The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Archive: Slylock Fox

Comments are closed

That woodpecker looks pretty guilty, you have to admit

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 2/15/21

Here’s my hot take on this supposed “crime”: who gives a shit about a little light fire alarm prankery? Yes, it’s annoying, and theoretically a waste of the fire department’s time, but you know what else is a waste of their time? Taking meticulous notes and pacing around trying to figure out who pulled the fire alarm in the first place, instead of just yelling at everybody and then getting back into the fire truck and taking off! And sure, Walter Weimaraner probably wasn’t actually bowling when the alarm went off, but let’s be honest: a guy hanging around a bowling alley in a double-breasted suit and fancy little boots, conspicuously not bowling, is probably up to no good anyway. Slick Smitty alone can see the truth, even if he needs to lie a bit to open our eyes to it!

Mary Worth, 2/15/21

Sometimes, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, the best incentive to get out of the house is that your house will be full of dog poop if you don’t. Saul and Eve are here to testify!

Dennis the Menace, 2/15/21

Honestly, I’m more concerned about the broken heart of whatever poor soul was supposed to be the recipient of that box of candy. Each scenario I come up with as to how Dennis and Joey got their grubby little hands on it is more menacing than the last!

Comments are closed

Love is … not really in the air, frankly, sorry to be the bearer of bad news

Post Content

Hi and Lois, 2/14/21

Longtime readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Hi and Lois taking “Thirsty” Thurston back to his roots as a desperate alcoholic, and having the Thurstons’ marriage (strife-filled, loveless) serve as a foil to the Flagstons’ (basically fine, I guess, as near as anyone can tell), which is the theme of today’s special Valentine’s Day strip. The main thing here of interest is that Irma just calls her husband “Thurston”; it kind of works for a wife to sarcastically call her husband who she’s mad at by his last name, but I suspect that some toiler at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC realized they didn’t actually know Thirsty’s real first name, couldn’t find any answers on the strip’s official King Features page or in its Wikipedia article, and found the pressure of adding a canonical element to the strip’s lore too much, so they just punted.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/14/21

Say, what if Snuffy had been dealt a hand full of hearts? That certainly would’ve been a good trigger for remembering it was Valentine’s Day, plus he might have to briefly struggle between demonstrating affection to his wife and winning a hand with a flush! I don’t really have a joke here, I’m just workshopping ways to make this strip better.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 2/14/21

Frankly, I want to know a lot less about Harry Ape’s bank-robbing activities and a lot more about his career as an Instagram influencer — or should I say apefluencer?

Comments are closed

“I mean, just look at this guilty-lookin’ dude”

Post Content

Marvin, 1/31/21

I feel like I’ve touched on this in a few recent posts, but I want to talk about it in slightly more detail today: I have become somewhat worried lately about coming across like one of those people who do ninety-minute YouTubes where they dissect all the “mistakes” in a movie, intending to “prove” that the filmmakers are idiots but mostly proving that they’re focused on minutia and not really taking in the big picture. Like, with today’s Marvin: I feel like before I go in on how weird it is, I need to establish that yes, I’m 100% aware that the idea that these characters are sort of like adults with adult worries and problems but are also babies isn’t something that’s wrong, in the sense of an IMDB “goofs” entry for Looks Who’s Talking that says “The movie depicts talking babies, but all these characters are far too young to be capable of idiomatic human speech.” I’m fully aware that the they’re-babies-but-they’re-not tension is itself the joke-radiation in which this whole strip is bathed. I’m just saying, if you’re inviting us to imagine babies who are capable of thinking, in very adult ways, about their future, and one of those babies is stressed about her parental expectations about her future education and extracurricular activities, and the other one is apparently planning to keep on shitting his own pants well into junior high — well, the “error” you’ve made is one of judgement, not world-building.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/31/21

The text of the solution to this crime sort of implies that Slylock has set up this mystery to teach these animals about the complex web of institutions and processes that make up the industrial civilization they’ve taken from the humans — that cans of pea soup don’t just grown on trees, but must be purchased from a store, where someone places the can on the shelf, and someone else drove the can there in a truck from a warehouse, and it got to that warehouse from a factory, and so and and so forth back up the supply chain. But the drawing makes it seem like he’s mostly saying “See this guy? This is Count Weirdly. You see him, your job is easy. If he’s one of the suspects, he fuckin’ did it, man.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/31/21

Obviously I know that, in this fallen, degraded age, newspapers feel free to print unspeakable filth in the comics section without shame. Still, even I thought there were some limits; but now that we see a proper Hootin’ Holler matron depicted in fully color without her kerchief, hair all exposed — well, now I know there truly is no depravity to which these people won’t sink.