The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Archive: Slylock Fox

Comments are closed

Outraged Monday

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 2/6/17

“Kooky?” That’s the adjective you choose for Count Weirdly? “Kooky?” This is a man who’s brainwashes his sapient serpent sidekick so completely that she willingly commits her unborn babies to his cause, turning them into living booby traps and condemning them to a life of crime from the moment they hatch into the world! Look at her face — she’s positive thrilled to watch her newborns kill, and possibly die, to serve Count Weirdly. So yeah, I think I’d go with “history’s greatest monster” rather than “kooky,” thanks very much.

Spider-Man, 2/6/17

“You know … people who love you, who care about whether you live or die. Emotional ties to others that complicate your decisions, especially when it comes to risking your life. It’s a real situation, you know? A real situation.”

Comments are closed

One-panel Wednesday

Post Content

Six Chix, 2/1/17

I’ve always been fascinated by how cultural images become detached from their origins and eventually become just bits of iconic flotsam in our collective consciousness. Like, skeletons have been associated with death for most of human history, for obvious reasons, but then in the West we started putting a hooded cloak on our skeletal death-figure, and then we started forgetting that our skeletal death-figure had a full body beneath that cloak, as the skull-face faded out of his representation. So that’s how we get cartoons like this, where a dentist is staring into the empty void where a face should be, not seeing flesh or a skull or even the back of a hood, just an infinitely dark emptiness that goes on forever, a yawning portal into the not-life that awaits us after our demise. The dentist seems remarkably unfazed by it, to be honest! Dentists have seen some shit, man.

Pluggers, 2/1/17

There are plenty of Pluggers panels that demonstrate that pluggers feel all the sorts of anxieties the rest of us do, from the financial to the familial to the creeping existential. I have to assume, then, that at some point in this joke’s history, the line was about “plugger performance anxiety.” Get it? Because usually that phrase involves inability to get an erection, but here it’s about peeing in a cup, because pluggers gave up on sex long ago. While usually I endorse complete freedom of expression in the comics, I can’t say I regret an editorial decision that spared innocent newspaper-reading Americans everywhere from thinking about the boners that these downwardly mobile exurban beast-men may or may not have.

Comments are closed

Mice are pretty high in protein, just putting that out there

Post Content

Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/29/17

Haha, yes, coconuts are a source of both nutrition and life-giving water, they’re a balanced part of a healthy diet, this comic has been made possible by the Association of American Coconut Importers (You’ll Go Nuts … For Coconuts™!), blah blah blah, but: let’s not lose sight of the fact that the crew of this cargo ship has abandoned Sly and Max to die. Like, what is even the backstory here? Was Slylock deputized by the understaffed animal government to deal in cases of admiralty law and about to crack some case of nautical crime wide open? Or was the whole thing a ploy to lure him out to sea to kill the vulpine detective in a way that left no fingerprints? Anyway, thanks to Slylock’s knowledge of nutrition, this bunny-bear-wolf gang isn’t going to get away with this!

Family Circus, 1/29/17

After more than half a century of “Billy, Age 7” jokes, it’s becoming pretty clear that the Family Circus is running out of English words to play with. Still, I was vaguely amused when I got to the end of this strip of free-associative sub-puns; no matter what our political beliefs, I think we can all agree that our nation’s laws would be more fair and just if they were written by a tribe of beautiful, magical creatures who combined the wisdom of a human being with the grace and power of a horse.