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Curtis, 11/13/16

I’m going to start out by saying something nice about a comic, for once! Say what you will about Curtis, but, unlike a lot of the strips I talk about on this blog, it never phones it in. The gag here is one we’ve seen a lot in the strip, but I really enjoy watching the little details of Curtis assembling his three-sandwich stack over the course of this conversation, up to and including him licking mayo off his knife, like you do (or at least like I do). The realism is a nice setup for him to dash off in the final panel, leaving a cartoonish cloud of sandwich debris in his wake.

Dennis the Menace, 11/13/16

It’s weird that everyone’s acting like this is Joey’s brand new baby sister despite the fact that she’s clearly at least 18 months old, right? Of course, her eyes are a terrifying, milky, pupil-less blue, so she’s also clearly a space alien or a demon from hell. Presumably she hatched from a leathery egg twenty minutes ago and has used her awful mental powers to convince the children that she’s always been here and that her nightmarish agenda for our planet is “wonderful” and “so cool.”

Spider-Man, 11/13/16

So when earlier this week we learned that Spidey had webbed a camera to the ceiling of Egghead’s den, I assumed that the writers were working with a vague memory that he had set a camera up at some point earlier in the storyline but had forgotten that in fact that camera was in a tree out in the front yard. But, nope! Turns out that in fact Spidey just ran outside and got said camera moments after JJJ bonked Egghead unconscious. This is hilarious in and of itself, but it’s even more hilarious that experienced newspaperman Jameson is just now putting together how suspicious that all is. I’m looking forward to how this plays out, what with the NEXT narration box giving Spider-Man the exact opposite of standard good advice.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/13/16

This is definitely one of Slylock’s most giggle-worthy mysteries to date, from the crime itself — do we want to live in a world where it’s illegal to mess with dandyish beavers by forcing them to watch televised chess? — to the puzzle’s solution. Look, Count Weirdly is weird! It’s right there in the name! Maybe he likes to eat his soup with a fork. Maybe that’s why it’s taken him 15 minutes to eat a single bowl of broth!

Shoe, 11/13/16

Wow, I’m not sure what strip I expected to see discussing the corrosive effects of corporate capitalism on the human soul today, but it sure wasn’t Shoe!

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Gasoline Alley, 10/17/16

Part of Gasoline Alley’s schtick is the Picaresque Idiot Duo (PID), pairing an illiterate English-mangling leader with an improbably even more hopeless sidekick. These roles are most often played by Rufus and Joel. But Harold and Stick are here to remind us that it’s PIDs all the way down. From an apex somewhere around the Beverly Hillbillies’ Jed and Jethro Clampett, the line passes through Hootin’ Holler’s Snuffy Smith and Lukey, the two Gasoline Alley crews here, and then descends inexorably toward the Beavis Horizon.

Pluggers, 10/17/16

Joke-a-day strip Pluggers experiments with serial narrative: behold the pluggernovela. We’ve long known that Henrietta Beak is married to Earl Houndstooth and Andy Bear to Sheila Roo. Now we discover they’re next-door neighbors. The affairs begin innocently: a little bit of harmless robe-gazing and rake-play, some “accidental” pouch-flashing. But things spiral quickly into unnatural chicken-on-bear and dog-on-kangaroo depravity, threatening the very foundations of strait-laced plugger society. Claude Manx watches heartbroken from his mansion on the hill: Andy will never be his.

Slylock Fox, 10/17/16

Why suspect Shady? Maybe because he showed up to gloat? Seriously Sly – he’s standing right outside the greenhouse with a big grin on his face. More to the point, he’s Shady Shrew, for crying out loud. Why do you even waste your time with these “clues”? If this were Dick Tracy, the guy would already have been broken on the wheel.

Mutts, 10/17/16

Dude – have you ever even met a dog?

— Uncle Lumpy

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/19/16

Just to prove to you the lengths I go to in order to make my silly jokes about comics on my blog, here are some fun facts I learned while researching today’s Hagar the Horrible:

• The common origin story of coffee cultivation — that an Ethiopian shepherd noticed goats getting jumpy when they ate certain berries — is probably a myth. The first written record of coffee being drunk comes from Yemen in the 1400s, which explains why there’s no coffee for Eddie to drink, five centuries earlier and thousands of miles to the north.
• Anxiety and worry are the end products of parallel linguistic evolution: both ultimately descend from words (in Latin and proto-German, respectively) that mean “to strangle.”

Anyway! I don’t know if those facts add up to much, except that maybe Eddie — who Hagar has already turned his back on in that final panel — has felt phantom hands around his throat for a long time, and it has nothing to do with caffeine withdrawal.

Gasoline Alley, 9/19/16

I’ve been reading the non-adventures of the chumps in Gasoline Alley for more than a decade and while I’m vaguely aware that they’re all part of a huge, sprawling family, I still couldn’t tell you how any of them are related to any of the other ones. Beardy Dude and Ranger Gal are thus connected by a tenuous web of kinship, though that didn’t come up when he guided her forest birth; it’s sort of coming out now, not that I can really follow what the hell’s going on in panel two. Are they visualizing … each other, but younger? Each visualizing his younger self? Why does the kid in the rightmost thought balloon have three legs? Why does he have three legs? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY DOES HE HAVE THREE LEGS

Slylock Fox, 9/19/16

I just want to point out that Slylock is a compulsive ratiocinator. Like, he does it to solve crimes when he doesn’t even need to. “So, I saw the whole thing go down with my own eyes, all you need to do is take down the information. The ape parked his car in the deale–” “IT’S THE ONE WITH THE LICENSE PLATES!!! Right? Right? I said it before you said it! IN YOUR FACE, RABBIT!”

Marvin, 9/19/16

Guys, it’s Monday, so I just want to leave you with an uplifting image: an infant with a thousand-mile stare, openly worrying that someday — maybe someday soon — he’ll become unmoored from any conventional system of morality and perpetrate unspeakable horrors. Let’s all have a super week!