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Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/18/23

This image is, quite frankly, one of the most horrifying that Slylock Fox has presented me with in all my years of reading and commenting on this strip. I suppose Weirdly imagined that his genetically modified mega-bee would itself be able to use its powerful stinger to attack his enemies and fetch its own honey, but thanks to the square cube law its insectoid anatomy means it can barely move, so it spends its days in a cage in Weirdly’s basement, dragging itself over to bowls of honey that someone else has to steal for it. We don’t have any indication that this bee is sapient like the other animals, and truly it would be a blessing if it weren’t, as an intelligent mega-bee would have nothing to do all day but contemplate the innate wrongness of its own existence.

Shoe, 6/18/23

Speaking of fucked up animal business, imagine if you were a mortician and you came into your showroom one day only to find some old guy in there sticking his head into the coffins, taking big sniffs and making satisfied sounds. I know morticians see a lot of stuff that would haunt us normies but this one would have to unsettle even them. Not sure how both the mortician and the old guy being birds would affect things but I can’t imagine it would help.

Gasoline Alley, 6/18/23

Can you imagine how annoying someone’s on-stage patter must be if you get up and demand that they start playing music while they’re in the middle of an anecdote about how people don’t like their music? Rufus must be even more irritating in person than he comes across on the page.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 6/18/23

I’ve never watched Bridgerton, but through cultural osmosis have learned that much of the first season’s plot revolves around a sexually naive young woman whose husband keeps using the withdrawal method and who slowly comes to understand that this is why she isn’t getting pregnant, which means that, to be blunter, much of the first season’s plot revolves around semen, so it’s fun to rate how unsettling it is to imagine various comics characters having in-depth conversations about it. Jeremy Duncan and his mom? Not great. Crankshaft? Very bad. Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn? Hoo boy.

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Pearls Before Swine, 6/10/23

I’m taking a slight break from my usual routine here to relay a personal anecdote. On Saturday, I went to a showing of The Philadelphia Story at one of the big historic movie palaces in downtown LA, and one of my personal crosses to bear is my inability to be chill about the fact that grown-ass adults cannot stay off their fucking phones even at special events like this. The guy sitting in front of me had one of those absolutely enormous phones that bordered on tablet size, and all through the pre-show stuff where the lights were down and they had a film historian giving a presentation about the movie, this guy had his phone on and sitting in his lap and the browser was open to the Pearls Before Swine strip you see above. Mostly he was paying attention to the presentation but every once in a while he would look down at the strip and zoom in on the phone so he could read it better. This went on for like 10 minutes; he did not look at any other strips, just this specific one. He turned the phone off before the actual movie started, but if I had had to tell some dude to NOT LOOK AT A NEWSPAPER COMIC DURING A MOVIE, surely I would have become the Comics Curmudgeon in that role’s final form. Anyway, if the person who was doing this is reading these words right now, sorry to drag you in public like this, but: when the lights go down, the phone should go off.

Beetle Bailey, 6/12/23

“I’m also burdened by feelings I can’t quite articulate about how my hair-trigger rage is damaging my relationships with other people and my own conception of myself as a basically good person.”

Gil Thorp, 6/12/23

The kids who got busted by Marty Moon for selling vape sticks were all boys, so I’m not sure why Gil feels like he has to alert the girls’ team’s coaches about it in the middle of a game. I guess he figures if his afternoon just got ruined, so should everyone else’s.

Slylock Fox, 6/12/23

Today’s Slylock Fox is a good example of why using a rigorous program of logic to suss out the truth is simply not enough for any law enforcement operation. Sure, Slylock can smugly point out that only a mammal would need hair care products, but the criminal reptile’s refusal to surrender in the face of this “gotcha” means that Sly is resorting to the hotel’s front desk workers to actually apply the force necessary to catch the thief, which implies that he’s failed to grasp the true nature of the problem he faces.

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Pluggers and Shoe, 6/6/23

How are the various human-animal hybrid monstrosities of the Jeff MacNelly Extended Universe grappling with the concept of the “beer belly”? Well, Pluggers would like you to know that they do not guzzle alcoholic beer like some lout; instead they get all the stimulation they could need from a combination of sugars and starches that every doctor on earth would look at and beg, “Please, rethink this.” Shoe, meanwhile, is confident that its core readership of elderly shut-ins has never been a store that sells novelty t-shirts and are unaware that they can find them online, so they’ll never realize that this is a shamelessly ripped off joke.

Slylock Fox, 6/6/23

Ah, here’s a delightful scene from the closing days of the Animal Revolution, in which one of few remaining human holdouts is cornered in a tent deep in the desert, while a grotesquely enhanced scorpion waits eagerly to sting him to death. However, as the snake-vulture interaction at the right of the panel illustrates, the animals are beginning to turn on one another, which explains why they failed to “finish the job” and Slick Smitty and Count Weirdly remain at large.

Gasoline Alley, 6/6/23

Oh, hey, how’s the tale of Rufus’s head injury going? Well, he’s unconscious and unresponsive, and emergency services are unable to reach him, so, not great, really! Not great at all!