Post Content

Mary Worth, 5/15/24

Oooh, look everyone, Mary Worth is doing a bit where Wilbur is shouting “Stella!” like Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire, except it’s “Stellan,” the name of his fish, and instead of demanding forgiveness from a wife he’s just assaulted, like Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire, he’s just sad because the fish is dead. Is this what you want, Mary Worth? That we all notice and pay attention to this truly outrageous stunt? That we all titter knowingly at the reference, and maybe post on social media that we realize now that you’ve been playing the long game on this one, for two and a half years? Well, fine, fine, we’ll pay attention to you, but keep in mind that not all attention is good attention.

Slylock Fox, 5/15/24

The central fact of the world of Slylock Fox is that one day, for reasons nobody clearly understood, almost all the animals simultaneously Ascended to sapience, and every strip, in ways ranging from the trivial to the profound, attempts to grapple with the implications of that transformation. For instance: what happens when creatures that had long been solely concerned with eating and sleeping, escaping predators and perhaps experiencing bodily pleasures, suddenly become aware that there is a world out there beyond themselves, a world vast and unknowable — or, perhaps even more terrifying, knowable? What happens when they happen upon a discarded book of spooky fish tales, and learn that their bodies and the sea that sustains them is not all that makes up a fish’s world, but there is spirit and divinity as well? Would they be struck, all at once, with a combination of wonder and terror, like Adam and Eve in the garden, realizing what good and evil were, wondering what comes next?

Post Content

Bizarro, 3/23/24

One of my goals in this blog is to get you all to appreciate the comics as a fundamentally visual medium. You could describe a comic where the punchline is that a chicken is working in a diner and serves eggs that it just laid. But what makes this comic good is the smug and just vaguely sexual expression on the chicken’s face, along with the human customer’s expression indicating that he gets everything that’s going on here, he’s extremely disgusted, and yet feels he has no choice but to eat the eggs anyway.

Dick Tracy, 3/23/24

You ever forget how many days there are in a week? You ever forget how many days there are in a week when your job involves creating a specific number of creative works tied to the number of days in a week? I think a nice thing to do if you find yourself in that situation is to just let your characters enjoy a nice dessert before moving on with their story.

Slylock Fox, 3/23/24

It’s truly demeaning what the animals in the Slylockverse had to put up with in the days and weeks after the moment when they achieved sentience but still had to obey outdated human law. It wouldn’t be long after the moment captured here when the dog would be wearing the police uniform and the policeman would be in a mass grave. The squirrel knows the horror that awaits!

Post Content

Dick Tracy, 3/11/24

OK, fine, after my uninformed joking yesterday, I am back to reading the comics so you don’t have to and can inform you that (a) these strips are a flashback and (b) these two “dumb housecleaners” are actually retired FBI agents/Little Orphan Annie’s biological parents (you can tell by the lack of pupils, I guess?), who are somehow involved in thwarting the attempt to kidnap Oliver Warbacks. This is exactly what I don’t like about these kinds of retcons, honestly: now we have to believe that Warbucks and Annie were somehow tied together before she was even born — that’s her in utero there in panel two and three — when there was already a perfectly good origin story to their relationship (Warbucks bought her from a crooked orphanage to burnish his public image so he could keep selling defective artillery shells to that commie FDR).

Judge Parker, 3/11/24

Judge Parker artist Mike Manley is having health issues, and I have no insider information beyond that, but even though his name is on the strip a series of guest artists have filled in for him intermittently over the past few months. Today is the first showing from Gil Thorp’s Rod Whigham — I recognize those meaty hands and shocked eyelines anywhere. (This feels a bit like an echo of when then-Apartment 3-G artist Frank Bolle briefly filled in on Gil Thorp back in 2008.) Get well soon, Mike, but until then Rod’s going to be guiding us through a storyline where I assume the Spencer-Driver clan puts aside their differences and closes ranks to prevent Ann, last seen having a heated argument with this guy, from going away for murder.

Family Circus, 3/11/24

Aw, look how happy Jeffy looks here! He’s very sure he was born a whole person and isn’t an eldritch abomination assembeled out of various parts, and we should let him continue to hold that impression, even though it isn’t true.

Slylock Fox, 3/11/24

Look, the newspaper comics need all the help they can get, so its actually totally fine when Slylock Fox decides to cash in on all that SLICK SMITTY NUDE SLICK SMITTY GETTING OUT OF SHOWER SLICK SMITY DRIPPING WET search traffic.