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Spider-Man, 1/16/17

Say, what’s been going on with the Amazing Spider-Man lately? Welp, that space capsule he got dressed to open up contained beloved Guardian Of The Galaxy Rocket Raccoon, returning this May to theaters everywhere thanks to CGI and Bradley Cooper’s golden voice! Now he and Spidey and MJ are off on a wacky road trip to catch Ronan, the Accuser, but first, they must defeat their greatest enemy: sleepiness.

Shoe and Slylock Fox, 1/16/17

Here we have pretty firm proof that Shoe and Slylock Fox take place in different universes. In Shoe, the bird-people built up their civilization themselves, and within living memory: only a few generations ago, they lived in nature, like the birds we know. We can assume that any similarity between their material culture and ours can be chalked up to convergent development. Slylock and his sapient animal counterparts, on the other hand, are clearly living in the cities that humanity built, riding New York’s subway and marveling at the Statue of Liberty in the harbor (do they think her a dead Goddess of a vanished race?). But the construction crane seems to indicate that the animals are at last beginning to put their own imprint on the city; maybe in a century or two all evidence of humanity will be finally lost.

Crankshaft, 1/16/17

I think it’s important to remember that even those artists we think of as driven by pure, inner genius functioned in a larger society and economy and had to cater to a certain extent to popular tastes. In this sense they’re different from comic strip creators, who can apparently just go with smug, unfunny punchlines with no obvious appeal to anybody.

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Spider-Man, 12/23/16

Huh, when Peter dashed heroically into that diner to get his ass kicked by Ronan, The Accuser, he sure didn’t seem to care whether anyone knew about his secret identity! I guess he wants to be sure to be dressed in his rad superhero outfit if he meets anyone cool, like an astronaut.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/23/16

“And her life turned out great, right? I don’t know a ton about her but I’m assuming she’s fine.”

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Slylock Fox, 12/17/16

Today’s Slylock Fox offers an important look at how the world evolved from the sudden, awful moment of the animapocalypse to the mostly organized society we know from the main narrative of Slylock and his mysteries. In the Six Differences panels, we see the early days of animal sapience, where the abruptly intelligent beasts are engaged in a Hobbesian war of all against all: the cat eagerly reaches for the fish, who squirms in terror, unable to escape, while a dog watches on smiling, devouring the stabbed corpse of a bird who was presumably as self-aware as any of these beings about an hour ago. Years (decades?) later in Las Vegas, the lights are still on, and Slylock is on the case, apparently enforcing securities law, making sure these wealthy, tails-and-top-hats beasts aren’t defrauded by one of the few remaining humans. It’s amazing how quickly the systems that protect first life, then property replicate themselves!

Spider-Man, 12/17/16

One of the things about laughing at Newspaper Spider-Man is that the character was always, across all iterations, supposed to be kind of funny, in a hapless teen way, even though the strip depicts him as a hapless twentysomething, which is … less attractive. So anyway, it’s pretty clear that Peter reaching out for help to other, better superheroes but only getting their voice mail is supposed to be funny. And yet I believe that Ronan, The Accuser’s magical conveyor belt of foodstuffs was intended to be entirely straight-faced! Sometimes parsing the levels of irony embedded in newspaper comic strips so I can tell whether I’m laughing with them or at them is exhausting, guys, but this … this is the life I chose.