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Suburban Fairy Tales, 12/9/24

I was going to give you the deep lore behind today’s strip but I think it’s pretty obvious from context, right? Third little pig and lady wolf are in an unconventional species-crossing relationship, pig’s mom doesn’t approve, yadda yadda yadda, you get it. It’s an allegorical tale about the dangers of prejudice, except the she-wolf is clearly contemplating killing and eating the mom pig in the panel three, so honestly maybe it’s an allegorical tale about the dangers of not being prejudiced enough.

Rhymes With Orange, 12/9/24

Snakes are obligate carnivores and any snake of that size is going to primarily eat mice, so I’m really curious about the legal situation here. Is the snake on trial for murder? Surely a member of any species that exclusively eats mice would, in a civilization where mice have legal rights, immediately become an outlaw and face extermination, right? On the other hand, maybe this is a legal system like the ancient Norse one, where harms are weighed and fines assessed based on the varying social positions of the interested parties. In such a case, it makes sense to have a judge from a completely different phylum from either of the parties to the case, and they should be willing to put up with a bit of delay in return for his objectivity.

Hi and Lois, 12/9/24

Yes, by saying that he wanted to watch something other than what his mother and sister were watching, Ditto hoped his mother would give him permission to go to his parents’ bedroom, so he could watch the thing he wanted to watch. I know I can’t shut up about the new post-punchline Hi and Lois being good, but I do feel like I need a little more to work with than this.

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Dustin, 7/22/24

To me, this feels very much like a strip that was originally going to do some kind of wordplay on the polysemic nature of “alarmed” — “it was alarmed” … “the door was alarmed?” … “no, [something funnier] was alarmed” — but then gave up on figuring out what [something funnier] might be and just did a “quiet quitting” joke instead with out even going back and reworking the dialogue that led up to it. Frankly, I kind of enjoy the idea that the narrative voice for Dustin (the comic strip) has boundless contempt for Dustin (the character) and yet both do the most half-assed job possible in any situation.

Mary Worth, 7/22/24

Love the way Mary is holding her hands at the ready in the second panel. She’s prepared to clap if these two manage to actually do a good job with this song, but she hasn’t been fully convinced yet.

Suburban Fairy Tales, 7/22/24

Don’t worry, Little Pig #2! Hay fever is the layperson’s term for allergy-induced rhinitis, and it is not contagious. I guess this sort of ignorance of the respiratory system explains why you built a feeble house made of out of sticks despite your primary predator using his powerful lungs as a hunting mechanism.

[HA HA WHOOPS I MISREAD THIS BECAUSE MY BRAIN WAS ALREADY WRITING THIS JOKE AS I WAS PROCESSING THE SENTENCE, SORRY EVERYBODY I AM ASHAMED]

Gil Thorp, 7/22/24

I think we can agree that doctors and cops are, if not jocks, then at least jock-adjacent, which it was why it was groundbreaking when characters from Rex Morgan, M.D. and Dick Tracy did the nerdiest thing possible (go to a comics convention). But now, with this wacky Gil Thorp summer storyline, we’re going to see pure unadulterated jock-nerd convergence. God help us all!

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Suburban Fairy Tales, 4/26/24

Suburban Fairy Tales is one of the new strips I’ve been reading, and it’s a basically funny and enjoyable strip about cute animals, so I regret that my first discussion of it on this blog has to be scolding, but: look, it’s perfectly OK if your cute anthropomorphic animal character wears pants, and it’s also perfectly OK if they don’t, but it’s not OK at all if they take off their pants mid-comic strip and clearly aren’t wearing any underwear but also have no obvious genitalia. It raises so many questions about what pig genitals looks like in this universe, and also, frankly, what pig genitals look like in our universe, which I absolutely refuse to Google image search on but like 5% of me wants to know how well the two correlate. Also, just FYI, that’s a “3” on the pig’s tank top, because he’s #3 out of the Three Little Pigs, which is also fine, but I definitely thought for a while that that was a weird “outie” belly button taking up most of his torso, which is not fine, though it did distract me from his whole genital situation, so there’s that.

Gasoline Alley, 4/26/24

Good news, everyone! They’re not going to change the name of Gasoline Alley after all, because the Town Charter contains a number of entrenched clauses, laid down more than a century ago, that can never be amended or altered, even by a vote of the people or their representatives! This is probably fine. Hopefully Mayor Melba will not read whatever this document has to say about women holding office, or owning property.

Mary Worth, 4/26/24

One day, many years ago, a young man who had not yet reached the age of 30 decided to try out this “blogging” thing by joking about his favorite comic strip, Mary Worth, online. “This strip contains what may be the first use of the phrase ‘Wilbur makes an overture’ in the history of the English language,” he typed, while chortling drolly. Anyway, now it’s the far-future year 2024, and an old man is lying in the gutter screaming “FUCK YOU” at Wilbur, because he knocked the old man over in the midst of a weird sex fantasy about rescuing the lady at whom he made that long-ago overture from a nightmarish ape-man, and frankly I’m pretty jazzed about it, and jazzed that I still get to bring important breaking Wilbur news like this to you, my faithful readers.