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The Lockhorns, 9/22/16

It’s actually pretty complicated trying to figure out how old someone is in a legacy comic strip, because you have to juggle a variety of narrative, cultural, and personal cues. Take the title hell-couple in the Lockhorns: they’re a long-time married couple still of working age, so probably no younger than 35 and no older than 55. That’s a span I’m right in the middle of! The seem older to me, because I’ve been reading The Lockhorns on and off since I was a child, plus their character design has been more or less set since they debuted almost 50 years ago, but today’s Leroy Lockhorn, the one who coexists with up-to-the-minute hipster stereotypes like our barista here, came of age in the 1960s at the very earliest. He has never sent or received a telegram in his life. And if he’s like literally every 35-to-55-year-old person I know, he sends text messages all the time. Basically Loretta can’t turn her back on him for more than 15 seconds before he starts just being a dick to someone for no reason.

Mark Trail, 9/22/16

At last, we’ve found out the relevance of this island makeout session from two years ago (strip time)/eleven weeks ago (real time): this couple brought invasive fire ants with them, as passengers on the firewood they burned to warm their writhing bodies. Fortunately, the U.S. Department of Agriculture keeps a meticulous log of the movement of every vessel everywhere on the seas, and was able to track down the culprits. After twenty hours of interrogation in a black-site USDA detention center in an unnamed Balkan country, our nautical lovebirds confessed to their woodcrime and will, after a tearful hour-long self-criticism session on TV, be sent to the labor camps where all Invasive Species Enablers are detained indefinitely until the War On Gross Bugs finally ends in victory.

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Shoe, 9/21/16

You know how you can look at something for every day for years and never really notice it, until one day a slight shift in perspective totally blows your mind? Well, I read this dumb joke about how Shoe, the title character of the strip Shoe, spends a lot of time at strip clubs, and I was starting to work myself up to a joke about how the very idea of sexy live nude bird-women really brings to the fore the uncomfortable realities of how the bird-people of Shoe have both avian and mammalian characteristics, when suddenly I realized:

Shoe doesn’t wear clothes.

Every other bird-person in this strip wears clothes! Not Shoe. He wears white low-top sneakers and smokes cigars but otherwise goes around fully nude. And everyone just goes along with this! What … what is going on here. Why is he naked all the time. WHYYYYY

Mary Worth, 9/21/16

I’m kind of surprised that this SAMHSA-approved substance abuse counselor is doing his intake with his newest adult patient with his mother sitting right there in the room with him, or that he seems to be taunting him for his inability to score Vicodin. I’m not that familiar with the treatment modalities for opioid addiction, though. I’m learning just like you all are!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/16

Becky’s wordless emotional arc here, as she goes from hope that her husband’s obsessive geekery might actually improve their family’s financial situation for once to mingled anger and crushing despair, is legitimately the best-executed thing on the comics pages today.

Pluggers, 9/21/16

Pluggers haven’t had sex for years, guys. Years.

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Hello, friends! If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt a regular or semi-regular reader of this li’l website, the Comics Curmudgeon. I’m doing a redesign later this year — no major surgery, but it’s time for a facelift, particularly for the mobile site — and would like to get some data and feedback to guide me! If you would be so kind, click here to take the user survey I’ve come up with. Please note that this survey doesn’t collect any personal information that you don’t actively put into it, and I won’t share the results with anyone except the redesign team (which is me, Uncle Lumpy, and Adam Norwood). It shouldn’t take too long and it will really help me out. Thanks in advance!