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Marvin, 6/6/16

You know, if you’d asked me a few years ago if I’d eventually get bored pointing out the scatological horrors of Marvin, I would’ve said yes, so shoutout to the creative team for “keeping it fresh,” as it were, and producing strips so disgusting that I feel compelled to discuss them! Today’s a real treasure trove of shittiness. The ostensible joke is that Marvin “breaks in” his new baby sitter by taking massive dumps, which in ordinary circumstances would be horrifying enough, but the strip’s visuals really take it to the next level! Specifically, take a look at how her hands wrap around Marvin’s butt. They look way too big, don’t they? And the fingers aren’t clearly delineated? It almost looks as if the colorists mistook Marvin’s diaper for her hands and gave it a caucasian flesh tone fill, but it seems pretty clear that those are thumbs wrapping around his waist, so I guess we have no choice but to see this strip for what it is: a depiction of a baby sitter with weird, diaper-esque hands wrapped around the butt of a grinning baby who’s cheerfully thought-ballooning about the volume and/or quality of feces he’s expelling while she grimaces in what appears to be physical pain.

Shoe, 6/6/16

This is one in a long line of vaguely dirty jokes made about Missouri’s genuinely funny state motto, but I’m having a good time thinking about it literally. There are about six million people who live in Missouri. Imagine them all lined up along the Mississippi River, hundreds and hundreds of miles of them, all dropping their pants and waggling their butts at their disgusted neighbors in Illinois. It would be soothing. Hypnotic, even.

Judge Parker, 6/6/16

Hey, remember that article I wrote about the Silicon Valley billionaire who secretly orchestrated Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker as part of a long-running revenge plot? Well that’s going to look like a gentle hug compared to what the Spencer-Drivers have in store for this no-good reporter. They’ll probably have the special ops team they have on call disappear her to some black site, forever. Coverage of Spencer-Driver business interests are gonna get a lot more fawning, in a hurry.

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Mary Worth, 6/5/16

This is the first depiction of Wilbur in the new Sunday artistic regime, and I frankly think it’s their first misstep. Where are Wilbur’s four lovingly combed over strands of hair, or the thick thatch of fur on the back of his hands? Mary Worth trufans know that the classic “Wilbur look” is as much about the hair he has as it is about the hair he lacks.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/5/16

ANSWER: Slylock knows all human laws were voided during the animalpocalypse, as well as most legal protections for H. sapiens. That’s why most of the animals who lived through that time weren’t charged with dozens of counts of murder! Anyway, it doesn’t matter what bipeds might’ve owned this land two hundred years ago: it’s now the property of, oh, let’s say the chipmunks.

Blondie, 6/5/16

Look, Dagwood, someone’s got to tell you just how sad and pathetic your idea of shaking things up is.

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Lockhorns, 6/4/16

One of the fun things about the United States is that most people learn some fairly specific aspects of very local history when they’re in elementary school that only later do you find out are not globally important facts. Growing up in Western New York, we made Iroquois longhouses out of papier-mâché, whereas our counterparts in California were building Spanish missions. When covering the War of 1812, our teachers described in vivid detail the way the British had cruelly burned down Buffalo, mentioned only in passing that they would go on to do the same to Washington, D.C., and did not at all discuss that the Americans had done it to Toronto first. My wife, who grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania, got the Whiskey Rebellion, so I’m always charmed to see it get a shout-out in print, which doesn’t happen enough for my taste. It even got cut from the Hamilton musical! Anyway, I guess the point here is that Loretta saw the American Revolution as being just the first step towards knitting together a unified political and economic power out of disparate colonies, whereas Leroy saw many of the British taxes and other measures that sparked the revolution as being evil in and of themselves, not just because they were enacted without the colonists’ consent, and also he’s an embarrassing drunk.

Pluggers, 6/4/16

Pluggers will never, ever get healthier. They will just get sicker and sicker until they blessedly die.