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Beetle Bailey, 8/14/14

It’s kind of amazing that Otto is perfectly capable of understanding symbolic language — for instance, he knows that fire hydrants are a longstanding visual shorthand for dog urination in our culture, even though no dog urinates exclusively on fire hydrants — and yet he somehow can’t figure out how to go to the bathroom in a toilet.

Dick Tracy, 8/14/14

These movie assignations are actually a cover for Dick and Annie to discuss their escape from Weird Maybe Time-Travel Island, but still, the idea that an adult police officer would help break a tween girl’s crush on him by literally taking her on dates is pretty gross! Haha, but everyone in ThePastBurg wants to get into Officer Tracy’s pants, so it’s totally OK.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/14/14

Hey, remember a couple days ago when I said Les’s fantasy sequence would be mildly more interesting than the whole Lisa’s Story movie plotline? Well, that was before I knew it would involve sexy ladies trying to get Les to have sex with them! Now it’s grosser, and not just mildly grosser.

Mark Trail, 8/14/14

Mark trail is such a dedicated naturalist that he’s going to make sure you know what kind of python this is, before, under duress and with great respect and sadness, he’s forced to slice off its head.

Wizard of Id, 8/14/14

In a cross-promotion of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week that I’m sadly certain is entirely unpaid, the Wiz in Wizard of Id has turned himself into a shark! A shark that yearns for shark-sex with lady sharks. The intersection of monogamy and animagery is in fact deeply complex.

Pluggers, 8/14/14

The most common use a plugger has for computers is figuring out how to poop more easily.

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Gil Thorp, 8/13/14

It’s mid-August and the summer Gil Thorp storyline finally comes into focus! It’s about how True Standish doesn’t want to go to some football factory in gross south Florida; he wants to go to one of the public Ivies, which looks like a college from an old movie! One of my cousins and her husband both went to Miami of Ohio, and they loved it; from my visits, I can confirm that it does have a classic look, largely as a result of rigorously enforced building codes that require that all buildings aesthetically match the original early 19th century structures. This uniformity has does have some weird results, particularly in huge new buildings that couldn’t actually be built from brick and mortar construction despite the appearance of their facades. At Cornell, where I went to college, buildings are supposed to look very contemporary to when they’re built, which results in an interesting aesthetic mishmosh that gives you something of an architectural historical tour as you walk around campus, even though some of the individual buildings from questionable periods end up kind of hideous (lookin’ at you, Uris Hall). Nevertheless, Miami of Ohio’s regime of strict architectural nostalgia-kitsch has managed to impress a star prospect for their 75th-ranked football program, so who am I to judge?

Judge Parker, 8/13/14

NOOOO … THE LEGAL PRACTICE THAT SAM SPENT HIS LIFE BUILDING … with the legal secretary … and the lawyer he hired, like, I’m not even going to bother looking up when but it was definitely in the last five years of real life so like three months ago strip-time … disintegrating … all he has to console him is his extremely active job of running legal interference for Judge Parker Senior and also his millions and millions of dollars … MY GOD MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN SAM

Momma, 8/13/14

Haha, highlighting the tinges of pseudo(?)-sexual jealousy in Momma and Francis’s relationship really adds to the laff factor in this strip, doesn’t it! This is a joke that’s appeared in the strip before, and I’m glad to see that, if Momma really is transitioning into some kind of greatest hits mode, the definition of “greatest hits” is “most perverse and unpleasant.”

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Heathcliff, 8/12/14

Here’s an amazing fact that maybe you’re smarter than me and it’s not news to you but maybe it will blow your mind as much as it did mine — I think maybe Ryan North’s Twitter feed is where I heard it but I’m not 100% sure. But, anyway: have you ever noticed that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty rhyme does it mention that Humpty Dumpty is an enormous man-egg? It’s true! It’s not clear from the rhyme’s history whether he was always meant to be an egg — perhaps it was originally a riddle with his eggish nature as the answer as to why he couldn’t be reassembled. Wikipedia says that “the rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.” Humpty-as-egg is such a well-known bit of pop culture, in fact, that Heathcliff and his friends have named their new eggcore band “Dumpty,” which nicely fits into the narrow space between whimsically surreal and thuddingly stupid where Heathcliff has found its sweet spot.

Better Half, 8/12/14

Stanley and Harriet yearn for the days when healthy electronic pizza will be a thing. Until then, they’ll just keep on eating enormous blobs of chocolate-chip cookie dough, I guess.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/12/14

Les has finally figured out that probably nobody wants to see a movie of Lisa’s Story and definitely nobody wants to see a comic version of the story of how Lisa’s Story got made into a movie, so he’s now kicked us into a mildly more interesting fantasy sequence instead.