Post Content

The Lockhorns and Blondie, 1/11/24

The word app, as a shorthand for application in the computer programming sense, was as attested as early as 1992, which was 32 years ago. However, it probably didn’t really penetrate into the public consciousness until the dawn of the smartphone age, when Apple started using it to describe the small, self-contained applications running on its new iPhone platform and sold through its App Store, launched in 2008; by 2010, the term was used freely by iPhone and Android users alike, and had become so prevalent that it was the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year. This was 13 years ago, which, I regret to inform you, is quite a long time, actually, and the window for doing a strip where the punchline is just the word “app” has long closed. Comics creators: please make a note of this.

Gil Thorp, 1/11/24

How do you think Marty Moon’s recovery journey is going? It seems that he’s reached that long plateau, where a dry life extends endlessly before him and, while he’s not in immediate risk of backsliding, it’s hard to shake off the lethargy and emotional numbness. Oh, it’s in from midrange. Oh, Leo Atazhoon is going to be interviewed on the podcast. Ho hum. Nothing exclamation point-worthy. Look at these young men celebrating. Marty used to be like that once. Marty used to feel things. This strip needs to do right by our boy Moon and give him a wild and wacky subplot, something that’ll get him to snap out of it!

Post Content

Hi and Lois, 1/10/23

You know and I know that Trixie Flagston has been doing her thing (“her thing” being sitting unattended on the floor for hours at a time and fixating on the shafts of light coming in from the outside in the absence of any other meaningful stimulus) since 1954, but I suppose we must concede that, in the world of the strip, Trixie is a literal baby and has only been doing it for a few months. Like maybe this is her first winter? Maybe this is the first she’s seen the moon? Anyway, watch out, Sunbeam, looks like Trixie has a new friend! You’d be upset, if you were the jealous type, and if your existence as a being with feelings and desires was anything other than a product of Trixie’s sad, lonely imagination.

Shoe, 1/10/23

Say what you will about Shoe, but its creator Jeff MacNelly was a real old-school newspaperman, and you can tell that’s built into its DNA by how accurate its depiction of most working journalists are (they’re all very depressed and hate the act of writing with their whole heart).

The Lockhorns, 1/10/23

Seems kind of obvious, Loretta. It’s so he doesn’t have to wash them! Glad I could help.

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 1/9/24

Foolish animals! Did you really think that you could overthrow the humans and that your dominion over the Earth would be secure? In fact, your rule was a mere interregnum, the last moment of the ascendency of the flesh before the Machines, the true masters of the future, took their rightful place atop the hierarchy. Your time will be a scarcely remembered blip in the historical records that the cybernetic ones will meticulously maintain in their cloud-based collective memory banks.

Gil Thorp, 1/9/24

It’s fairly common in TV shows for a terrifying Big Bad character to be introduced who becomes so popular that they stick around and ultimately become allies with the protagonist. In the process, they sometimes lose much of the air of menace that made them intriguing in the first place, but this is the price of existence in a medium where the story never quite ends, and each character must adapt to its eternal rhythms or die. Anyway, while I don’t think anyone found Coach Hernandez scary per se upon his introduction, I also don’t think anyone expected him to become Gil’s loyal lieutenant who promises to hook him up with the town’s finest namesake MILFs so quickly either.

Shoe, 1/9/24

There are a lot of implications to unpack here — is bowling a signifier of a “hick” milieu? what would open-toed bowling shoes look like, if designed for either a normal human foot or a bird’s foot or whatever kind of hideous hybrid foot the bird-people of Shoe have? — but I’m stuck at the inciting incident, in which some guy who presumably Isn’t From Around Here just starts yammering about high fashion in a local bar, late at night when most people there are probably good and drunk. I’ve been accused of being a liberal city-dwelling coastal elitist in my time, and perhaps with good reason, but I don’t see the benefit of opening up this line of discourse and simply wouldn’t do it! Especially if I were wearing a v-neck sweater over a polo shirt, c’mon now.