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Crock, 12/5/24

If these two guys have names, I don’t know what they are — the Wikipedia Crock article just calls them “the men of Outpost 5,” and they don’t merit a mention on the official King Features Crock character list — but their deal basically is that the guy on the right is always reading letters aloud about life in his hillbilly home town back in France (?). Anyway, I find today’s bit actually kind of heartening. The guy on the left generally looks uninterested during these recitations, but it’s clear he’s been paying attention. He knows the lore!

Gil Thorp, 12/5/24

“Coach, let me rephrase that. It’s cool that you decided to come back from your extended sick leave and all, but I get the feeling you’re only doing it to engage in psychological gamesmanship against your hated rival and not because you’re interested in molding a new generation of student-athletes or anything like that. I’m just a teenager who wants to play football! I don’t think I should be going out there! I’m not equipped for the emotional complexity of this whole scene!”

Gearhead Gertie, 12/5/24

Some might say that having two near-identical drawings in this cartoon is “lazy,” but I think it really hammers home Gertie’s emotional state. Her beloved NASCAR is in danger due to internal conflict, and she’s not exactly sure who to blame or how it’s going to end — maybe if she stays very still and just vaguely shit-talks the legal system, everything will work out for the best.

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Slylock Fox, 12/4/24

An extremely fond memory I have from my youth is seeing Fugazi playing an outdoor show in San Francisco sometime around the turn of the millennium and getting to hear Ian MacKaye earnestly plead with the crowd to not overturn the port-a-potties. “Why do punks always want to fuck up the toilets?” he asked. “Toilets are good! Toilets take shit away.” Sanitation workers are part of this same waste disposal infrastructure; they help make modern life possible, but they similarly receive endless disrespect, their reputations stained by the very purifying acts they perform on our behalf. They deserve our praise, not for children to prank them with overly elaborate mechanisms that might lead them to think some undead ghoul was attacking them while they’re just trying to do their jobs. Maybe we deserve the animals rising up to overthrow us and take over our planet, though if the expression on that cat’s face is any indication, the new civilization will be born already tainted by the sins of its predecessor.

Alice, 12/4/24

Alice! Alice, your boss, Mr. Bossman, appears to have provided exactly one computer, one table, and zero chairs for you and your coworker, so I guarantee that he is already cooking up an extremely ill-conceived plan to cut costs by replacing you with AI.

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Mary Worth, 12/3/24

It can be hard to remember sometimes that Wilbur doesn’t dedicate his full energy to being a sad loser with a host of emotional problems; he also has an ostensible job as a newspaper columnist, simultaneously acting, against all good sense, as an advice columnist, something he has no qualifications for, and, separately, as a chronicler of the lives of people who have survived disasters, a job he secured after he himself almost died in a cruise ship disaster (no, not the one you’re thinking of, I’m talking about the one before that). Anyway, Wilbur is going to Florida for two weeks to interview hurricane survivors, which is the sort of thing a lot of people would use as a thin excuse to basically go on a Florida vacation, except that immediately afterwards he’s going to actually go on a Florida vacation. Florida as a state has a lot to answer for, but I frankly don’t believe they deserve this.

Beetle Bailey, 12/3/24

It’s a good thing America’s enemies don’t read the comics, because otherwise they’d learn that, much like 19th century Ireland, the U.S. Army is overly dependent on a single crop, and the introduction of, say, a water mold that could infect that crop would rapidly degrade our military readiness and leave us vulnerable to invasion! But America’s enemies are very much like Americans in a number of ways, one of which is that they generally do not read the newspaper comics. Surely this is something we could bond over, which in turn could transform enmity into friendship!