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Marvin, 10/13/22

Well, Marvin’s been at it for 40 years now, with the “it” that it’s been “at” mostly consisting of poop/piss jokes about the title character, but also sometimes about the old people, dogs, and even passing birds in his life, but we’re finally reaching the final frontier of excretory narratives and getting into Jeff and Jenny’s bathroom situation. Specifically, we’re getting a week’s worth of “jokes” about how Jenny wants to get a bidet installed. I particularly enjoy her sly look in the final panel. “Padding out a list of things to talk about related to shitting until it’s not interesting anymore? That’s the syndicated comic strip Marvin’s turf, am I right, folks?”

Judge Parker, 10/13/22

“She doesn’t really know Steve particularly well or anything; we’re just at the stage of our divorce where I text her ‘thinking of you!’ and then send graphic crime scene photos.”

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/12/22

Whoops, I was going to do a whole bit about how this bulldog straight-up murdered someone in prison “the kennel,” but it turns out that teardrop tattoos are polysemous, with as many meanings as there are people who get them. So instead I’ll just say that I really admire the 3D, photorealistic work on this one, much better than you usually see in from tattoos people get while incarcerated, and even more impressive when you realize that the artist probably didn’t have thumbs.

Six Chix, 10/12/22

Look, if you had told me when I first launched this blog that I would be spending a lot of time contemplating the romantic and reproductive lives of mermaids, I might’ve taken a different path in life, but I’m here now and have to make the best of it. Anyway, we now know that, in the early stage of their lifecycle, mer-people have a fish upper half and mammalian lower half, which is really quite a fascinating discovery! Also, as with fish, it seems that the sperm and egg meet and fertilize outside the body, meaning that the young must be retrieved and delivered to the mother by a stork (a species that coexists with mermaids in some kind of symbiotic relationship) in order to be properly raised. (On the other hand, it’s possible that this baby is a reversed generic abomination that the mother tried unsuccessfully to toss into the sea, and this stork is just confronting her with her responsibilities.)

Pluggers, 10/12/22

Ha ha! It’s funny because pluggers are in pain, all the time!

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Shoe, 10/11/22

If you want a sense of how very old the actual imagined target readership of the newspaper comics is, consider today’s Shoe, which uses as the basis for its punchline the pop cultural touchstone of men belonging to fraternal orders with silly, overelaborate rituals and leadership titles. This is not even something that was really part of the Baby Boom generation’s experience; it’s something that Baby Boomers half-remember their parents arguing about, probably. It’s something that I, a 48-year-old man, mostly know about from watching decades-old reruns of The Flintstones as a child. And yet here it is, a joke in the newspaper and on God’s own internet that makes exactly zero sense if you aren’t familiar with these entirely moribund organizations. Definitely a sign of a healthy art form!

Gasoline Alley, 10/11/22

Not sure what I’m more surprised by: that Walt never considered that his proposed activities might be physically dangerous, or that the prospect of death finally coming for him still engenders anxiety, rather than a sense of profound relief.