Post Content

Gil Thorp, 6/20/23

Some years back, the state of Maryland renamed the government agency in charge of courts, detention facilities, and parole supervision for kids under 18 from the “Department of Juvenile Justice” to the “Department of Juvenile Services,” and I can understand trying to get rid of a label that has punitive implications and maybe try to imply that you’re leaning towards rehabilitation, but (a) you can never win a race on the euphemism treadmill and (b) “Department of Juvenile Services” might falsely lead you to believe that the department was delivering services to young people that weren’t ultimately crime-and-punishment related. Anyway, I bring this up because I thought that was a pretty bad euphemism, but “Milford juvenile sports program manager” as a job title for a prison guard is frankly a lot worse.

Family Circus, 6/20/23

Now, obviously the joke here is that Jeffy is an idiot. But you have to admit that it does present us with a truly horrifying image of a world where children just a little older than Jeffy reach an age at which they lose their “child’s eyes” — maybe they cloud over and harden first, or maybe they just suddenly and painfully pop off the optic nerves, with the new, literate “adult” eyes emerging from bloody sockets over the next few excruciating weeks. This is a lot of body horror to just tell us that Jeffy’s an idiot, in other words, especially considering that most of us already knew that he was an idiot.

Hi and Lois, 6/20/23

The truly depressing thing here is that after nearly 70 years in publication, this strip hasn’t come up with enough of a personality for Ditto to give him a plausible joke.

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 6/19/23

There was a truly incredible report a few months ago that featured extensive quotes from Taliban fighters who, after spending two decades waging a brutal and ultimately successful guerilla war against the mightiest superpower the world has ever known, found to their great surprise and disgust that running the country they had conquered mostly entailed sitting in an office building in Kabul and writing a lot of emails. This was what popped into my mind immediately upon reading this, and for some reason I find this a much funnier and more incongruous scenario than these sapient animals stealing jewels from each other or whatever. These creatures rose up and dispossessed the dominant species of planet Earth, in a paroxysm of genocidal violence, with the intention of building their own civilization in the ruins! And now they’re hacking into one another’s email accounts in order to frame each other for the crime of sending mean notes? The creatures looked from funny animal to man, and from man to funny animal, and from funny animal to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/19/23

I genuinely love how distressed this Hagar’s victim looks in panel two here. He lives in the civilized Carolingian realm, and probably he though that the days of violent Teutonic justice and trial by combat were over; now disputes are settled peacefully in accordance with civil law in the Emperor’s courts. But here are a couple violent men with weapons, sent (or so he thinks) by his wife’s vengeful family, here to make it very clear that, if you cross the wrong people, the old ways are still very much alive.

The Lockhorns, 6/19/23

I am frankly quite pleased to see the whole crypto/web3 scene go through multiple hype and boom/bust cycles to finally achieve its final form: something used in a syndicated newspaper comic strip as a well-understood shorthand for “a topic the most irritating person you meet at a party would talk to you about.” I only find this strip unbelievable because I am 100% certain that Leroy doesn’t need anything explained to him, because he has lost a substantial amount of money in crypto.

Post Content

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/18/23

This image is, quite frankly, one of the most horrifying that Slylock Fox has presented me with in all my years of reading and commenting on this strip. I suppose Weirdly imagined that his genetically modified mega-bee would itself be able to use its powerful stinger to attack his enemies and fetch its own honey, but thanks to the square cube law its insectoid anatomy means it can barely move, so it spends its days in a cage in Weirdly’s basement, dragging itself over to bowls of honey that someone else has to steal for it. We don’t have any indication that this bee is sapient like the other animals, and truly it would be a blessing if it weren’t, as an intelligent mega-bee would have nothing to do all day but contemplate the innate wrongness of its own existence.

Shoe, 6/18/23

Speaking of fucked up animal business, imagine if you were a mortician and you came into your showroom one day only to find some old guy in there sticking his head into the coffins, taking big sniffs and making satisfied sounds. I know morticians see a lot of stuff that would haunt us normies but this one would have to unsettle even them. Not sure how both the mortician and the old guy being birds would affect things but I can’t imagine it would help.

Gasoline Alley, 6/18/23

Can you imagine how annoying someone’s on-stage patter must be if you get up and demand that they start playing music while they’re in the middle of an anecdote about how people don’t like their music? Rufus must be even more irritating in person than he comes across on the page.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 6/18/23

I’ve never watched Bridgerton, but through cultural osmosis have learned that much of the first season’s plot revolves around a sexually naive young woman whose husband keeps using the withdrawal method and who slowly comes to understand that this is why she isn’t getting pregnant, which means that, to be blunter, much of the first season’s plot revolves around semen, so it’s fun to rate how unsettling it is to imagine various comics characters having in-depth conversations about it. Jeremy Duncan and his mom? Not great. Crankshaft? Very bad. Leroy and Loretta Lockhorn? Hoo boy.