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Family Circus, 7/28/23

Ah, sweet, unlearned Jeffy! Having heard his parents and grandparents telling treacly stories of guardian angels, he assumes that everyone must have one, even characters in the fairy tales his parents read to him at night. But Ma Keane’s face shows that she knows the truth: that the protection offered by God and his heavenly messengers does not extend to freakish nightmare-beings like Humpty Dumpty. Man was made in the image of his Creator, and falls under His protective grace; but this egg-demon is clearly born of Hell itself, and being shattered on the ground, his guts oozing everywhere, is the fate he deserves.

Hi and Lois, 7/28/23

I assume, in a fatalistic way, that there are no new newspaper comics fans, and haven’t been for some time, and anyone still left reading them daily has really committed to the genre, and already knows all the lore. Still, I’d like to think that there are a certain number of people — not 10,000, surely, but at least a few — who are only learning today that Lois from Hi and Lois and Beetle from Beetle Bailey are siblings, and those people are absolutely losing their minds.

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Crock, 7/27/23

The thing about ladies’ butts is that the societal consensus on their optimal size has waxed and waned over the years: some decades have extolled the skinny, while in other eras big and round has been the way to go. This is a particular dilemma in the universe of Crock. When exactly was this strip published? When is any of the action supposed to be taking place? I don’t know and my guess is that the characters don’t either, so “compared to what?” is a legitimate question.

Judge Parker, 7/27/23

You and I both knew in our heart of hearts that the newspaper funny pages were never going to show a guy getting torn to pieces by a bear, not even if we’ve already established that guy as a child kidnapper, so we should appreciate what we do get today, which is seeing his screams of agony coming in from just off-panel. Then, to chill us out a bit, we smash cut to Sophie and Marie watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’m pretty sure, but Sophie’s not even paying attention because she’s looking at her phone. Kids today! With their phones and getting kidnapped by guys who get killed by bears and such!

The Lockhorns, 7/27/23

A thing I love about The Lockhorns is that in most panel, no matter what the “joke” is, one or both of the title characters looks like they want to die. Like this is just a dumb and overdone bit of wordplay on “continental,” they didn’t need to go so hard, but Leroy is looking at those pancakes like he’s contemplating whether he can deliberately choke himself to death on them, and I respect that artistic choice so much.

Dennis the Menace, 7/27/23

It’s true: Mr. Wilson spent much of his tween years as a child soldier in the bloody spasms of civil conflict that wracked the Congo after Belgium pulled its colonial administration out in 1960. The experience has left him with terrible emotional scars that he cannot bring himself to talk about. His outfit today is unrelated.

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Gil Thorp, 7/26/23

Oh, wow, when I called for a wacky summer storyline, I didn’t expect a dystopian plot where a flamboyantly dressed warden named “Reno Harwood” forces criminal-teens to battle it out in his JailDome, with quadrocopter drone cameras streaming the whole thing out for the entertainment of bloodthirsty Twitch viewers everywhere. Marty Moon will enthusiastically do the play by play, and the stakes are high: the winners will earn their freedom, while the losers are condemned to death. Unfortunately, Gil’s decision to prepare his team for an indoor game by making them practice in the pouring rain may prove counterproductive.

Bizarro, 7/26/23

Like Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald is theoretically the most important character in his weird little world but is also the most boring one; why would you spend time thinking about this vaguely off-putting clown when you could be following the adventures of the mayor with a cheeseburger for a head, or a criminal who steals burgers, or a bird who is also Amelia Earhart, or whatever the hell Grimace is? But from now on I’ll spending a lot of energy contemplating Ronald McDonald — specifically, wondering if his partner is a hamurger or if he has latent hamburger DNA or if his partner is a normal human woman who gave birth to a hamburger and just started screaming and screaming while the doctor came out and told Ronald and he was just like “Heh heh, exactly as I expected.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/26/23

“You also keep sending us your bill, and we keep telling you that just because you commandeered one of our rooms and did surgery in it without asking anyone about it doesn’t mean we owe you money.”