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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.

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Six Chix, 10/10/22

Man, it’s been a while since there’s been a Six Chix with so many specific inexplicable details as this one, and I feel like we need to kick off the week by celebrating it! “Back to the land” generally refers to a movement in the ’60s and ’70s where people rejected modern industrial society and moved to rural areas to live in ways they hoped would be more self-sufficient and connected to the earth. What does this have to do with robots? Why is the back to the land robot carrying a bindle, like it’s a hobo or a child pretending to run away from home in a old-timey comic? Why doesn’t the back to the land robot have legs? Is it significant that the other robot is plugged into the wall? Why is now a particularly panic-inducing time for this trip back to the land to happen? Is the plugged-in robot flailing his arms around in panic like the Lost In Space robot, or is he finger quoting around “back to the land”? Feel free to wildly speculate about the answers to all these questions in the comments, but I assure you that you will never figure it out.

Gil Thorp, 10/10/22

Milford’s new trans student Tobias is also the newest Mudlark, recruited as a kicker after Gil saw him playing soccer. This is big news! The traditionalist Gil Thorp readership needs to be introduced to the idea in the most Gil Thorp way possible: by having him pull off an deranged trickeration play (a rainbow kick, to be clear, is a soccer move) that we only have described to us while two other characters that we’ve never seen before look at the off-panel action. Why is mohawk dude telling Guy “you gotta see this” when Guy is clearly looking directly at the football field, just like mohawk dude is? Did Guy close his eyes so he didn’t have to see the woke hellscape? This too is classic Gil Thorp, and I appreciate it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/10/22

Oh yeah, in Rex Morgan, Hank Jr. and his long-distance girlfriend got married! It all happened off-panel, but don’t worry, they’re here to assure you that it wasn’t very interesting and you didn’t miss anything.

Dennis the Menace, 10/10/22

Ugh, it’s called athleisure, Dennis, look it up. I guess it’s kind of menacing for an eight-year-old to sound like a furious senior citizen writing a rejected letter to the editor about how women today dress like whores in public, but maybe not in the same spirit of menacing as the strip title intends.

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Mary Worth, 10/9/22

Oh, God, remember when Tommy proposed to his girlfriend with an onion ring but she rejected him and then thought he had lapsed back into his druggie ways (he hadn’t) so she dumped him and then he sent an extremely ill-advised email but she took him back anyway because he got a part-time job as a hall monitor in a high school? Well, now his mother is the one doing the rejecting! Ha ha, those Beedles, they just can’t figure this marriage thing out. Anyway, I can’t really remember if Tommy and Zak have ever interacted, but I can see some real emotionally fraught bonding coming up! Hopefully they’ll invite Iris’s ex, Wilbur, a guy who knows a thing or two about having his marriage proposals rejected. “You ever think about faking your own death, Zak?” he’ll slur after several drinks too many. “Chicks love that shit, trust me.”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/9/22

I’ve always assumed that Count Weirdly is a more or less ordinary human whose green skin is the result of some sort of genetic mutation that occurred around the time the animals took over, but now that we’ve learn that his father, who was alive during hippie times, also had green skin, and also there were four of him, I have a lot more questions on the subject.