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Dustin, 12/15/22

I always criticize the comic strip Dustin for its failure to depict its young-person characters in realistic ways, so I have to give credit where credit is due: TikTok is, in fact, an app that young people enjoy, and where you could watch many hours of dance videos, if you so choose. Now, young people do not come away from an evening of TikTok dance video viewing looking like they’ve just watched a solid six hours of disembowelments, like Dustin does here, nor do they make these kinds of execrable puns, but, you know, baby steps.

Judge Parker, 12/15/22

“Uh, no, Steve, my version is at least kind of plausible, whereas yours doesn’t really make sense at all. How much blood have you lost, exactly?”

Family Circus, 12/15/22

“So put some damn pants on. Fun time’s over!”

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Crankshaft, 12/14/22

I love the idea of this TV station boss threatening to make his staff pick up dog shit if they annoy him. There are just lots of levels to it. First of all, there’s the fact that they have a regular event where a bunch of dogs shit all over the studio, and they haven’t really figured out how to deal with that yet. Also, if nobody makes this pun, I guess the dog turds are just going to stay all over the studio? To prove a point? “At least nobody made a stupid pun,” the boss says, as everyone gingerly walks around all the poop that’s smeared everywhere. Anyway, I certainly hope that the station janitor is within earshot, so that he knows that his job is a punishment, actually.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/14/22

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the gag writers for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith understand what “feudin’” entails in a culture where clan loyalties are paramount and the government is unable to claim a monopoly on legitimate violence. It does not involve playing wacky pranks on one another, I assure you! It involves Barlow trying to murder Uriah, with a gun.

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Curtis, 12/13/22

Part of the whole comedic engine that makes Curtis work is that Greg Wilkins is kind of a square. Still, I hadn’t guessed just how much he eschewed the modern world’s loose morals — and how much he secretly yearned to emulate them — until today. “Dare I?” he thinks. “Dare I take off not just my shoes, but my socks — and not in the shower or under the covers at night, but in out in the open in the living room, where anyone who lives here can see my bare feet? I mean, why not? If I have to look at naked toes every day thanks to the out-of-control liberal media, plus all those foot fetish websites I keep accidentally ending up on when I do innocent Google searches like ‘is it legal to go barefoot’ and ‘punishment for barefoot in public’ and ‘big toed nymphos can’t stop foot-fucking,’ then who am I to cling to the old ways?”

Hi and Lois, 12/13/22

As you should know by now, my favorite kind of Hi and Lois strip is the kind where we see just how dark the Thurstons’ lives are, and today’s really pays off in that department, with Thirsty sitting in his patched chair in front of his computer where he’s watching the game on some janky illegal stream from Slovenia that’s downloading malware right now, maybe because he failed to pay his cable bill, maybe because he’s in a fight with Irma and they’ve divided the house in half with masking tape, I Love Lucy-style, and she’s claimed the living room. Either way, I assume that “My football team is having a losing season” is code for “I’ve lost a ton of money betting on the NFL this year,” and his depressed slouch tells me he was in for a lot on Portugal over Morocco too.

Mary Worth, 12/13/22

I know we’ve all been trying to figure out what exactly Zak’s deal is over the course of this storyline, but I really do think we need to apply Occam’s Razor and accept the simplest answer, which is that Zak is just kind of dumb.