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Crock, 5/2/23

Clearly a lot of Crock strips will have you saying “What on earth is going on here,” but today’s Crock really has me saying, “No, really, what on earth is going on here?” I guess we’re meant to understand that the French Foreign Legion’s militarized colonial regime makes a mockery of the rights to free speech as laid out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but it’s very funny that the way this is conveyed is by having Crock declare that “signs are illegal!” And honestly, this angle just seems like it’s adding unnecessary confusion to a joke about how Grossie is protesting (?) something in a hypocritical way, but the engine for that middle panel’s gotta come from somewhere, I guess.

Mary Worth, 5/2/23

Wait, did we know that Dr. Ed was widowed? I don’t think we did, and I am enjoying Estelle carefully composing a neutral position for her facial features as she processes this information and begins to grasp that Ed’s issues might go a bit beyond “burned out at work.” Just another successful Mary Worth romantic yoga session!

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Dustin, 5/1/23

A truly incredible thing to keep in mind about Dustin is that it’s a comic that debuted in January 2010, when, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, unemployment was higher than it had been at any time since the Great Depression, and its whole deal was that college grads who had to move home because they couldn’t find jobs were just lazy, entitled brats whose problems were entirely a product of their bad character. It’s really only today, with joblessness at historic lows, that the times have caught up with the strip’s premise, although now the economic big brains are loudly proclaiming that we need more unemployment in order to fight inflation, so maybe Dustin needs to start arguing that actually, by being unemployable, he’s helping in macroeconomic terms.

Hi and Lois, 5/1/23

In other generational warfare news, Hi is a white-collar suburban dad in a legacy comic strip so he feels like he should be a Boomer, but based on the age of his kids he’s probably in his mid-to-late 40s, and, you know what, usually us Gen Xers are just glad to be noticed, but I’m sorry, I will not sit here and be lectured to by Chip fucking Flagston of all people.

The Lockhorns, 5/1/23

You ever have an older relative that you remember always “taking a nap on the couch” during family functions when you were a kid, and you only realized later probably hated big gatherings in their house and self-medicated by getting drunk? Well, in unrelated news, Leroy has “run out of gas” during Loretta’s attempt to share a pleasant afternoon with him.

Dick Tracy, 5/1/23

This sounds like a great way for the Red Cross to destroy its role as a neutral aid organization and ensure that no government ever gave them access to POWs ever again! On the other hand, do we know for sure they didn’t do this for Axis POWs too? Maybe they were just opposed to the idea of holding prisoners of war in general.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/1/23

“This is Rex Morgan, M.D., for pete’s sake! Do you realize that something interesting briefly happened? Unacceptable!”

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Gasoline Alley, 4/30/23

I thought perhaps we were going to get the beginning of a heartwarming arc where Joel learns to read late in life (hey, it worked for Crankshaft!) until Rufus actually reads the letter to him, which is so inane as to make someone actively avoid becoming literate if that’s all that’s on offer. Why not spend your day planting trees rather than reading books and letters written on the stuff they make the trees into, you know? It’s Arbor Day all year, my friends.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/30/23

Another data point for the “Where is Hootin’ Holler” question: probably the only part of the U.S. that has both a rich history of hillbilly culture and a fault line capable of producing earthquakes this powerful is the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which puts today’s action squarely in the Ozarks. Apologies to the millions of people from St. Louis to Memphis who don’t live in a region of mandatory seismic retrofits who are about to wake up under a pile of rubble!

Panel from Slylock Fox, 4/30/23

Ha ha, check out the facial expression on that doctor. That is a guy who’s trying to come up with a schedule for the nurses and his least favorite intern to keep 24/7 tabs on Cassandra’s litter box.