Post Content

Gil Thorp, 1/23/23

Maybe I’m going to get pushback for this by people who are and/or know actual teens, but my take on vaping, setting aside for the moment its purpose as a drug delivery system, is that it’s one of the dorkiest things I encounter in the real world on a regular basis. You’re sucking cotton-candy flavored mist out of an object that looks either like a tiny alto saxophone or something that would’ve been called a “deathstick” in a bad late ’90s cyberpunk movie. Not that a teen should take lessons on being cool from me, a 48-year-old man who blogs about comic strips, but it’s just sad that the Magic the Gathering nerds have internalized that vaping is too cool for them. To be fair, Nick refuses to buy into this dichotomy either, and is happy to share his cool guy vaping bounty with them. Nick seems like an all right dude, to be honest, maintaining his generosity despite the nerds’ rudeness!

Slylock Fox, 1/23/23

For some reason I assumed that the answer to “which way” was going to be a cardinal direction and I was about to pen a screed about how the liberal coastal elitists at Slylock Fox have constructed a mystery where you have to know about the relative locations of the zoo and lake in Central Park. But it turns out the answer relies on knowing which side of the bus the doors are on, and as a transit nerd I’m down with this one.

Honestly, the biggest story here is not Harry Ape robbing yet another bank, but the continued existence of a zoo in a post-animalpocalypse world. I suppose the animals could maintain it with empty cages and habitats as a monument to their former enslavement, but there are other possibilities, and they’re all much darker.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/23/23

You know, for someone who’s dirt poor and also doesn’t really seem to care about living a healthy lifestyle, Snuffy sure visits the doctor a lot! And it occurred to me, looking at this strip, that we often see him in that situation with his shirt off and the top half of his overalls unbuckled, which (a) indicates that a decent amount of thought went into the question of “Given how Snuffy canonically dresses, what would it look like if he had to disrobe?” and (b) is really a blessing, considering how much further they could’ve gone with it.

Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 1/22/23

One of the biggest transformations in American life over the last generation is that children — including ones who are surprisingly old, or at least surprisingly old to me, a non-parent — have to be strapped into car seats in order to go anywhere. I remember being kind of smug when hearing that the Kids Today can’t go a long car ride without being entertained by a screen of some sort, but then I realized that unlike me at that age, these kids are essentially immobilized for hours at a time, so what can you expect? Anyway, newspaper comics are created by and/or cater to the aesthetic tastes and nostalgia of Boomers and older Gen Xers, so it makes sense that Dennis, a child who is absolutely small enough be in a car seat, is not in a car seat in this comic, even though Henry’s phone places the scene squarely in the present. At least he’s in the back seat, so he won’t be killed instantly by the airbag triggered when Henry inevitably drives into a tree while futzing with the GPS.

Shoe, 1/22/23

Shoe and the Perfersser make up the entirety of the Treetops Tattler’s editorial staff, so it seems a little weird that they’re both in court to cover this story. But it’s not every day you get to see an old man sentenced to die in prison, I guess.

Family Circus, 1/22/23

Literacy, everyone! It’s what transforms you from the idiot dipshit in the first two panels to the smug little fucker in the final one. Learn to read, why don’t ya!

Post Content

Gasoline Alley, 1/21/23

Does anyone put a lot of energy into predicting how Gasoline Alley plots will get resolved? Like, no one does, right? Not even me? Well, let’s pretend we all do for the sake of this next joke, OK? [clears throat] Wow, I don’t think any of us had “Santa’s prayers were answered by a hot new she-elf showing up, causing Bunky to abandon his plans for an exciting, independent adventure and instead pledge another century of his eternal (?) life to serving Santa, due to horniness” on our Gasoline Alley plot resolution bingo card, which is a thing we all definitely maintain!

Bizarro, 1/21/23

I guess Bizarro has finally figured out what it takes to get noticed on this blog, and it’s weird interspecies sex stuff. One thing I enjoy about this panel is that usually in gags where a fish has crawled up onto a barren shore, we’re supposed to imagine it representing the first vertebrate colonizing the land sometime in the late Devonian period, but here our brave fish encounters a tiger, meaning that at the very earliest we’re several hundred million years later in the Miocene. That fish isn’t an evolutionary pioneer or anything, it just wants to fuck a mammal.

Beetle Bailey, 1/21/23

I’m sorry, I think all of us have always assumed over years reading this strip that Sarge is functionally illiterate. This “joke” is not very good, and certainly not worth forcing me to completely restructure my idea of what Sarge is all about to accommodate the possibility that he can write a restaurant review! “But Josh,” you’re probably saying, “this is a one-off joke that will never be referenced again,” but sorry, it’s canon now and I have to update the wiki and everything, how dare they do this to me personally