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The Lockhorns, 2/6/23

A thing I like about The Lockhorns is that it’s a comic about a marriage that has spiraled into truly dark territory, but most of the individual strips aren’t necessarily about incandescent moments of hate. Instead, you just get a series of small disappointments that add up to a wasted life. Like, today, you have to imagine that Loretta got it into her head that they should be a tea family, or at least that they should try it out, and she went through the trouble of putting together a matching tea set, and now, on morning one, Leroy just stares dully into his cup and is like “enh, let’s not.” Devastating. Devastating! And the most devastating thing is that they can still devastate one another like this, without even thinking about it.

Slylock Fox, 2/6/23

I feel like Weirdly has honestly put more work into his alibi here than he usually does. “Who, me?” he says. “I just got back from bowling. Haven’t even bothered to put my ball away yet, and my phone still hasn’t fully recharged. I was just sitting down to get on the computer and hadn’t even had time to enter my password!” The boiling flask isn’t that suspicious to me, it’s not like Weirdly has ever given the vibe of being really concerned about safety so he could’ve just left it boiling while he was out, or left one of his menagerie in charge of it, like the purple thing or the [record scratch] WAIT HOLD ON A SECOND COURT WEIRDLY HAS A MAX-ANALOGUE SIDEKICK? With the same color/dress scheme except he’s like … a tiny canid predator of some sort? Is that a small fox, specifically chosen to taunt Slylock? More on this story as it develops.

Pluggers, 2/6/23

It’s hard to get more Pluggers that today’s Pluggers, in which a plugger looks more smug than you can possibly imagine after completing a basic task that used to be something everyone did and now is something that nobody actually needs to do.

Shoe, 2/6/23

It looks like, after literally years of me demanding that Shoe start doing jokes that play off the strip’s basic premise, which is that all the characters are birds, that they finally did one. Honestly, I feel nothing about this. Nothing at all. This should be a big day for me, and yet: nothing. Going to go somewhere quiet where I can contemplate what I’m doing with my life for a bit.

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Mary Worth, 2/5/23

Because Estelle simply can’t get enough of public amateur musicianship, she invited Ed on their date to a “piano bar,” which in the Worthiverse refers to a bar that has a piano that, apparently, literally anyone can just come in and play, which sounds like it would be significantly less pleasant than karaoke. But it turns out that Ed is in fact very good at playing the piano! You can tell that Estelle finds this extremely hot, but you can also tell that Ed is getting so much positive feedback from the audience that he finds the prospect of continuing to boogie-woogie all night (musically) more appealing than going back to Estelle’s place and boogie-woogieing (sexually). This is, you have to admit, one of the funnier ways for a date suggestion to backfire.

Family Circus, 2/5/23

“Hey Jeffy, you know who’s boring as shit, who’ll put you right sleep? Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior” –Dolly Keane, apparently????

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Crock, 2/4/23

My attitude towards most of the comics on this site range from “I make fun of this because I love it” to “I make fun of this but I grudgingly respect its history and craft” to “I make fun of this because I love it ironically, which over the years has become increasingly impossible to distinguish from just loving something the normal way,” but there are a few that I genuinely dislike and think are bad, and I don’t think it’ll come as a big surprise to anyone that Crock is one of them. That’s why, in the interests of intellectual honestly, I feel compelled to confess that I think this is a really good joke.

Hi and Lois, 2/4/23

I can’t tell if Lois’s facial expression in panel two is meant to indicate that she just didn’t want to look at a little white spot up by the ceiling for the next five years and didn’t think Hi would take it so personally, or if she’s thinking “Wait, Hi thinks Michelangelo had a wife? Oh, you sweet summer child.”

Crankshaft, 2/4/23

“Back when I was a high school band director … it seemed like we were always in a strip called Funky Winkerbean. And now that I’m a choir director for St. Spires … we’re always in a strip called Crankshaft, which presumably had its own characters and plotlines that its readers enjoyed at some point.” “The more things change…” “Amen!”