The Comics Curmudgeon

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Feel like if you refer to your clothes as a “getup” you already have misgivings

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Shoe, 5/20/22

Look, Roz, I know you had to come up with an insult on the fly here, and so I guess I should be impressed by the extremely labored pun your mind just generated, but the truth is that it’s not just the Perfesser’s pants you should be roasting. Or are we meant to understand you find this garish pattern perfectly acceptable on a suit jacket, but somehow the matching pants put it over the line for you? I give you an A for effort but 5/10 on execution, keep working at it.

Blondie, 5/20/22

I’ve very intrigued by the question of how Dagwood’s posture and facial expression in the first panel fits in with the revelations over the rest of the strip. Is he expertly faking his usual cringe so Mr. Dithers won’t realize that he can’t hear a word of abuse? Or does Dithers’s diatribe have a physical force that still knocks Dagwood backwards, quite separate from its semantic content?

Mary Worth, 5/20/22

He’ll do anything for you, Toby. Anything. He’ll come down to where you work and engage in some extremely light PDA! Can you imagine a greater hero? I certainly can’t!

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Comics deal with the future (i.e., the present)

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The Lockhorns, 5/19/22

I’m pretty sure the first legacy comic to do a cryptocurrency joke was, shockingly, Snuffy Smith way back in 2015, although they just did a “bitcoin? what if a coin got bit? Wouldn’t that be funny????” joke. Nobody would ever accuse The Lockhorns of being innovative, but I respect that they wait until something like cryptocurrency has become a fairly well established part of our mental landscape before figuring out exactly how to fit it into its own internal universe. What they came up with is “Leroy has lost much of his paltry savings in the recent crypto crash but still keeps posting ‘HODL’ on Reddit and won’t shut up about crypto at parties,” which is 100% correct and I applaud it.

Blondie, 5/19/22

I was about to make an “Alexander, your father looks literally exactly like you, as if you were not sired by him in the normal human way but rather were grown in a vat from cells containing only his DNA, what possible reason do you have for saying he’s taking away from the quality of your social media,” but upon reflection I think the joke is about him smiling. Is … smiling bad now? Do the kids not smile anymore? Does Blondie, the strip that did a “You know what I miss? Chalkboards” gag two days ago, know more than me about acceptable facial expressions on Instagram? Truly this is one in a series of humbling moments.

Gil Thorp, 5/19/22

Climate change is accelerating, and you can find evidence of it everywhere. For instance, as the traditional saying goes, “Gil starts actually coaching in June, corn be heavy soon.” But it’s only mid-May and he’s already noticed one of his players is blind! Truly we are moving into uncharted territory.

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Sexually unpleasant Wednesday

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Mary Worth, 5/18/22

Oh, wow, not only has l’affaire HelenCal ended with Ian and Toby’s past and potential future (respectively) student entanglements safely banished, but it seems the Camerons have learned a valuable lesson: namely, that performing their sexual attraction for the benefit of others is just the thing they need to rekindle that attraction and indeed spark it to new and intensely erotic heights! Look for Charterstone’s #1 intellectual academic couple to engage in increasingly public and risky erotic rendezvous in the coming months.

Sally Forth, 5/18/22

Sally Forth, meanwhile, is approaching much more transgressive territory than mere exhibitionism: no, Ted and Sally are making their first ever neighbor friend and are immediately veering into cuckoldry. Look at how Sally sweats with delicious anxiety as their neighbor moves boldly into her personal space! Ted seems to have vanished entirely after the first panel, but I assume he’s bearing the same intrigued expression you can half see on him there.

Dennis the Menace, 5/18/22

This is a profoundly sad strip. Dennis is begging — begging — his father to stop shit-talking his friends because he knows he’ll blurt all those insults out in front of them, he wants to stop but he can’t stop, not matter how hard he tries. Henry, meanwhile, looks not upset or sympathetic but bored. “Look, kid,” he’s thinking, “You’ve gotta menace these guys. I know it’s no fun, but it’s what the people want. It’s the name of the strip. It pays the bills around here.”