Post Content

Crankshaft and Curtis, 12/1/21

I’m genuinely of the opinion that “gaslighting,” as a word, at one point conveyed a useful concept but has had its impact significantly reduced by ever-broadening use. But still! These two strips use a structure common to mild domestic comedies, where a child or old person is unfamiliar with or confused by a concept intuitively understood by an adult of a normal age. But in this case, the concepts are, respectively, “There’s a thing called a ‘smart pad’ that everyone has, maybe everyone is required to have” and “ghost flush,” and gosh darn it if I don’t feel as if I’m Ingrid Bergman being manipulated by Angela Lansbury and Charles Boyer! Am I an old person, like Lillian, flummoxed by the “smart pad” revolution and unable to remember where I put mine and increasingly suspicious that I don’t even own one? Am I a child, like Curtis, who has never heard of a “ghost flush” and would immediately assume that it was about a ghost, flushing? Am I full-on in the Berenstein Bears universe now? WHAT IS HAPPENING

Dick Tracy, 12/1/21

Oh wow, it looks like Dick’s decision to dabble in hoodies was actually just a way to help him to transition to full on disguises, huh. You know, I never pegged Dick as a supergenius or anything, but I have to respect the fact that he saw the flaw in in this criminal gang’s “Let’s wear identity-obscuring gimp suits at all times, even when we’re just hanging out with each other at the office” shtick before they did.

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/30/21

I’m reasonably sure that I’ve never seen the blessings of the Anglo-Norman system of trial by jury granted to the people of Hootin’ Holler, who as near as I can tell are subject to their unelected sheriff and judge, a regime whose arbitrary nature is at least somewhat tempered by its ineffectiveness. Presumably, however, the town courthouse is a relic of the days when the Holler was part of the now only dimly remembered Newnited States. Nobody is sure what the jury box is for, but today Snuffy and Lukey are going to use it as a place to hang out and laugh theatrically at someone else getting sent to jail for once.

Gil Thorp, 11/30/21

Wow, if you had asked me to guess “so what’s the resolution to this Chance Macy storyline going to be, the one that the strip keeps teasing as super boring,” I don’t think I would’ve picked “Chance is going to Canada to play metric football in front of nobody” in a million years! Kudos to Gil Thorp for keeping me guessing in this extremely low-stakes way, I guess?

Hi and Lois, 11/30/21

I’m not usually one to be like “Oh, the children have been raised on digital machines and have no soul, ours is the last truly human generation that will ever walk the earth,” but today’s Hi and Lois, in which the Flagston kids declare their excitement for getting “all kinds of food” delivered and then rattle off not the varieties of food a person might savor but rather than names of various apps, as if their appetite could be sated by a stream of 1s and 0s generated by gullible venture capital, has truly sent a chill up my spine.

Post Content

Crock, 11/29/21

“Hmm,” I bet you’re thinking, “a four-digit number that turns out to be the price in dollars and cents of an entire barrel of wine sure is a forced way to do a ‘Ha ha, Maggot is cheap!’ joke.” Well, consider this: 1830 is actually the year the French began their conquest of the Maghreb. So perhaps this is actually a way for French Legionnaire Maggot to taunt his Algerian wife Grossie over her colonial servitude! Surely this is so grotesque a possibility that we can’t blame the waiters for desperately trying to spin some other possibility into existence.

Crankshaft, 11/29/21

Hey, remember a couple weeks ago when Lillian browbeat a local youth into helping her do a Zoom book panel and then was a real dick about it the whole time? Well, turns out that she tried to do a slideshow using an actual slide projector in the process, which I’m sure was a big disaster that she probably blamed the local youth for.

Gil Thorp, 11/29/21

Ah, yes, finally, the big mystery of “Is Chance Macy going to play college football and if so where” is about to get resolved, and frankly if none of the actual characters in this strip are going to get excited about it, I’m not sure why we should even try.