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Gil Thorp, 6/6/22

Look, folks, I’ve never claimed to be particularly “baseball savvy,” so I apologize for failing to follow Saturday’s disjointed jargon about Ryne Duren. (Just as a side note, faithful reader/Twitter follower Windier E. Megatons pointed out that Ryne Duren is a classic guy for the Let’s Remember Some Guys genre of sport talk, which you’d think Gil Thorp would engage in more often.) Apparently the point was not that “You should get better glasses, like Ryne Duren did” but rather that “Now that your opponents know your vision is poor, you should ham it up and make it seem like you have very little control, like Ryne Duren did, so that they’re terrified you’re going to ‘accidentally’ murder them with a fastball to the face, something that a coach at the high school level would definitely just let happen.” Remember, kids, using a series of elaborate coded signals to compensate for your disability is the pusillanimous tactic of an effeminate coward and violates the rules of baseball. But pretending to be a true psycho/major legal liability for your school district? That’s all the game, fellas.

Slylock Fox, 6/6/22

A thing that I have noticed in my many years of Slylock Fox studies is that a great many of the “mysteries” simply involve a sapient animal who has been caught in some wrongdoing offering a transparently false alibi that Slylock easily sees through. Today it occurs to me that one of the things that distinguishes humans from (present-day) animals is our ability to imagine counterfactuals: ways that events could have, but did not, play out, or, alternately, explanations that we know to be false for actual events. Perhaps part of the great Animalpocalypse was the non-humans’ sudden ability to dream up counterfactuals of their own, but being so new to them, they find them difficult to refute. Only Slylock, one of the wisest of the new breed of animals, is able to keep is bearings on reality in this brave new world.

Pardon My Planet, 6/6/22

The comics pages are a small-c conservative institution heavily invested traditional institutions like the nuclear family. Only truly radical strips like Pardon My Planet are willing to speak the unpopular truth: raising children is exactly like your soul being condemned for your sins and tortured forever, in hell.

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Hi and Lois, 6/5/22

I think telling stories out of chronological order has gone from being an innovation to something of a crutch or gimmick at this point, but there are times when it still works. Like, I’m thinking about this Hi and Lois from a couple weeks ago totally differently now that I know that the twins are trying to get extra scoops of breakfast ice cream at like 8 in the morning, and their dad is waiting in the car because he’s still groggy and disoriented.

Crankshaft, 6/5/22

One of my very first shocking insider discoveries about the comics-production process when I started doing this blog was that the daily strips were colored in by syndicate folks who aren’t the strip artist, leading to occasionally troubling errors. But the Sunday strips? Those, in theory, are colored by the same people who draw them, which means you can treat the entire scene as a unified whole. That explains why all these people have fallen asleep, because they’ve clearly decided to have their Sunday Afternoon Book Club at a law office and are having a hard time staying engaged while reading the identically bound volumes of the city code cover to cover.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/5/22

I love how angry Rex looks when he says “You want me to come down there in the middle of the night just to save somebody’s life?” but as soon as the cop is like “Nah, you’d just get in the way,” he’s like, “Of course, officer, I’ll help in any way I can. I’m a hero!”

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Mary Worth, 6/4/22

Whenever Jared appears in this strip, he inspires intense loathing in both me and, based on your comments, all of you, and one of the fascinating things about Mary Worth is that it’s never clear if that’s the intended effect. Like, normal people recognize Jared as a needy, petulant, emotionally manipulative “nice guy,” but are we supposed to view him as such, or is he actually just an unappreciated sad sack worthy of love, and worthy of Dawn’s love in particular? Well, I kind of feel like today’s strip, in which Dawn goes clubbing with strange men like a whore while Jared gently consoles a victim of domestic violence, answers the question, and I’m excited that we’re all going to get the outcome we’ve been begging for (Dawn and Jared breaking up) but only because Dawn isn’t good enough for him.

Gil Thorp, 6/4/22

Wow, huh, so we’ve spent this entire spring focused on Gregg’s little blindness problem and finally we have a solution to it: get better glasses. Glasses, everybody! Why didn’t we think of that? You know, weirdly there hasn’t been a girl’s softball B-plot this year, and I think it may be because the Lady Mudlarks are too smart to be in this strip.