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Dick Tracy, 10/14/21

Say, remember a few weeks ago, when Dick seemed to grudgingly agree that a free press is an important element in society and gave an interview to some lady from a newspaper? Well, surprise: that lady was a criminal, and Dick, who’s never forgotten a single misshapen criminal skull he’s laid eyes on, knew it at the time, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. Too bad, because it looks like she doesn’t even work for the fake news after all! Wait, does not working for the fake news make her better or worse? Either way, I’m sure Dick is regretting not shooting her while she was trying to escape from the interview.

Shoe, 10/14/21

I’m a strong believer in the Occam’s Joke Razor, by which I mean that when it comes to setup material, entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. However, this should be balanced against the Law of Joke Specificity, which says that specific things are more funny the vague ones. Take today’s Shoe, for example. To set up the punchline, the lady bird needs to say she has a particular dream job, because it wouldn’t make a ton of sense otherwise; but the strip goes so specific, having her claim she wants to work at an English department store that went out of business in 2006, that you sort of expect that to feed into the punchline, when it really doesn’t. That said, I do enjoy the loving way the Perfesser is gazing into his beer glass in the second panel. I think we know what he is doing in his dreams when he’s not working, ha ha! (He’s getting bombed in the middle of the afternoon.)

Dennis the Menace, 10/14/21

Speaking of facial expressions, I am absolutely loving Alice’s face and body language here. This is the moment when she realizes that Dennis is never going to become a functional enough person to move out of the house, and she is not OK with it!

Mary Worth, 10/14/21

Speaking of facial expressions, I’m interpreting Libby’s here as one of grim determination. She’s not sure how many more piece of furniture she’ll need to piss on to break Estelle of the Wilbur habit once and for all, but she’s willing to do whatever it takes.

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Mark Trail, 10/13/21

Interesting, interesting, it seems that despite my taunting Mark may have fought in a war after all. Or … did he? He does seem quite cagey about the details as soon as friend starts pressing him, doesn’t he? Maybe he realizes that Cliff isn’t going to consider his lifetime of efforts punching hippies to be a “tour,” even though his handlers from the CIA assured him he was on the front lines of the most important war America would ever fight.

Slylock Fox, 10/13/21

Hmm, we’re seeing a lone walrus warily eyeing those polar bears, but the quiz answer assures us that walruses are almost invariably found in massive herds of hundreds or even thousands of walrus companions. We have to assume this isolated individual is a scout for a vast walrus army that’s preparing to attack and overwhelm the arctic’s most powerful predators. I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen Slylock and his pals interact with sapient polar bears or walruses, presumably because they’re locked in a brutal war thousands of miles north of the Forest Kingdom.

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Pluggers, 10/12/21

After years of discussing pluggers, I still don’t fully have a handle on every nuanced characteristic of pluggerdom, but honestly “there is very little overlap between pluggers and stage magicians” was one that I feel like I could’ve guessed at pretty easily.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/12/21

Ma’am! Ma’am! There’s only been widespread and earnest use of streaming for stuff like weddings since the coronavirus epidemic started a year and a half ago! It’s different than it was in our day too! There’s nobody around getting married whose day this is!

Dennis the Menace, 10/12/21

Mrs. Wilson is cruelly laughing not at her husband, but at Dennis. It’s funny because Dennis thinks of Mr. Wilson as one of his best friends, but Mr. Wilson doesn’t even like him!