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Family Circus, 3/25/22

I very distinctly remember the moment more than four years ago when I read this article about the “raw water” movement in the New York Times because it drove me very nearly to despair. Basically, starting around 150 years ago humanity began to achieve something that would’ve been deemed near-miraculous by any other civilization in history — safe-to-drink water delivered at incredibly low cost to almost every home — and now that we’re a couple generations removed from anyone who remembers what life was like before that, people are instead selling unsterilized spring water for $15 a gallon and saying stuff like “They’re putting in fluoride — call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug” to reporters. It’s bad! It’s real bad! On the other hand, if it’s gonna result in Jeffy and Billy getting killed by cholera, I guess I can’t complain too much.

Mary Worth, 3/25/22

Oh my god, this is too good. This is perfect. I love everything happening here. I love Cal dropping “have you tried just not thinking about your problems” like it’s sage advice, and I really love that Helen has busted out binoculars for her Toby-spying needs. I’m assuming Helen isn’t, like, an ornithology professor (because I assume most community colleges don’t have ornithology departments) so she brought those in to work specifically for looking at Toby’s brazen flirtations from afar. Who knows what further madness her obsession with cock-blocking Toby will lead her to! Keep it up, Helen!

Shoe, 3/25/22

The fact that the creative team behind Shoe thinks that “being an artist” is a ticket to financial independence reveals a lot frankly surprising information about how lucrative Shoe is.

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Blondie, 3/24/22

This is not the first time I’ve griped about this, but at one point unseen off-screen characters in Blondie used to be named things like “the Glambasters,” just for fun, but now they all have to have incredibly on-the-nose names that explicitly tell you what their deal within the comic is, like “the Clockers” who hate it if you’re late or, in this case, “Winona Braggart,” who likes to brag. Where has the creative energy that used to be put into the names gone? If today’s strip is any indication, it’s going into incredibly detailed drawings of curled up cold-cuts, which, while on-brand for this strip and no doubt of great interest to its readership, really saddens me.

Mary Worth, 3/24/22

Look, I’ve never said that Toby is a genius, exactly, but it seems like it should be obvious even to her that a mostly treeless hillside facing your workplace’s enormous plate-glass windows is the last place you’d want to pick for a makeout session with a student that your coworkers are already criticizing you for flirting with. Just walk to the other side of the hill! Think for once in your life!

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Six Chix, 3/23/22

One of those things that I never thought about until I learned it and then I thought about it all the time is that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is it stated that he’s an egg, yet this is, universally, how we envision him. The main theory explaining this is that the rhyme was originally conceived of as a riddle: “humpty dumpty” was a general slang term of abuse for the short and squat, and so the joke was something like “Sure, seems weird that some little fat dude fell off the wall and broke into pieces … but what if we told you that actually, he was an egg? Eh?” Humor, notoriously, does not translate well across eras, and this is a pretty good example of that in play! You know what does play well across eras, though? Body horror! That’s why I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the Six Chix reboot of the Humpty Dumpty mythos, in which the Humpty Dumpty was deliberately taunted into hurling himself to a horrifying death so that his “inner bird” could be set free. Each bird in this grim world must convince other beings to die in order to perpetuate their species. It’s grim stuff!

Crankshaft, 3/23/22

If you “run” Montoni’s pizza through “the pipeline” (of your digestive tract), you’ll experience any number of unpleasant side effects, at both ends and the middle, which might in some sense be interpreted as “saluting”. Sorry you had to visualize that, but the motto of this blog long ago shifted from “I read the comics so you don’t have to” to “I involuntarily contemplated Ed Crankshaft’s pizza-farts so now you’re going to have to as well.”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/22

I know, in theory, that the teens in the first two panels have just finished a practice, and it’s only in the second panel that we’ve zoomed in enough to see that Parnit is sweating as one normally does after such exertion. But what it looks like is that Pranit has been told that he’ll be allowed back in the lineup after being suspended for his little “I accidentally became a bookie and hired an enforcer” oopsie and has immediately broken into a frenzied, manic sweat of excitement. He might have a problem not messing up between now and the game! Looks like he’s gonna mess up right there, to be honest!

Judge Parker and The Phantom, 3/23/22

Sorry I have not been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker and The Phantom, but I did want to point out that they’re both drawn by Mike Manley but written by two different people, and I would like to imagine that Manley enjoyed getting the scripts this week and finding out that he would get to do two explosions on the same day.