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Zits, 2/17/22

Do we, in fact, live in a fallen world of filth and degradation, where our young people are engaging in all sorts of nightmarish sex stuff that would set their chaste grandparents spinning in their graves? Well, the numbers don’t really seem to support this — US teen birth rates are at record lows, and the average age of a person’s first sexual encounter is higher for those born in the 1980s and ’90s than it was for previous cohorts. But, on the other hand, in 2009 the Zits creators could note in the intro to one of their books that they would get in trouble for using the word “sucks” in a strip and now they can just do “this kid’s dick looks like the Loch Ness Monster” jokes like it’s no big deal.

Mary Worth, 2/17/22

Oh, wow, it looks like Toby needs more help fighting her midlife crisis than we thought. “OK, let’s see how you did on this week’s assignment: drawing me as an adorable anime teen. Cal, what the hell is this? This isn’t anywhere near kawaii enough. You get an F! Get out of my sight!”

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Curtis, 2/16/22

OK, look, I don’t pretend to know everything about how other people live their lives, but I refuse to believe there’s a human who comes home from work and takes off his shoes and socks but not his tie, flops down on the bed, and calls a life insurance company. I refuse, do you hear me? I can only assume — especially in light of panel three — that some sicko tweeted often enough at the Curtis creative team and King Features demanding that Greg Wilkins show feet that they finally said, “Enh, what the hell.”

Funky Winkerbean, 2/16/22

Sorry for my objections from yesterday, everybody! In fact, the Lisa’s Story Oscar trajectory makes total sense. It’s simple: the movie was released to the art-house circuit in early 2020, and then theaters were shut down in the first wave of the pandemic, and in [checks notes] October 2021 Les got the first report that the movie had flopped, but then it found a second life on streaming so now it’s going to be nominated for an Oscar in [squints at calendar] February of 2022. This all adds up! There’s a persistent rumor that the Funkyverse strips are written a full year in advance and I haven’t always believed it but honestly that would go a long way towards explaining this sequence, especially considering that last year the nominees were announced in March whereas this year they were announced, uh, last week.

Mary Worth, 2/16/22

Toby knows just how to chase away those encroaching middle aged blues and recapture that feeling of being a little girl again: marrying a much older man who likes to give her condescending little pep talks while grabbing her by the chin.

Family Circus, 2/16/22

God damn it, Family Circus, I got halfway through this caption and was all excited to make a joke about how Whitney is lucky because she doesn’t get sent to the principal’s office for yelling that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by the devil to trick liberals, but now I have to live for the rest of my life with the awful knowledge that Dolly spends every day at school squirming and holding it in because the toilets at school are never as clean as mommy makes the ones at home, and I’m not excited about that at all!

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/15/22

Look, I have very little credentials to speak as a “Hollywood insider” of any sort, but I feel very confident in saying that box office failures that got zero promotion from the studios that produced them do not get Oscar nominations. They simply do not! Either the studio thinks there’s an Oscar-worthy performance in it, in which case it does promote the movie, at least as something art-house-y award-worthy, or the movie finds an audience perhaps unexpectedly and then the studios do some “for your consideration” lobbying as awards season approaches. Performances in movies nobody saw or liked (“nobody” here meaning both general audiences and film snobs/critics) definitely do not get nominations just out of the blue, buzz-free, no matter how moving they are or how much awareness of breast cancer they raise. Anyway, I guess Mason is saying she’s up for an Oscar nomination rather than she’s actually been nominated, so … maybe the studio is doing a late push, or something? But, overall, if the woman playing Les’s dead wife in a low-budget flop wins an Oscar, I will officially declare that less realistic than the time this strip burned down Los Angeles and created millions of refugees.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/15/22

The days in which people gave the Morgans heaps of money and free boats for no reason seem to be over, for the most part, but you have to admit that a jailhouse snitch derailing Rene’s likely-to-succeed lawsuit out of the goodness of his heart is functionally the same thing as giving them a bunch of money, if you think about it mathematically.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/15/22

Would I have ever predicted that Snuffy Smith would meet his end not at the hands of Sheriff Tait or an aggrieved member of the Barlow clan, but would rather be torn to pieces by a dozens angry squirrels? No, but I’m not complaining about it.