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Shoe, 7/9/21

A few weeks ago, faithful reader Tabby Lavalamp raised questions in a COTW runner up about why the notoriously heard-hearted Shoe would accompany the Perfesser on a tender-hearted errand. It stuck with me and was definitely the first thing I thought about today, as Shoe has not only accompanied his employee to the latter’s uncle’s grave (signs of multigenerational newphewism?), but has brought a bouquet of flowers along as well. Anyway, the reason Shoe actually goes along on these trips is that there needs to be another bird-person present so that the exchange of dialogue that creates these joke-like utterances can happen, but today’s strip did make me wonder if he’s actually there as part of his journalistic mission. There isn’t a lot of news in Treetops and anything sensational could make a good story that would get people sharing links to treetopstattler.bird on Facebook, and he’s always had a gut feeling that there was more to this uncle business. So the guy died in some unexpected and perhaps shocking way due to a terrible mistake he made, huh? Sounds interesting. Putting that gruesome tale into the newspaper might be a cruel thing to do one of the paper’s longest-suffering employees, but don’t let the flowers fool you: Shoe’s no softie.

The Lockhorns, 7/9/21

Meanwhile, it looks like the Lockhorns’s Featured Brands program is off to a great start! Congrats to Ann Taylor for partnering with this universally beloved feature, which is bound to portray their brand in a positive light!

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Gil Thorp, 7/8/21

Oh, hey, the “spring” storyline in Gil Thorp is still going on [checks notes] several days after the 4th of July, but today’s strip would like you to know that you aren’t going crazy: it’s being deliberately dragged out by the library board, because they’ve discovered how great it is when people pay attention to them and they’re going to ride that high as long as they can. Anyway, it’s pretty clear from the neoliberal detente Zane and Abel achieved at their debate that the library board is going to announce that there’s no rule in the bylaws that would prevent them from appointing two new members. If there’s further conflict between the two, expect the rest of the board to live-stream the meetings in hope of recreating this magic springtime when everyone cared about library governance (it definitely won’t work).

Daddy Daze, 7/8/21

The whole gimmick of Daddy Daze is that the Daddy Daze baby speaks in an unintelligible series of “ba”s, which the Daddy Daze daddy purports to understand as a fully-fledged linguistic system that encodes complex ideas and concepts. I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor, the idea that simpler explanations are usually to be preferred to more complex ones, which may give you an idea of where I come down on the question of “is the Daddy Daze baby actually able to formulate complete sentences in a language of his own design despite his young age that his father understands, or is the Daddy Daze daddy merely in an advanced stage of psychosis?” Strips like today make the question substantially easier to answer, in my opinion.

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Judge Parker, 7/7/21

Ha ha, ever since Sam was supposed to be guarding Randy and Charlotte but got punched into unconsciousness and Randy and Charlotte subsequently got kidnapped, Judge Parker Senior has been mostly sulking and getting drunk, fuming mad at everyone but especially at Sam. So for the last few days Sam’s been building up to his proposal for a mission that will give them purpose again, which I’ve assumed was going to be that they go into the deepest jungle and do whatever terrible deeds are necessary in order to find and free Alan’s son and granddaughter. But haha, nope, Sam’s just antsy and wants to rack up some billable hours so he can keep in good standing with the local bar association. C’mon, Alan, ever since the Cellino & Barnes partnership ended in acrimony and tragedy, there’s room for some new ambulance chasers in town!

By the way, it’s wholly possible that I’m not remembering Randy’s daughter’s name correctly, but I don’t care that much and I made only an extremely half-assed attempt to look it up, discovering that the Judge Parker Wikipedia page doesn’t seem to have any updates to the “story and characters” section beyond 2009. So, no word on Randy’s daughter, but the article does note that when the strip launched Randy had a sister, Ann! So, I dunno, Alan, maybe spent some effort figuring out where she went if you need to focus your energy somewhere.

Blondie, 7/7/21

One interesting thing about the weird character design in Blondie is that Dagwood’s canonical outfit is the weird modified version of a tuxedo that you see here, a holdover from the strip’s 1930s origins, when he was a dissolute rich kid and this was the sort of thing it was normal for people of his social class to wear to parties. In 2021, of course, that would be a wholly insane thing for someone to wear, so Dagwood tends to wear polo shirts when lounging around at home, and his tuxedo is now his work uniform; his officemates generally go in for more normal work attire, but I digress. My point is that Dagwood has clearly pulled out his laptop immediately upon arriving home to fact-check the extremely backhanded compliment his boss gave him, and I think that’s sad! Blondie obviously does too, as that’s a pity kiss if I ever saw one.

Crankshaft, 7/7/21

You know what I’m not sad about? Crankshaft getting straight-up scammed by the garden product catalog he’s obsessed with. Good for them, I say!