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Gil Thorp, 4/2/21

So there’s been a lot of buzz in this new storyline about the triumphant return of Zane Clark, after the resolution of some unspecified family drama, and this is upsetting me because I usually pride myself on remembering beloved Gil Thorp characters from the past, but his name doesn’t ring a bell and I’ve never mentioned him on this blog. But today I was relieved to learn that in fact Zane is dead, and possibly has been for years! I think it’s quite progressive that ghosts are allowed to participate in Milford athletics, honestly, although it seems there’s still some social opprobrium that comes with them dating the living.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/2/21

So it turns out Sarah got bored with the gangster version of this adventure even faster than she got bored with the cowboy version, and now they’re doing some kind of superhero shtick, with her as Rex’s sidekick and Buck as Rene’s sidekick. But Rene unleashed his ultimate weapon, paint, and now he and Buck are sort of ambling away and Rex and Sarah are walking slowly in the other direction, and their only hope is that she just kind of casually pull some item out of his handbag. I think Sarah kind of sucks at imagining things, is what I’m getting at.

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Hagar the Horrible, 4/1/21

Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone! Say, were you concerned that the creative team behind today’s Hagar the Horrible believed that an olive tree might realistically grow out of an olive left floating in a martini glass over a single evening? Well, rest assured: that little sign being held by a tentacle is here to let you know that this is just a seasonally appropriate jest, and we’ll be getting back to this strip’s ultra-realistic medieval Norse setting tomorrow. (The creative team also knows that squid and octopuses do not hold signs this way; the tentacle is itself a secondary April Fool’s joke.)

Crankshaft, 4/1/21

These two twins have been volunteering to help Lillian with the unpermitted bookstore she runs over her garage for years now, and they’ve finally won her trust enough that they can start scamming her. And good for them!

Mary Worth, 4/1/21

Well, now that we’ve established that dogs are good, I guess we can finally move forward to the next storyline, and … OH NO SAUL DID YOU LET HER SEE A HEADLESS BESUITED MANNEQUIN, this is going to trigger another panic attack and at least another six weeks of this plotline, please, we had almost made it out of this one

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Baby Blues, 3/31/21

Look, as a guy with a Gen X beard situation myself (though I finally ditched the goatee for the full mountain man during the quar), I get why it’s absolutely perfect for “Good Ol’ Stan,” Darryl’s douchey college pal whose visit Wanda has been dreading all week, to have a prominent and douchey beard when he finally makes his first on-panel appearance. I won’t even quibble with the individual decisions to have his hair be light brown, to have him wearing a mask, and to have Darryl’s underpants tucked under the beard in the aftermath of the epic wedgie he’s received. But taken together? To produce what appears to be a wavy light brown stain near the waistband of Darryl’s tighty-whities? That’s just bad decision making and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Hi and Lois, 3/31/21

Look, all you people who call Hi and Lois “unfit parents” just because they leave their infant unsupervised, both indoors and outdoors, for hours at a time: would an unfit parent bother to carefully place that infant several inches into the shade, which is a great place to leave her for several more hours, since we all know that shade remains in the same place over the course of the day? Check and mate, haters!