The Comics Curmudgeon

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140

Friday consternation

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Garfield, 3/21/25

Not sure if the implication here is that flies go into some kind of suspended animation over the winter upon being frozen then reawaken in the spring (only to be eaten by spiders), or if this particular spider has been stashing fly corpses outside all winter and can now enjoy eating them after the spring thaw. Either one is honestly pretty distasteful, and also scientifically inaccurate!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/21/25

Remember, while Tater is the Smifs’ biological child, Jughaid is their nephew, which makes it all the more disturbing that he refers to the family mule as “Aunt Sukey.” Are we to understand that he considers Sukey to be a sibling to one of his caregivers? Or, worse, do Sukey, Snuffy, and Loweezy constitute a throuple?

Curtis, 3/21/25

I’m sorry, Greg, but your tween son asking to use your credit card to buy an umbrella as a gift for his wealthy crush is a perfectly insane scenario! What child would even think of such a thing? The fact that it’s an expensive fancy English umbrella is the least of what’s going on here! I declare this whole situation to be not very reasonable at all, actually.

178

Romantic troubles

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The Phantom, 3/20/25

The Phantom, it is my task to occasionally remind you, is actually a 22-generation long chain of fathers and sons who each take the role of the Ghost Who Walks in turn, who arrived in southern Africa from Europe back in [waves hands vaguely] the pirate era, and who have perpetuated themselves by continually sending away for European or European-descended brides. But one of the very long- and slow-running ongoing storylines in the strip is about how the current Phantom’s son Kit will probably be the first to break this chain of racial purity. He’s not going to marry one of the Bangallans that his family has lived among for centuries — let’s not go nuts — but will probably end up either with the local girl who’s mooning over him as he studies Phantom stuff (?) at a monastery in the Himalayas, or with Kadia Sahara, born the daughter of one of the Phantom’s longtime nemeses but now a foster daughter of the weird Walker clan. Anyway, the thing I like most about today’s strip is that container ship cruising by in the background as Kit’s sister Heloise, a Kadia partisan, boasts to her mother (via some kind of bespoke video messaging app, the screen branded with the Phantom’s famous skull mark) about the beach-based meet-cute she’s just arranged. The huge vessel reminds us that, despite all these superheroic breeding machinations, the quiet miracle of global commerce soldiers on.

Mary Worth, 3/20/25

Check out the contemplative way Dawn is regarding that apple in the second panel. Sure, she missed her musical duets with her dad while he was away; but now that she’s eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she realizes that inflicting Weston karaoke stylings on an innocent and unsuspecting public is wrong, and must be stopped for the good of mankind.

Pluggers, 3/20/25

Hi is experiencing a plugger-like loss of sex drive in middle age, but as his huge grin in panel two makes clear, he’s not mad about it at all! Remember when he was younger and got distracted by erotic feelings all the time? That ate up valuable time in which he could’ve been working on improving his short game! Thank god those days are behind him.

177

Are there tongues involved? Guess we’ll never know, thanks to the clipboard

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Luann, 3/19/25

Looks like Luann’s 40th anniversary celebration is going to roll on all week, or maybe for the rest of the month, who even knows at this point, but today anyway real Luann heads are urged see the Luann 40th vid at LuannFan dot com, your source for Luann content on the World Wide Web. Do you want to watch some Luann vids? Huh? Do you want to watch Luann and some guy named “Phil” or whatever smooch chastely behind a clipboard while Tiffany watches them and cracks wise? Do you? Do you want to watch that? Are you a sick freak and that’s the sort of thing that gets you off? Well I guess you should go on over to LuannFan dot com, then, but don’t say you weren’t warned.

Andy Capp, 3/19/25

I of course rely on Andy Capp for all my up-to-the-minute information about British culture, so I’m intrigued to learn that that accursèd island’s most hardened criminals have given up on their former pursuits — knifecrime or ASBOs or what have you — and have instead embraced pub trivia fraud. Truly Charles III’s depraved dominion never rests when it comes to developing new forms of malice!

Dennis the Menace, 3/19/25

I genuinely love the absolutely blank expressions Dennis and Margaret are giving Mr. Wilson here. Sorry, George, that insult absolutely did not land, you should probably workshop it some more. Good thing you’ve got nothing but time on your hands!