Comment of the Week

After all the other 'Ed doing things nobody visiting NYC would' entries, I have to acknowledge today's strip for verisimilitude: Only a tourist would go to Washington Square Park to buy pot.

ValdVin

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Folks, do not forget: TOMORROW on December 5th, at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern, yet another Zoom version of my beloved comedy show, The Internet Read Aloud, is happening! Special ZOOMSUKKAH edition! Featuring me, Katrina Davis, Jupiter Baudot, Laurie Bolewitz, and Brian Bahe!

Here is the Zoom link, which will let you into the show at the appointed time, and here is the Facebook event, if you find those useful for your event record-keeping!

But for now … it’s COTW time:

“Leonard, you’re the quarterback. Now move slightly to your right so I’ll be pointing directly at you, we wanna see team players here.” –Dan

And time for the runners up!

“Blondie’s motionless resignation as Dagwood explicitly leaves the marital bed to have sex with a roast turkey is the most chilling thing on a comics page that also includes a lovingly detailed closeup of a noose. Something something 2020.” –Applemask

“So while Shoe can’t ever seem to remember that it features birds, the artist of Mother Goose and Grimm has sufficient ornithological awareness to show a goose throwing up stones from her crop in fear. Well done!” –Voshkod

“Look Tommy, completing one task at work is not impressive and it’s definitely not evidence that you’re sober. I complete several work tasks every day, and I’ve been drunk since March.” –Rosstifer

“No time to talk, Babe, I’ve got three more displays I want to get up before lunchtime, or maybe I’ll just skip lunch, great ideas aren’t just going to just all of the sudden materialize into reality, am I right, ha-ha, I mean, listen to this, see if it doesn’t blow your mind: instead of putting the soup cans on the shelf vertically, the way they’ve been displayed since, I don’t know, since the Druids (wouldn’t that be cool, Druid Soup?), we put them on the shelf horizontally, with some sort of rack for them to roll on, I think I can put something together, I saw some welding equipment out back. Now, if I was addicted, I wouldn’t be able to ride the heartbeat of the universe this way, would I?” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“So uh, Tommy. Do you think you would be able to do your job as well if you had, say, chlamydia?” –pastordan

What a tableaux Hi and Lois has given us today. Whole family in a hideous living room, staring in wonder that someone owned that many books, contemptuous that someone might want to know something that isn’t on Facebook and looking to assure the rest of the family that they didn’t waste any money on books and that they certainly will never actually READ them. After all, that encyclopedia is so old it probably doesn’t even have an entry on the latest season of The Masked Singer. The Last Gasp of the American Mind, by Hi and Lois.” –jerp jump

“Ooh, Buck’s got the ’rona! He’s already lost his sense of taste — just look at that shirt!’ –Uncle Lumpy

“I love that the entire division is so incompetent that they just drove their tanks into an open field to face each other and then couldn’t figure out what to do next. They’ve been sitting there all day, eyeing each other and occasionally checking their field manuals.” –pugfuggly

“Also, the diner is a tree. That’s why you can see the moon even though the rest of the drawing looks like it takes place inside. I don’t know where the door came from, I’ve never seen it before. We really trashed decades of world-building, for this joke?” –matt w

“Buck’s son (what was his name? Dingleberry? Skidmark? something like that) sees Buck sprawled on a couch, hands behind his head, glasses pushed up to his forehead, and he can’t figure out that this is a nap. ‘What are you up to, Dad?’ he says, like an idiot. I hate this kid for so many reasons, not least of which is that he emphasizes the word ‘you’ in that question, as if he’s making an accusation.” –Joe Blevins

“I’m surprised that Westview High has moved on from blackboards. Doesn’t chalk dust cause cancer?” –Midtown

“Yes, drugs never enhance performance and Tommy will be the first clean person on the US Olympic Grocery Store Display Team.” –Mikey

“Today, we learn that the mouth-on-the-side-of-the-face style of comic-strip drawing doesn’t work when a character has a goatee. I mean, it’s weird enough that there are still Sears employees left — the last thing we need is to see his freaky, hairy cheek-hole.” –BigTed

“Toilet paper is still relevant, but less scarce for those of us who get Six Chix in a print newspaper.” –Where’s Rocky

“What I appreciate about Gil Thorp is that it takes sports, something I normally find boring, and makes them tediously, painfully, mind-numbingly dull.” –Tabby Lavalamp

‘Oof!’ The time-honored sound of a Yeti releasing a giant spider. You can’t miss with the classics.” –Pozzo

“Dick might not get to shoot the villain this time, but between that solid steel door and his godawful trigger discipline there’s a strong chance he’ll at least get to negligently kill Sam with a ricochet.” –jroggs

“WAAAAIIIIIITAMINUTE. Waitwaitwaitwaitwait. How are we supposed to chuckle at the backwoods rubes of Snuffy Smith, mired in their lives of inescapable, soul-crushing poverty, when they can just GET IN A CAR and GO DANCING IN THE BIG CITY ANYTIME THEY WANT? This is like finding out that Gilligan and Skipper could just up and leave the island whenever they felt like it! Or that the last line of No Exit is really ‘Oh, look, gang, there’s the exit!’ Oof. I’m gonna need some corn squeezins to deal with the implications of this.” –Doctor Moreau

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/4/20

For those of you who don’t know the history (and really, why would you), this comic strip started out as Barney Google, in 1919, and the titular character was a sharp city slicker, but then the strip aimed to cash in on the Depression-era vogue for hillbilly humor already being exploited by Li’l Abner, so Barney went and visited his pal Snuffy Smith in Hootin’ Holler, who by the 1950s had become the strip’s main character, with increasingly infrequent visits from Barney Google. The current creative team brought back Barney in 2012 in his first appearance in 15 years, and he’s appeared intermittently since, but this week he’s actually taken Barney and company back with him to the city, which raises the question: we all know that this strip’s main setting is a grotesque, distorted caricature of rural life, but what will its take on urbanity be? Well, it appears to be people dancing in brightly lit clubs with floor-to-ceiling windows that make them visible from outside, where various draft animals rear about grotesquely on dirt streets, so, in other words: accurate.

Dick Tracy, 12/4/20

Meanwhile, in Dick Tracy, another decades-old strip whose depiction of everyday life is composed of multiple layers of continually updated nostalgia, one of our villains has terribly injured himself in a sewer while the other is about to be killed by his own giant spider, which he keeps captive for venom-milking purposes. How sad is Dick going to be that he doesn’t get to shoot anybody? Maybe he’ll shoot the spider, but his heart won’t really be in it.

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Six Chix, 12/3/20

Today’s Six Chix is a pretty compelling piece of evidence for the proposition that at least one of the Chix is a space alien attempting to use the medium of comic strips to reason out from a few pieces of data what life on earth is like. Clearly this being got word that something called “toilet paper” was relevant a few months ago. Is it still “in the conversation” today? Do humans still need to remove poop from their buttholes, or have they moved past that? This roll of toilet paper, asking for a friend (a space alien attempting to use the medium of comic strips to reason out from a few pieces of data what life on earth is like), would really like to know!

Gil Thorp, 12/3/20

So it turns out that Corina’s conflict-resolution plan for solving Milford’s quarterback controversy was to bring the two feuding players together and have them hash out their problems in an open, honest discussion. Too bad she didn’t do it a week ago, because Gil has his own solution to the problem: benching both of them and throwing in the third-string quarterback to haplessly flail around in some dumb, wacky old-timey formation that almost certainly will lose Milford most of its remaining games but might at least spawn a viral TikTok or something.

Marvin, 12/3/20

Every once in a while I feel kind of bad that one of my recurring themes on this 16-year-old blog that is essentially my life’s defining project is, “Gross, this comic strip about a baby makes jokes about poop constantly,” and I wonder if I lean too far into it, but you know what? Today’s strip is about the title character’s dad’s desire to use a leaf blower to spray dog shit everywhere, including, presumably, all over the side of his house. So I don’t feel bad anymore, or at least not about that!