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Shoe, 11/9/20

One of the whole reasons this blog exists is to make you actually think about the longstanding institution of the newspaper comics and really appreciate how weird they are. Like, take Shoe, which is about bird-people who live in a treetop town, which sounds like a recipe for either gentle whimsy or manic antics, except for the fact that these bird-people are just miserable all the time. Often they’re depressed to the point of near-catatonia but sometimes they can rouse themselves to go out into the world and be merely unreasonably irritable. How long do you think Shoe’s been sitting there, listening in on other people’s conversations, waiting for any possible opportunity to jump in and gratuitously insult Roz, at whose restaurant he eats every day? It can sometimes be hard to parse the sequence of actions in a comic strip, but I’m interpreting the appearance of a stogie in panel two as meaning that he delivered his jibe, then pulled out and lit up a cigar right there in the restaurant, as if to emphasize all the different kinds of asshole he can be.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/9/20

Hey, remember when Harry Dinkle learned he suffered from hearing loss and had to quit as Westview’s band director? Well, he’s apparently nevertheless still teaching music to children, who are ungrateful little brats who would rather dick around on their phone than learn how to play an instrument they hate from a guy who can’t hear very well.

Dennis the Menace, 11/9/20

I truly, sincerely hope that Mr. Wilson is saying this because Dennis is in the middle of his front lawn, shouting about demons in Latin at the top of his lungs.

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/8/20

Welp, I guess Hagar the Horrible is thoroughly cementing Lucky Eddie’s mermaid-focused sexuality into strip canon. In today’s installment, we learn both that Eddie has attempted without success to conform himself to society’s idea of who he should fall in love with (mammals), and also that, no matter how much Hagar’s family and warband have thrown in with the newly arrived Christian religion, they still have to deal with the occasional pagan diety, especially when they fuck said deity’s daughter.

Mark Trail, 11/8/20

Hey look, it’s Jules Rivera’s first Sunday nature strip! It looks great, fits in with the storied tradition of these Sunday strips, and absolutely includes a piss joke.

The Phantom, 11/8/20

The current Sunday Phantom plot features our hero helping out a Bangallan cop who appears to be the one person outside his inner circle who realizes that the “Man-Who-Cannot-Die” bit is obvious flim-flam, and good for him! Today we learn that the Ghost-Who-Walks not only stores the priceless historic heritage of many cultures in his non-temperature-controlled cave, but also hoards the world’s biodiversity on an island optimistically called “Isle of Eden” but where nevertheless I’m reasonably sure a certain amount of endangered-species-on-endangered-species carnivorism goes on.

Beetle Bailey, 11/8/20

I of course have always assumed that due to the weird chronological discontinuities brought about by comic book time, we’re meant to understand that Beetle walked into a recruiting office in 1951, just like he did in the strips that ran in 1951, and has stayed in the military ever since. But today’s strip seems to have updated the timeline a bit, with Beetle and Sarge (?)’s teenagerhood now having taken place in [squints] the ’80s? Sure, let’s say the ’80s. This still presumably makes Beetle the oldest living serving private in the entire U.S. Army, but at least it’s not that improbable that he’s still alive.

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Beetle Bailey, 11/7/20

I guess the joke here is that Sarge is an ape-like brute who took Beetle’s first-panel retort as an invitation to pound him into a pulp in traditional Beetle Bailey fashion. But I’d like to imagine that in fact Sarge took Beetle to a zoo or gorilla sanctuary and threw him into an enclosure to be attacked, or perhaps released a gorilla he keeps captive for just such occasions, because he is a very literal ape-like brute.

Hi and Lois, 11/7/20

Faithful readers of this blog know that I’m extremely on board with Hi and Lois reclaiming Thirsty’s original characterization as a sad, desperate alcoholic. I’m sad that the colorists of today’s strip, apparently unaware of the comics’ rich history of using alcohol-inflamed rhinopehyma as a visual gag, spent all their red-yellow gradient efforts on the fall leaves and not on Thirsty’s cross-hatched nose. Because Hi is trash-talking his neighbor and best (only?) friend well within hearing distance, I assume that Thirsty is fully passed out in that chair.

Pluggers, 11/7/20

I am dying to know the relationship between this strip and the infamous “Rhino-Man Hocks His TV” panel, not least because that appears to be the identical model of television, which was decades out of date even when Rhino-Man hocked it back in 2006. I don’t know if we’re supposed to understand that Dog-Man is superior to Rhino-Man in fixiness, the quality most valued in a plugger after down-home smugness and sexism, or if this is in fact the exact same TV, which the guy at the pawn shop gave Dog-Man at no charge just to free up some space on his shelves.