The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Comments are closed

Monday is for cyber, and murder, and love

Post Content

Alice, 11/4/24

A thing I think about a lot is that the guy who the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory inspired to shoot up Comet Ping-Pong in the aftermath of the 2016 election had gotten home internet only a few weeks before. Imagine going from zero to 2016-election-campaign-level internet madness instantly! You’ve heard vaguely that the “Web” is the best way to learn about news and current events, finally get hooked up, and the first thing you discover is that there’s a cabal of pedophiles operating out of a pizza place in D.C. Anyway, it’s eight years later and the internet has gotten a lot worse, so, I’m just going to say it: I’m worried about Alice.

Dick Tracy, 11/4/24

I have a stepbrother who used to be a Marine and is recently retired from the Border Patrol, and that’s a great way to hear all the jokes that different kinds of troops and/or cops tell about each other (he once referred to the Highway Patrol as “AAA with a badge,” for instance). This Dick Tracy storyline started with a crazy (?) guy getting arrested by the Neo-Chicago Transit Authority (T.A.) for jumping a turnstyle, showing a fake (?) employee ID from the mysterious “Totten Organization,” and then he got murdered in the bathroom of the T.A. jail, so I’m hoping to see some similar inter-agency snark upcoming. I feel like we’re off to a good start here with the Chief telling Dick, “Oh yeah, some guy got arrested for an extremely minor crime and then died in jail, right under the T.A. cops’ noses … but wait, this time there’s something screwy about that scenario.”

Mary Worth, 11/4/24

Sometimes with visual art, it’s an open question whether you’re supposed to interpret what you’re seeing literally, or just understand that the people and items you can see have been arranged as you see them in order to emphasize their importance and relevance. Like, did Dr. Ed and Estelle really set up an end table for their three pets to sit on and bark/meow approvingly while they toast one another in front of their five friends and Wilbur? Or are they “really” on the floor, but we’ve only got two panels and surely you don’t want us to ditch the establishing shot or draw anybody’s feet?

Comments are closed

Bench II: Return to the Bench

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 11/3/24

Every once in a while, you do have to wonder how much anyone at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC knows about the actual U.S. military and how it works. Like, do you think that they’re vaguely aware that’s there’s a football team called “Army,” but don’t know that it’s the college team fielded by the U.S. Military Academy and assume instead that its players are just, like, enlisted men chosen at random? Anyway, today our Camp Swampy heroes are playing against a team [squints at helmets] comprised of literal pirates, or maybe representing Death itself.

Family Circus, 11/3/24

Say what you will about today’s Tiktok-addled children, but they would not get distracted from a wholesome family game by some dumb hobo clown on TV and then sit there watching him enraptured for a full minute. Kids simply don’t have that kind of attention span anymore.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/3/24

Noooo, Wanda, be careful, Truck is trying to pull you into his bench sitting based lifestyle, don’t fall for it

Comments are closed

Century Boulevard … we love it

Post Content

Blondie, 11/2/24

The Blondie creative team is usually very locked in to whatever big calendar full of real and fake holidays that’s clearly hanging up in the writer’s room, so today’s misstep is actually kind of surprising to me. Sure, it was possible, weeks ago when this strip was written, that game six of the World Series might’ve been played on November 1, but it was also possible that one of the teams would wrap it up in five games or less, as one of them in fact did (go Dodgers!). Anyway, I get why you’d risk it though, the glaring error is absolutely worth it to deliver this tight, flawless joke about a mailman streaming the baseball game from the night before, so his trainee has to talk to one of the mail route customers, like the regular guy usually does, about something that we don’t need to bother explaining, you know, the usual customer-mailman conversations we all know and love and have every day.

Marvin, 11/2/24

Of the weird holdover jokes from an entirely different era of gender relations that routinely pop up in newspaper comics, I have to say that “haha, it’s women’s job to cook but this particular woman is really bad at it!” are my absolute least favorite. The particular woman in question could be the speaking character’s mother, wife, or (as in this case) daughter, each possibility carrying with it its own specific unpleasant vibe. That said, I do think today’s Marvin is kind of funny because usually you think of “runing your appetite” as something you do with snacking, but Roy is just straight-up eating a whole actual meal here. Like he knows Jenny’s cooking is terrible, he wants no part of it, and he’s just made his own dinner early, because he’s fully self-sufficient.

Beetle Bailey, 11/2/24

Some days I think I’ve left the snickering sexual innuendo I was prone to in this blog’s early days behind, but then I encounter a strip like “Lt. Fuzz decides to horn in on General Halftrack’s threesome,” sigh heavily, and realize I will simply not be able to help myself. Anyway, here’s today’s Beetle Bailey, in which Lt. Fuzz decides to horn in on General Halftrack’s threesome.