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Shoe, 6/8/20

As I’ve said here before, probably the thing I’ll be remembered for the longest is coining the term nephewism for a fictional scenario where a child lives with an uncle or aunt and their parents are neve mentioned, and while I used it first to identify the relationship between Peter Parker and Aunt May and Uncle Ben, it really applies to the Perfesser and Skyler in Shoe even better, as nobody ever made a series of Shoe movies starring Andrew Garfield as Skyler where they tried and largely failed to get people excited about what happened to his parents. Anyhoo, it seems like nephewism is hereditary in the Shoeniverse, as Roz assumes that the Perfesser is talking about his own uncle, who she probably knows as his own closest relative, and she assumes that he’s helping to care for him in his old age. But he’s not. We’ve never seen this uncle in this strip, and the Perfesser clearly never thinks about him much. He’s not his dad, after all. I think you can tell by his heavy-liddle look of despair that he might be starting to realize that someday Skyler will treat him the same way.

Mark Trail, 6/8/20

Folks, Mark has been really casual about Andy going missing and now we know why: he’s hoping to mine #content from the poor dog’s trauma! Mark can brag all he wants about writing being a “good career for me to provide for my family,” but nothing generates revenue like viral clickbait pet stories, so Andy better Incredible Journey it back to Lost Forest real quick.

Slylock Fox, 6/8/20

Wait, none of Count Weirdly’s fucked up inventions are grounded??? Good lord, it’s a miracle he hasn’t burned his castle down!

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So today a lot of comics artists have inserted some symbols into their strips to pay tribute to essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic. And, naturally, there was a range of approaches to this!

Dustin, 6/7/20

You could, for instance, take the Dustin route, where the symbols are explicitly explained in text, and then used in the comic itself to further the cause of recognizing various heroes, sung and unsung!

Baby Blues, 6/7/20

Or you could take the Baby Blues technique, which is to integrate the symbols naturalistically into the comic itself, on the assumption that readers will pick up news stories about this campaign and understand what they’re looking at.

Six Chix, 6/7/20

Or — hear me out — you could do it the Six Chix way, by which I of course mean the most half-assed way imaginable, wedging symbols into a joke that’s already terrible by itself so as to make them fully incomprehensible. What’s the most insultingly placed of the icons here? Lotta people are gonna say the steering wheel at the bottom left corner, held by disembodied human hands, but don’t sleep on the picture (?) of the microscope that the pigeon is wearing (?) on its chest.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/7/20

Funky Winkerbean, of course, can not accomodate any misery that is not Funky Winkerbean, so it will not be acknowledging the coronavirus pandemic nor any of the essential workers ameliorating it, but I did enjoy today’s strip, in which Cayla desperately begs Mason not to try to get inside the mind of a madman, it’s too late for her, but he can still save himself, there’s still time, there’s still time.

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The Lockhorns, 6/6/20

Probably most people reading this blog know that syndicated newspaper strips have to be submitted some time in advance of publication; generally the minimum is four weeks but some prefer to work months in advance. And so it can be a fun game to play: how long ago was this drawn? That especially applies in These Troubled Times, with history happening so quickly. Can you imagine that just a few short months ago, we thought that we’d be enjoying ourselves this summer by heading down to the cineplex to enjoy Scoob! (which was released straight to streaming) or the live-action Little Mermaid (the filming of which was delayed)? I guess in the Lockhornsverse, the COVID-19 pandemic never broke out, possibly because Leroy and Loretta’s powerful rage-radiation has antiviral effects that scientists don’t yet fully understand.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/6/20

Longtime Funkyverse trufans know about Frankie, Darrin’s biological father, who in the original long-ago storyline had a consensual sexual relationship with Lisa that got later retconned to sexual assault. Frankie makes occasional appearances for no real obvious reason beyond causing misery, and Les seemed to think that he had come back and was stalking him, but it turns out it was [comical BOI-OI-OI-OING sound] Mason??? As yet it’s unclear whether he was trying to “go method” by observing Les in his natural habitat so he could really bring Les’s brand of depressing unpleasantness to the screen, or whether he was just planning to murder Les before Les decided to once again tank the movie project that Mason has inexplicably become extremely passionate about.