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Beetle Bailey, 5/1/20

What’s your favorite incredibly wrong-headed aspect of this strip? For many, it will be the misguided implication that the cultural triumph of “nerd”-focused media like superhero franchises has upended society’s assessment of what is and isn’t sexually desirable. But I personally am a big fan of Killer wearing a v-neck sweater that somehow also has a shirt pocket on it.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/20

Speaking of the triumph of nerd-focused media, the Chinese market’s appetite for action flicks has definitely distorted the American film industry’s incentives in all sorts of troubling ways, but if that results in the new, gritty and realistic version of Lisa’s Story never getting off the ground, I for one am willing to forgive a lot.

Crock, 5/1/20

You know, sometimes you can actually forget that Crock is about a sadistic military officer who rules his colonial outpost as an unaccountable dictator, but then you get to a strip like today, when he forces one of his least favorite soldiers to eat a bowl full of rat meat.

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Mary Worth, 4/30/20

Ha ha, well isn’t this … incredibly convenient, for everybody! Remember back a few months ago, when Hugo was going to leave town and Dawn was devastated, just devastated, and, after feigning nonchalance, Hugo ended up feeling just as strongly about her, running back from the airport to be with her and deciding to give a long-distance relationship a shot? Welp, it seems that all was based on a wild misunderstanding of their own emotions: turns out they were just horny, and now that they’ve found more convenient people to do sex on, they can cheerfully move forward with their separate lives, with no hard feelings or tough questions like “Hey, wait, if I hadn’t said anything, when were you planning on telling me about this chick in Paris?”

Hi and Lois, 4/30/20

Big news: thanks to advanced DNA analysis, police have arrested a suspect in the so-called Chomping Murders, and it’s Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. This is of course shocking to all his young fans, but the important thing is that this menace is now behind bars, and the families of the victims will begin to find closure.

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Gil Thorp, 4/29/20

The current Gil Thorp baseball storyline has been almost as boring as the recently concluded Gil Thorp basketball storyline — Mike Knappe, a baseball player known as “the Mayor,” is often running late and makes weird breakfast-on-the-go combos and gives people nicknames and so far that’s been about it? — but today we have an embarrassment of riches. First off, we have NUTSO brand peanut butter; in contrast with Planters’ Mr. Peanut, which is a cheerfully foppish business success, the NUTSO mascot is an ordinary peanut that knows it’s about to be ground up into a delicious paste, and is spending its last conscious moments screaming in terror. Side note: wasn’t there some other zany peanut-snack brand in a this strip that we all had funs with a few years back? Like, called NUTZ or something like that? I’ve been spending way too much time Googling increasingly baroque variations on “nuts” and Gil Thorp and it’s killing me that I can’t remember! (UPDATE: Thank you to faithful reader Usacotts: It was NUT BOY!)

But [record scratch] all this zaniness is about to come to an end as Mike and his pals start diving into the oeuvre of Flannery O’Connor. Can “the Mayor”‘s good cheer and fundamental lack of self-reflection stand up in the face of Wise Blood’s dark musings on free will and the inescapable nature of religious belief?

Gasoline Alley, 4/29/20

TIRED: Tricking teenagers into performing manual farm labour without pay
WIRED: Tying farmers to their profession from birth to death, therefore creating a new class of feudal serfs