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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

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Shoe, 4/28/20

Was Cats a box-office failure? Very much so. In fact, it’s one of the most prominent movie flops in recent memory! So it’s actually a good movie to pick for this joke … or it would be, if the joke weren’t about a dog hating it. C’mon, man! Is the joke about how a dog ID’d Cats as a financial failure because he’s a bomb-sniffing dog, or is it about a movie-reviewing dog who hated the movie Cats because he’s a dog who, like all stereotypical dogs, hates cats? YOUR JOKE IS OVERLOADED WITH SIGNIFIERS, damn it!

Crock, 4/28/20

This is comic written by someone who’s heard of books, and seen people on TV interacting with and talking about them, but has never actually read one.

The Lockhorns, 4/28/20

Pretty sure Leroy’s dying? Let’s be honest: it’s a blessing, for everyone concerned.