Post Content

Six Chix, 3/19/20

I think the joke here is that the mummy is very bad at cooking because he … doesn’t have … eyes? Like, can mummies not see, in the classic horror-movie mummy canon? As near as I can tell, mummies’ traditional powers involve shuffling forward very slowly and moaning, so the fact that they can’t see anything makes them even less scary. Anyway, if I were doing this comic, I’d make the joke about how the mummy is covered with highly flammable linen cloth, preserved over the centuries by the bone-dry Egyptian desert, which would have hilarious results next to a stove’s heating elements, but I guess that’s why I’ve always been deemed “too edgy” for the newspaper funny pages.

Dick Tracy, 3/19/20

DICK TRACY UPDATE: Shaky (remember him?) had his big meetup with the Tracys and ended up getting shot in the shoulder, and now he’s laying low at some criminal safehouse for which he had the keys, except it also happens to be where crime-family-adjacent characters Ugly Crystal and her bio-dad (remember them?) are living. Anyway, this has all been funny because Shaky has been trying to “play it cool” despite slowly bleeding out from his bullet wound, and while it isn’t quite as theatrically awful a death as you would’ve seen in the Dick Locher years of this strip, watching his agony mount has been pretty impressively grim, I’ll say that.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/19/20

Wait, do all the characters in Mother Goose and Grimm live in the Land of Oz? It would explain all the talking animals, I’ll say that much.

Post Content

Gasoline Alley, 3/18/20

One of Gasoline Alley’s most prominent characters is a World War I veteran, so it’s a strip that’s admittedly somewhat untethered from our timeline, but I was still prompted by this strip to look up when the international whaling ban went into effect and was surprised to learn it was 1986 — much more recently than I expected! So it’s not too unrealistic for Baleen to have worked on a commercial whaling ship in her youth, or maybe even on the Icelandic, Norwegian, or Japanese ships that continue the practice despite the ban. The important thing is that “glabella” is like Proust’s madeleine for her, the mere word immediately evoking the image of firing a bolt of metal between the eyes of some majestic, intelligent, endangered sea beast, shattering its skull and pushing on right into its brain.

Six Chix, 3/18/20

Now, I don’t want to criticize here, because you’re a tiny robin that mastered human speech and that’s pretty impressive, but … it actually sounds like you do care which game he puts on? It sounds like you care quite a bit, honestly!

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/17/20

“Like I said — long story. Pretty boring one, too. I mean, not as boring as the one about how you and your wife had a baby after a moderately difficult pregnancy. Hoo boy, was that a stinker! So, what have you been up to? No, don’t tell me, I’m sure it’s not interesting.”

Crankshaft, 3/17/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because … Lillian forgot the name of the guy who was planning on interviewing her for his podcast? That’s it? That’s the entire joke of this strip? Ha … ha?

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/17/20

Hey, everything’s going crazy, the world is ending, and you know what? Why not put some diaper fetish content in your nationally syndicated newspaper comic? Really, why not! GOD IS DEAD, DO AS THOU WILT