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Six Chix, 7/23/19

Look, folks: I make fun of Six Chix quite a bit here, but the truth is, not everything is for everyone, you know? These strips aren’t really written with me in mind, and that’s OK! They’re for people who are maybe a little older, who maybe have little less “edgy” sensibility than I do. Suburban moms who just want to open the paper and laugh at life’s little foibles, to see a joke then can relate to. Who among us hasn’t run into a few problems with short-term memory as they age, right? Who among us hasn’t had long stretches of the day that they can’t remember, that they can’t account for, but feel a gnawing sense that something horrible happened in those missing hours? Haven’t we all had “one of those days,” where you come to, not sure whether it’s “wine o’clock” or even what day or time of year it is, covered in blood, so much blood, you’d think there’d be a body here with all this blood, but it’s nowhere to be found? Maybe the body’s in the closet. Is there more blood around the closet? It’s so hard to tell. The blood is everywhere.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/23/19

You might think it cruel that Snuffy is laughing at his nephew for trying and failing spectacularly to bake himself a tasty dessert. In fact, he’s laughing that anyone — especially anyone who lives with him — would assume he owns anything as useful and potentially economically productive as a hammer and chisel.

Sam and Silo, 7/23/19

Wow, I have to admit that I haven’t been keeping up with the latest currents in Roman Catholic theology, but I’m pretty surprised they’ve gone from Vatican II to “humanity is an infestation of vermin too powerful for even God to kill” in less than sixty years.

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Mark Trail, 7/22/19

Wow, hmm, Mark Trail sure has some … interesting and nuanced ideas about property rights! Like, it’s bad to hold people at gunpoint in order to get access to gold mines, but it’s totally ok to plunder treasure chests despite the presence of locks that clearly indicate that those chests are private? Anyway, I think it’s particularly cruel of Mark to theatrically break open this lock with a stone and then tell Doc “this is your show.”

Shoe, 7/22/19

There’s definitely an argument to be made that, especially in an age of extremely focused and specific streaming platforms, Saturday Night Live has become bland, middle-of-the-road entertainment. I’m just not sure that message is best delivered by [checks note] the legacy newspaper comic strip Shoe.

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The Phantom, 7/21/19

So the Phantom is the middle of a Sunday plot about a mountain kingdom that’s taken Lean In feminism to its ultimate conclusion, which is that it’s a brutal, violent dictatorship but, like, run by women, you see. (It’s also right next to Bangalla, in Africa, and yet seems entirely populated by white people, hmm.) Anyway, today’s strip made me laugh and laugh, as our hero, significantly underestimating these Amazonians, just wanders in completely non-stealthily, frees their prisoner, and is like “Rule of law, ladies, you ever heard of it?” and then just gets immediately stabbed in the chest.

Dick Tracy 7/21/19

Welp, looks like Dick Tracy wasn’t successfully gunned down after all! I really like the helpful graphic the local news has chosen to accompany this story. “Usually it’s best to aim for center mass when trying to take someone down. But if you’ve got a scope and suspect your target might be wearing a Kevlar vest, why not aim for the head?”

Hagar the Horrible, 7/21/19

TIRED: Lucky Eddie wants to fuck a fish

WIRED: Lucky Eddie wants to be a fish