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Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/5/19

Just about every animator and cartoonist eventually dabbles with a “Duck Amuck“-style plot where the characters grapple with the nature of their own reality. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is a particularly disturbing take, though, with Mother Goose going bug-eyed with panic as she realizes she’s dissolved her beloved dog’s body into nothingness. Only his eyes remain, hanging in mid-air, leading to an important question: are eyes the soul of a cartoon character? Makes you think!

Shoe, 6/5/19

I’m extremely put off by the way Shoe is making direct eye contact with the reader in the second panel, as if to say, “Get it? I, Shoe, the title character in this comic strip, walk around naked at all times, and maybe you’ve been reading this strip for years and just assumed it’s a weird visual quirk that everyone involved in the strip’s production has long forgotten about, but: nope! I’m naked, other characters in this strip wear clothes, I’m violating every in-universe social norm, but they can’t stop me. Nobody can stop me. It’s now official Shoe canon that I’m a sick pervert bird-man who likes making everyone feel uncomfortable, because that’s how I get off.”

Gasoline Alley, 6/5/19

Please sign my change dot org petition to require that every Gasoline Alley strip end with one of the characters saying “Huh?”, thus assuring the reader that they aren’t meant to really understand anything that anybody is saying.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/5/19

WELP HERE IT IS

BARNEY GOOGLE HAS STUMBLED INTO CAMP SWAMPY

IT’S THE COMICS CROSSOVER EVENT THAT NOBODY WANTED OR ASKED FOR BUT WE’RE GONNA GET IT ANYWAY, BY GOD

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Dick Tracy, 6/4/19

Well, it turns out the reason Little Orphan Annie is returning to Dick Tracy is because Daddy Warbucks’s second wife gave some testimony in a criminal case years ago, but the cops lost it (?) and now they need to talk to her again, but she’s disappeared and Daddy Warbucks doesn’t want to talk about her! Today we learn that this is probably because … he murdered her? On a boat? And yeah, the authorities should have investigated, but really, “rich, politically connected guy kills his wife in international waters” just isn’t a high-reward prosecution, honestly, which is why we’re only bringing it up now that we have a gangster with a facial deformity and corresponding nickname we need to put away.

Crankshaft, 6/4/19

If you ever need evidence that the Funkyverse is where joy goes to die, you could just present panel one of today’s Crankshaft, in which Pam and Jeff brace themselves for what seems like it’s going to be a happy announcement from their son and his girlfriend in their own particular way, which for Pam is “staring wide-eyed in absolute panic” and for Jeff is “crossing arms defiantly and glowering with contempt.”

Funky Winkerbean, 6/4/19

Of course, if that’s too subtle, you could also just point out today’s Funky Winkerbean, in which a little boy threatens to vomit on his grandmother.

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Slylock Fox, 6/3/19

Since the early days of this blog, I have cruelly mocked legacy strips’ tendency to shamelessly recycle content. So perhaps it is a fitting comeuppance that I, having in nearly fifteen years of blogging become something of a legacy feature myself, sometimes get sucked into the repeats, compelled to comment on the same recycled strip with variations on the same joke! Sometimes I catch myself and sometimes I don’t, but I suppose it makes sense that the same strips would draw me in, since they’re presumably activating the same parts of my comics-mocking brain. Still, it’s I enjoy contemplating the differences in how I react to the same strip, to try to understand how my own mind has changed over the years. For instance, back in 2011, I found it sad that Slylock could only correct some physics facts as this poor stork-lady’s business collapsed around her. Today, I’m reading this and thinking — did she call the cops because her candles were melting? Couldn’t she get ahold of her landlord, or, like, an HVAC repair person? Does she run a candle store and somehow not have an HVAC repair person on retainer? She’s taking up valuable police time! Slylock and Max could be out there finding Slick Smitty guilty of something that isn’t even a crime rather than coming up with ways to save this careless merchant’s inventory! It makes me sick.

Hi and Lois, 6/3/19

Wow, Hi and Lois looked genuinely shattered that their daughter is doing a perfectly normal, if irritating, baby thing! “Oh, Hi! We raised our kids in stultifying suburbia specifically so that they’d respect the sanctity of private property from birth. And we failed! She’s an anarchist, Hi, a damn anarchist. What have we done?”