The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Comment of the Week

Well, I must admit, I have never seen 'yikes' used in a cartoon that conveys so exactly and accurately the reader's impression of the panel in which it occurs. I mean, yikes.

—Chance
Comments are closed

Time is a flat circle

Post Content

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?”

Comments are closed

Online love

Post Content

Mary Worth, 6/2/19

Oh man, I take back what I said yesterday about this strip being stuck in a holding pattern. Because now Estelle is going to be smart. She knows how to play the game. She knows how to lull the lonely into a false sense of intimacy that can be easily exploited. She knows she’s not getting her $10,000 back from “Arther,” but she’s definitely going to get $10,000 from somewhere.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/19

Time to add cybersex to the long, long list of things that the Funky Winkerbean crew doesn’t understand and can’t do right!

Comments are closed

Soapy Saturday

Post Content

Mark Trail, 6/1/19

Many years ago, Mark Trail provided us with a perfect, beautiful sentence: “You stole a friend of mine’s pet bear!” Today, we have what I think is a new contender in the contest to be the “cellar door” of America’s #1 outdoors adventure comic: “By the way, Mark, wasn’t it you who urged caution before we got too excited about the possibility of finding the vanishing mine!?” Feel free to use this sentence yourself in an appropriate scenario — for instance, when one of your friends or acquaintances gets real enthusiastic over some exciting possibility (the discovery of a vanishing mine, say) that relatively recently they had been skeptical about, perhaps even urging others not to get to excited about the prospect.

Mary Worth, 6/1/19

We last checked in with the sad tale of Estelle eleven days ago, and, uh, I regret to inform you that literally nothing has happened since, other than Terry Bryson turning Estelle on to some dumb federal cybercrime website that will definitely, 100%, not help Estelle get her $10,000 or her ability to trust back. The rhythms of this strip being what they are, if this plot were going to wrap up this week we’d be getting some kind of closure today, but apparently not! Apparently this is just going to keep happening. And it’s possible that something interesting will transpire next week, but it’s also possible that Mary Worth just stalled, and we’re just going to keep seeing Estelle sad and Libby and Mary comforting her, forever. Has … has anyone tried turning Mary Worth off and turning it back on?