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Mary Worth, 10/27/18

An act of providence? An act of providence? Mary, there wasn’t some crazy series of coincidences guided by a divine hand that led Mr. Wynter to this sad pup. You were the one who tricked him out of the apartment by claiming you had car problems and then drove directly to the animal shelter. This is as close to an open confession we’ve gotten of how we’ve long suspected Mary sees herself: as a direct instrument of God’s will on Earth, or perhaps even as a Deity in her own right.

Dick Tracy, 10/27/18

I apologize for my premature complaints about the realism in this story line. While it’s of course wholly improbable that newspaper syndicates would roll out, with great fanfare and expenditure of resources, a comic strip about two obscure actors from several generations ago, it’s significantly more likely that if a cartoonist contacted various newspapers and said “Say, would you like to run a comic strip I’m drawing about two obscure actors from several generations ago? You don’t have to pay me — in fact, the situation is quite the opposite, thanks to a trust fund that’s been earning investment income for decades and was set aside for this very purpose,” they’d at least hear the guy out.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/18

If this strip ran on a Monday, it would be the setup for a week’s worth of jokes about Lukey’s beefy, amiable cousin Moose, who might have been pulled from the 99 years of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith archives or might’ve just been made up today to be mined for laughs, who can say! But it’s not Monday. It’s Saturday. Moose is here because the best this strip could do for a joke today was “What if Snuffy thought Lukey was talking about an animal, but in fact it was a person who had the same name as an animal, or possibly a it’s nickname given to him because of his large stature,” and I honestly think that’s pretty sad.

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Hello everybody! This is your monthly reminder that if you’re in LA, you should always come to my beloved comedy show, The Internet Read Aloud, on the first Friday of every month month, which this coming month is on November 2nd! I’ve been granted an extra half hour in my theater time slot, which means I can now pack in more funny people serving up more World Wide Web-themed laffs!

You want a Facebook event? Here’s a darn Facebook event! See you there!

Meanwhile, here, you can see the week’s top comment!

“Roasted brussels sprouts have actually become a popular food item in hipster bars, so in addition to being bullied, that little sprout is likely to be chewed up by some guy with a fedora and a web series.” –Jenna

And the very hilarious runners up!

“Kingpin reads the throwaway panels.” –JJ48

“Look at that George Wilson, showing off with his fancy two-story house and his solid gold garbage cans! I’m glad he’s in a loveless marriage!” –Joe Blevins

“The expression on Jenny’s face tells me that she’s looking at this morning’s schedule and just realized how much coffee she’s had.” –pugfuggly

“Happy fish being scarfing worms from the dock … terrified fish carried off by a gull … fish skeleton resting in a puddle … Slylock Fox is a Renaissance allegorical painting, except for cartoon fish.” –matt w

“I feel that we need to ask just what that crab thinks it is doing pulling up Max’s tail with one claw and gesturing suggestively with the other. #MaxToo” –Dmsilev

“I choose to believe that is Miss Kandikane’s deformed tongue, and will not be dissuaded by any argument.” –RexDartEskimoPi, on Twitter

“Looks like Dick will finally learn where babies come from. If his health teacher were alive today instead of a bullet riddled corpse buried coincidentally when Dick was a student in middle school, he’d be proud.” –Foodar

“The silhouette of the bus driver in Crankshaft has horns, and he’s driving Bus 0013. This is Crankshaft’s ironic afterlife, a Sisyphean torture of trying to drive up Mockaman’s Hill. It’s right there in the name — Mock A Man Hill — the demons mock Crankshaft by letting him nearly crest the hill before the bus slides right back to the bottom. The children get hungrier and louder in the back because they just want to get home. Crankshaft’s hands grow tired on the wheel, his feet split from the effort of pushing the accelerator. The top of Mockaman’s Hill is in sight and the wheels start to scream like the children and the bus slides all the way back to the bottom and the children in the back get hungrier and louder because they just want to get home and he guns the engine again, the squeal of fraying belts sounds like the cacophonous laughter of demons.” –Voshkod

“You can just see the wheels spinning in Mary’s mind: ‘So maybe I can get Saul to be mentally broken and completely submissive, and then be ready to open up, just by confining him in a cage for a year? I’ll have Carlos Alora go buy some wire, today!’” –seismic-2

“These kids range in age from about 4 to 6. Should they really be the ones responsible for fighting bullying? Where are the adults? The cops? The PTA? The older retired guy who was probably in the military at some time? In any normal community, violence against kindergarteners would be considered a serious problem. But happy unity day, everyone!” –BigTed

“Oh, man, are we going to find out that the nonstop promises to ‘take care of those kids’ means these guys are running some kind of artifact-themed daycare operation?” –Uncle Lumpy

“I’m hung up on the fact whoever is talking (Snuffy or Loweezy) correctly makes the grammatical distinction between ‘yore’ and ‘yo’re.’” –Ignatz

“That’s what I always say during sex: ‘Maybe you can get out at the other end!‘ Confuses the hell out of my boyfriends, and what’s worse, not one of them has managed to do it.” –made of wince

“It’s butter. Handful-sized lumps of butter. A desperate attempt to shore up Vitamin D deposits before the dark season sets in. Yep, it’s butter three times a day ’til ol’ Bessie stops givin’.” –Hopester

“There’s no explanation for why the Wilsons have taken Dennis out to the countryside so I’ll assume the obvious. Since there’s aerial surveillance in that area, George and Martha should dig the unmarked grave underneath that tree.” –nescio

“Rusty won’t fall for it. He knows he has no dad.” –Naked Bunny with a Whip

“I’ve never seen a newspaper comic where the plucky kid heroes are saved by the villain’s strabismus, but I’m certainly open to new adventures.” –pastordan

Thanks to everyone who became a Comics Curmudgeon Supporter to get an banner-ad-free site, put some scratch in my tip jar, or backed me on Patreon!. And we need to give a big shout-out to our advertisers:

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Mark Trail, 10/26/18

[dramatic music sting] SHOCKING TWIST! But how can this be? Extremely Cool Motorcycle Guy has LONG HAIR and a MUSTACHE and STUBBLE??? How could such a ruffian be an ally of Mark Trail? I certainly hope that once we learn that the faction of Jose and Cool Motorcycle Guy was really being run by Mark from behind the scenes all along, and that Mark was happily using Rusty and Mara as bait to catch the artifact-nappers, our friend pulls off his wig and wipes off the fake facial hair to reveal the clean-shaven, crew-cut hero beneath the surface.

Dick Tracy, 10/26/18

How can we tell that Dick Tracy takes place in a heightened, parallel world, similar in some ways to our own but fundamentally different from it? Well, one clue is that Dick Tracy and the Neo-Chicago Major Crimes Unit routinely kill suspects without due process and face no consequences for doing so some syndicated newspaper cartoonist launching a strip about a forgotten pair of movie heroes from fifty years ago is “dominating the entertainment news today.”

Dennis the Menace, 10/26/18

The weirdest part of this panel is the word “countryside?” Like, that’s not a huge plane, but it looks to be a twin-engine commuter jet, probably carrying at least 75 people, and while those planes often fly to airports that serve smaller cities, you’re not going to land it on some dirt airstrip in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I guess the real menace here is that Dennis has slowly wormed his way into Mr. Wilson’s trust, until he gets the point of opening up with his innermost hopes and dreams, at which point his wife can belittle and humiliate him.