CSotD: The Return of Friday Funnies!

Pros & Cons (KFS) sets the mood for the day.

Between what’s actually going on and what people are griping about, it’s getting tiresome out there. Maybe Lyndon avoids political talk out of patient privacy and maybe he avoids it because after eight hours, he’s had enough.

But I’m not getting $75 an hour to listen to it, so let’s just have some funnies instead.

 

This Real Life Adventures (AMS) echoes a common misconception because, while everybody has had several months of permission to be a slob, the fact is that, although you can’t easily get to a barber these days, ain’t nobody keeping you out of your own bathroom.

And the same place that sells food sells shaving cream.

Granted, it’s a little political in that among the people who are trying to resurrect the Don Johnson look is that insufferable hipster, Ari Melber, who has not only gone to shaving once a week but is apparently under the impression that all political issues are best addressed with rap lyrics.

Bad enough that he feels compelled to let us know that Some Of His Best Friends Are Hip Hop Artists, but the other night he sidetracked a political conversation because the fellow made a Joker reference and Ari needed to know which Batman film he thought was most relevant.

None of them, you doofus.

Bear in mind that showing up for work unshaven is like when Gym Jordan shows up without his jacket.

The line between “hip” and “arrogant” is thin, but unflattering.

 

Anyway, as the vaccines roll out, we’re about done with all this work-at-home stuff and ready to get back to the cubicle farm.

Rico Schacherl offers this look at things, the joke being that you don’t need a lifeguard because these people are already dead.

Nice thing about retirement is that you feel like you’ve finally wised up, and when you see a feature story about someone still working at 90, your reaction is not “Bless her plucky little heart,” but, “What a slow learner.”

If nothing else, going by AARP’s magazine, she ought to be summiting Aconcagua, not clocking in at the office.

Which is why I don’t get AARP’s magazine: I don’t believe arthritis is a failure of character.

I also don’t believe that anyone of any age should be consigned to a cubicle farm, but I’ve passed the revolution down to Gen Z and I wish them the best of luck.

 

Still, wotthehell, let’s be political for a moment because David Rowe knocked me out of my chair with this milkshake reference to Australian PM Scott Morrison’s response to climate change.

Dull-witted people often complain that a political cartoon “wasn’t funny” when humor is not the goal of political cartoonists. Though sometimes it is.

Aussie and British cartoonists do a truly excellent job of maintaining a sharp sense of ridicule in their work.

Now enough politics. Back to the funnies:

 

Bizarro (KFS) often bases its gags on “This, but also this” mashups, and this one combines two tired themes into a ridiculous fresh one.

Often, the gags here take a moment to sink in, but I think this one is obvious, and the best part is the mental picture you get of what happens next, an element too many strip cartoonists are not content to allow readers to fill in for themselves.

The strength of a single-panel cartoon being that it forces the reader to do a little work.

Which builds character.

 

Also on the topic of building character, young Edison Lee (KFS) is in danger of learning the term “dovetailing,” which can get you kicked out of college.

Aside from not getting caught, the trick is writing a paper that satisfies the requirements of both physics and political science. I suspect the best you could hope for from one paper would be a C in both classes, though an A in one and a D in the other seems more likely.

Trust me. I majored in obtaining C’s.

 

I got both a laugh and some PTSD from this Rhymes With Orange (KFS), in part because, while I was well out of school before such things existed, I took a lot of exasperated sighs from our tech guys at work for having icons and files all over my desktop.

Things were more three-dimensional at one daily, where the maintenance guy was so offended by “clutter” that, as soon as I left, he threw out thousands of dollars worth of printed material my successor needed as well as a collection of archival materials from the newspaper’s history and all the local data records for the past two US Censuses, just before the next one came along.

I guess you’d call the result “PTSD by proxy,” since it wasn’t my problem anymore.

 

On the Fastrack (KFS) offers another chilling memory, which was being on my way out the door slightly late to an appointment, and, as I went to drag a file onto my laptop for the meeting, encountering this:

Bad memory, but a lovely segue to telling Fastrack fans about this:

 

Dethany took over the strip nearly as soon as she was introduced, and this graphic novel goes back to her days in middle school, dealing with a more comically embedded system of cliques than in real life.

DD Degg earlier linked to an interview with Bill Holbrook and his collaborator/daughter Haviland, but the book is now out and available. (I encourage special orders at your local bookstore, since bookshop.org is no faster and Amazon is Amazon.)

It’s a fun read for Fastrack fans, though it could have been about half again longer to flesh out the large cast and complex action for newcomers and younger readers.

You have to jump in, hang on and go for the ride, but it’s a good ride.

 

Speaking of good rides, Mrs. Olsen echoes one of my prejudices in an unexpected climax to a Frazz (AMS) story arc about muscle cars.

I, too, had friends who labored over better cars than the pre-fab crap that Detroit later started handing out to entitled rich kids.

Even hot stock Pon-Tons received some loving modification in them-thar days.