So here’s the thing: I didn’t have to wait until the final panel of today’s Barn (Creators) to know what musical selection the ducks were performing. I could attribute that to my educational and cultural upbringing, and I do, but only to the extent that cartoons used to be a lot more educational and cultural. […]
After such a hateful week of deliberate lies and irrelevance, it’s time to take a break. Here’s an intelligent palate-cleanser from Bizarro (KFS), which only requires that you have read some Poe, which, in turn, only requires that The Telltale Heart was assigned in eighth grade. Though we were assigned the Pit and the Pendulum […]
Dark Side of the Horse (AMS) on the dumb side of praise. There are a couple ways of looking at this simple cartoon, the first being that paying to be told you’re smart is contradictory, and you can bet that vending machine never shows anything but 160, which is genius level, 100 being average. According […]
I don’t think squirrels are crepuscular, but apparently Harry Bliss and Steve Martin — teaming on this Bliss (Tribune) — do, and who am I to argue with them? I’ve never charted squirrels to see what they do around noon, and perhaps they aren’t diurnal, but then nobody’s out at noon, at least not in […]
If Ionesco or Becket were writing “The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day,” this Frazz (AMS) would be the one to endlessly cycle, it being more absurd than dadaesque. Or, at least, it would become absurd if you simply kept cycling it. As it is, it speaks for the prevailing mood, which is […]
I don’t necessarily like “Ain’t it the truth?” comics, because they tend to harp on worn-out topics that haven’t been the truth for a long time, or at least, have stopped being innovative and funny. The archetypal “Ain’t it the truth?” jokes start with “And what about airline food?” which might still be funny if […]
Having railed against inaccurate history the other day, let’s relax a bit and note humor that relies on either not knowing much about the topic or not caring about it. If you’re going to read comics at all, you have to have a well-developed willingness to suspend disbelief, not only to accept talking animals but […]