This was an exceptionally good day on the comics page, full of doubles and triples and not a few home runs, so let me do a quick NPR rant and say that, if you don’t have a Comics Kingdom and/or GoComics account, well, you’re missing out on supporting some good work, even if you are […]
For a season, and a day, dedicated to rebirth, there sure were plenty of “boy am I old” cartoons today.We’ll ease into this with Between Friends, which is a fairly gentle parent-child-tech gag.(It also, I think, fits today’s topic as a subtle shift in age for Emma. Sandra Bell Lundy periodically nudges her characters forward […]
I really shouldn’t praise Sandra Bell Lundy for today’s Between Friends. It should be a well-worn path she’s treading.But it’s not, and it’s one I find myself on, which of course makes it even more likely that I’m going to praise it. Still, why isn’t this a more common theme?Like most people, Sandra is younger than […]
Let’s start, for a change, with the Juxtaposition of the Day: (Between Friends) (Watch Your Head)I warned Maeve not to go to Europe with her ex. Well, actually, I warned her not to call him in the middle of the night.Which she did.Before she went to Europe with him, which I would note she did […]
Let’s start today’s mixture of reality checks with thankyouthankyouthankyou Wiley Miller, the only cartoonist, it seems, willing to pull back the curtain rather than to reflexively accept “delivery drones” as something non-ludicrous.It seems bizarre that the flood of tiresome, repetitive drone cartoons have all been predicated on the idea that the pipe dream Jeff Bezos […]
It’s fitting, I think, that “Between Friends” would feature the first fruitcake joke to make me laugh in more or less forever.I consider fruitcake jokes to be lazy, one of a number of comic kneejerk gags that kind of straddle the ho-hum of Santa caught in the chimney and gags about animals without opposable thumbs. […]
Another tax cut for the wealthy Tom the Dancing Bug echoes my thoughts on lotteries.In fact, as I was pulling it out of the vaults, I just realized that, a week from today, this Runyonesque commentary on the topic will be a quarter century old. Two observations: (A) It was a relatively fresh take on […]
“Long Past?” inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.“No. Your past.””Oh, &%^# that,” said Scrooge, and went back to bed.The End. Juxtaposition of the Day(Rex Morgan)(Between Friends)Today’s Juxtaposition gets top billing because it really fires up the Rant Generator and I’m going to have to sort the relevant from the visceral here.To start with, Rex’s sudden […]
Rhymes With Orange gets some of its best laughs by pointing out the obvious.I don’t know if this has any connection to our hunter/gatherer roots, in which men were cast into a hostile, competitive world where the nail that stands up gets the hammer, or whether it’s simply perceptual.When I was a kid, my mother […]
I see new people everywhere, starting with a Superhero that Kim, or Sandra Lundy, has been developing for several weeks over at Between Friends. It’s been interesting to have the process be part of the strip, and, to be honest, it’s a good choice to show it this way, because I’m not sure what you […]
Luann Cartoonist Greg Evans and I are roughly of an age, and there is always, at the age we are roughly of, the nagging doubt about how much the world has changed and how much is just you getting old.Some of it is the inevitable process of aging. There genuinely is a mosquito ring tone […]
I said before that the Danny-Goes-To-University theme at Between Friends was going to be a rich vein for Sandra Bell Lundy, and it is proving to be just that.I also said then that she had set Kim up well, since Kim is not overly neurotic as a parent and so the issue can unfold on […]
I was at my school reunion this past weekend. The place is too small to make individual class reunions practical, so we just all get together and chip in for a buffet. It’s really more of a “homecoming” celebration without the football game. When I was growing up, it was a miningtown, but the mines closed […]
Pajama Diaries on the nonsense of “healthy snacks” in an unhealthy world, or, as I like to think of it, the persistence of comforting delusions.Dear-lord-forty-years-ago, I belonged to a food co-op in Denver that, when we joined, was one of those co-ops where you ordered your three pounds of raw cheddar, your two pounds of […]
Between Friends is dealing with Kim’s son heading for college, which, by the way and not at all by coincidence, is happening in cartoonist Sandra Bell-Lundy’s life as well, though not — as in Kim’s case — for the first time. Yet they both face the empty nest.There are so many ways I’m already enjoying […]