Recent Comments

1. 9 days ago on Peanuts Begins

   My guess is that Schulz had in mind a snapshot of a painting/bust of Beethoven that Schroeder might have seen at a museum.

2. 14 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   LoL, in real life after a speech like that his teacher would likewise send him to the principal but with a note saying “this kid is too advanced for not only 1st grade but the 5th grade too…fast track him for college!”

3. 21 days ago on Garfield

   Right. That’s what kind of ruins the joke for me. It’d be different if he ‘thought’ this to Odie or Arlene, but the telepathy isn’t supposed to work with humans in Garfield’s universe. Not this explicitly anyway.

4. about 1 month ago on Cul de Sac

   I think it shows that deep down kids know their imaginary friends (whether invisible or in the form of toys) are just a part of a game of pretend. So when confronted with a perceived danger from the real world, the pretend world immediately collapsed and Pollyfill was transformed back into a lifeless toy. Which is exactly how it should be, for it depicts a healthy mind that can cast aside illusion when necessary.

5. about 1 month ago on Nancy Classics

   He looks like that Monopoly guy lol

6. about 1 month ago on Peanuts

   First CB puts a menu in Snoopy’s dish . Then he tells Snoopy that they are closed for remodeling. And now he is saying that the computer is down. So in each strip of this arc CB is pretending that his house is actually a restaurant and he is the waiter; therefore it is a make-believe computer inside a make-believe restaurant and very likely nothing more was meant by the strip.

7. 9 months ago on Nancy Classics

   Looks like her “watering the garden to make it rain” plan really did work!

8. 9 months ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   Sure it’s an extreme gesture to use on one’s own kid, but this isn’t meant to be a documentary or a how-to guide for parenting. It’s only meant to be funny, even if in a somewhat grim and startling way in this instance. Here the normally mild-mannered father making such a threatening gesture is both unexpected and exaggerated and, for many i’d wager, it is is funny precisely because it is both unexpected and exaggerated. Would it have been funny if dad had simply wagged his finger back and forth in a “don’t you dare misbehave” type of way? No not really, or at least not much, because that would have been the expected and realistic thing for a mild-mannered father to do.

   Nor do i believe the intention of this entry is to make us see Calvin’s father in a negative light. If this were a serious comic strip then yes, but it’s not, and the characters (other than Moe obviously) are generally meant to be viewed in a positive or at least neutral light. Otherwise we could easily make Calvin himself out to be a demonic child if we viewed his actions in a real-world sort of way divorced from its comedic intent. Such as calling the library for books on how to make bombs or asking Santa for a flame thrower or building snowmen depicting sadistic and violent acts.

   But that would be taking the strip too seriously and would be completely missing his true nature: that of an imaginative boy who, in spite of some of his antics, is at heart a pretty good kid. And i’d argue that this same consideration should apply to his parents as well. Are they monsters? No. They are never shown beating up Calvin or telling him he’ll never amount to anything or things of that nature. Did Watterson on rare occasion go too far with their portrayals? Possibly. But i don’t think Watterson intended at all to have readers see them as monsters despite sometimes depicting them as such in Calvin’s daydreams. Just like it wasn’t his intent for us to think Calvin would be destined to become a mass-murderer.

9. 9 months ago on Frank and Ernest

   Yes but whether the bar weighs 45 or 100 or even 200 lbs it can still be called weightless (in a wordplay type of way) since it doesn’t have any weights attached to it.

10. 9 months ago on Calvin and Hobbes

    That’s a good catch. And if this were a novel i would say you’re right, it does indicate a multi-year camping cycle. However, as a comic strip, i’m not at all convinced that Watterson intended for it to be read that way even if it DOES read that way upon close examination. For as opposed to a novelist, a cartoonist is primarily concerned with coming up with something that’ll amuse readers today and will largely be forgotten by tomorrow. They’re not as concerned with possible plot holes and timeline issues cropping up over the course of the strip.

    Also when a Looney Toons character like Bugs Bunny runs off a cliff into midair, then slams to a halt and scrambles back to the cliff again, we call that cartoon physics. Cartoon timelines often work in a similar way and aren’t meant to necessarily comport with the real world.

    A good example of this is the Foxtrot strip from Feb 4 2024. Peter is excited about a new Grand Theft Auto game coming out next year and says that when it does he’ll be 17 and finally old enough to play it. Jason points out that they basically had the same conversation before the previous GTA came out. Peter is perplexed since that game was released 10 years ago. So in the last panel Jason says “It’s probably better if we DON’T think about it.” Which of course is Bill Amend’s way of poking fun at comic strip characters remaining the same age even as time and events in other respects keep flowing pass them in the usual way.