Agnes by Tony Cochran for May 31, 2020

Agnes inadvertently points out here that being an absolute deity is hard.

Trout’s muse: “…& I thought my Mom had a warped sense of responsibility!”

Sea Monkeys, sea horses. Land monkeys, land horses.

If you lead them to water that does not get changed you cannot make them drink. Rules are rules after all.

I’ve written this before: I don’t like the way this strip treats animals, even “sea monkeys.” Too many dead animals in this strip. Happy Sunday to you, the person who doesn’t like my comments. I expect to hear from you shortly.

If these are sea monkeys as advertised in the back pages of comic books…

I don’t know how you can tell.

My younger brother was in junior high, not a small child, when he ordered some…

So it wasn’t for want of our best efforts that nothing ever appeared in their bowl but oddly tinted water, and some tiny black specks that soon floated to the top.

Alive or dead?

Who knows.

I’ve since found out that what you really get is brine shrimp eggs, which can live a long time in a desiccated state, like fern spores.

Did they hatch? Um… got a microscope?

Definitely not moving….

and no relation to the humanoid creatures portrayed in the ad.

I’ve always wondered why that company was allowed so many years of ripping off gullible children.

Note to Tony….

I love your writing, as you’ve probably surmised.

In fact, I’ve posted here that your dialogue is some of the best in the comics.

And I know it’s hard to balance so many words with the artwork.

But strips like today’s are almost impossible to read.

It may be that GoComics displays it too small…

but this is the size normally shown, so will probably not change.

The font is so tiny… and appears grey, not black.

I had to open the image alone and magnify it several times to make out the words…

Newspaper readers don’t have that luxury.

It looks to my untrained eye like there was room in panels 1 and 3 (not counting the title panel) to have made the speech balloons bigger….

though in panel 2, the art might have had to be shrunk a bit to accommodate that.

Just off the top of my head, I recall some strips from Valentine’s Day that were wordier, but legible because the dialog was larger.

I’m hoping maybe you’ll take pity on your aging fans!

Thanks.

And they’d almost finished typing “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, too… ☺

Does anyone still sell those “Sea Monkeys”? Considering the age range of comic book readers these days, I doubt they’re advertised there any more.