Crabgrass by Tauhid Bondia for April 19, 2024

Bad parenting, Gene! Take the win!

A legitimate question in this case

“Pods!”

As someone pointed out yesterday this is neat as Kevin.. dosen’t have a dad anymore. So it makes sense he’s bonding with him.. and it makes sense Gene finds it unesettling as he’s just not.. used to his son actually liking him or wanting to have antyhing to do with him.

“Well, since you brought it up /ask, I’m actually Kevin in your son’s body”.

Kevin is learning that Miles’ parents are weird.

Worse, in a few days, Miles will have forgotten the incident completely.

It seems Gene knows his son a lot better than his wife, without knowing him at all.

Considering the situation with Kevin’s dad at home, the fact that he’s bonding with Gene so much is kind of sad.

Sounds like a real slam dunk! He really made a homerun on that one! 10s across the board!! (Ok be honest. How obvious is it that I don’t know football…?)

How poignant. Kevin is getting attention from a father figure he never had nor knew in his life.

I love this arc and how you can see each kid’s real personality poking through in the illustrations. I think it’s really well drawn and interesting.

Another long-awaited sucker has been spotted!

Somebody might not want to switch back.

All “Miles” wants is to mend the pain in his heart of not having a father around.

For those trying to figure out why this story grates so: its trying for the same magical ambiguity that Calvin & Hobbes would sometimes employ where Watterson would occasionally not bother to establish that events were happening mostly in Calvin’s imagination. Unlike that strip though, Crabgrass doesn’t have the benefit of having a super narrow focus centered on a single character’s point of view meaning it is incredibly hard to suspend disbelief and go along with the lead characters’ ruse here.

There are only two ways a story like this can go: Either its a ruse and the audience’s time has been wasted by demanding they take things seriously or its all to be taken at face value and the comic is now broken with regular people walking around with magical objects that work for no good reason. Either way it speaks to a greater problem Crabgrass has in that it doesn’t know if it wants to be Calvin & Hobbes, the Simpsons, or The Fairly Oddparents and it makes for a flat, uneven tone where you’re supposed to go along with middling family drama and humor alongside magical ice cream trucks and santa claus.

WOW, way to intense comments, it’s just a comic strip. It’s just supposed to be fun to read, not a doctoral dissertation.

poor kevin is bored

I suppose Kevin never really got to do this stuff with his dad.

The cracks in this spell are beginning to show!

How long is this Ark going to go on?

I would say enjoy it while you can Gene, stop worrying and give the boy the dad experience he needs.

It’s the invasion of the body snatchers! Run in circles yelling with your hands over your ears.. it works for Homer

I love this comic. The art is pleasing to the eye and the stories are creative. Sometimes they mimic life and other times they take advantage of the comic medium to play around in fantasy… not just in the imagination of the characters but trying out alternative realities. It isn’t a repeat of anything else I have seen.

Last panel, in response to Gene: Roger Daltrey, maybe?

Oh My! This probably won’t happen, but I could see both boys liking the change of life and choosing not to go back. Kevin is experiencing what it’s like to have a father present and to share things with, and having a mother that is not so overburdened and overworked that she has time for individual special attention and teaching him to be emotionally astute, and being basically the center of attention.

Miles, I would think, would enjoy the chance to experience having siblings and bonding with them, and also having more freedom and probably a less overbearing mother.

A grass is always greener scenario, perhaps. I wonder if that’s how it will play out. Each thinking the other has it better and not wanting to switch back, but ultimately realizing they miss their respective families. Maybe that’s their lesson to learn before they are transformed back- more respect for each other and respect for their own families. Or I could be totally wrong.

Well said! I feel exactly the same.