Lio by Mark Tatulli for June 20, 2021

oh, hello, Ahab

I’ll chase him ’round the moons of Nibia, and ’round the Antares Maelstrom, and ’round perdition’s flames before I give him up!

I’ll chase him round Game Stop and round the MS Xbox, and round Playstation’s flames before I give him up.

Hey! That controller is only plastic, don’t go whaling in it.

On the bright side, if Lio ever needed to do a book report on Moby Dick, all he needs to do is invite Captain Ahab to play a pro fisherman video game.

Not sure why he’s rolling his eyes. He’s usually the one that enables and / or encourages that kind of behavior.

does this mean that lio is starbuck in this strip?

Until I read the story, I thought Moby Dick was a venereal disease.

Where are those comic censors when you need them? :-)

“What’s big as a whale, and has feathers? Moby Duck!”

(A riddle — which I made up — that I once used as a theme for one of my crosswords!)

Ishmael looks bemused.

If Lio rolls his eyes any further back, he’ll see his brains….

Actually, a pretty good book…..

Strange to use initial caps for every word, even the short prepositions.

He was always a windbag with an inflated sense of self importance. Pathologically grandiose ideation.

Just don’t let him throw the harpoon through the screen!

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”

Flat screens on sale at Best Buy and WalMart.

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”​

“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

“There she blows!-there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”

“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.”

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

“Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and a lung. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

Gregory Peck did that scene a lot better.

I wonder where Lio dug Herman Melville up?

Um, Wiki doesn’t say anything about Ahab’s losing an eye…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Ahab

Khan quoted a lot of Moby Dick.