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Pluggers
Family Circus, 10/29/13
You can criticize the Mommy and Daddy’s decision to keep the Keane Kids forever bottled up in the Keane Kompound, with the resulting stunting of their psychological, intellectual, and physical development obvious in every Family Circus panel. Still, you have to marvel at how even in their stunted circumstances, their imaginations soar. Sure, they’ve been denied contact with any biological texts outside of Genesis 2:20, but that hasn’t stopped them from coming up with their own charming and whimsical explanations for what they observe of the natural world. What would their parents say if they could hear their precious children’s simple just-so story? Probably it would involve scouring the Kompound for hidden radios to try to stop any further knowledge of “Halloween” reaching the children.
Funky Winkerbean and Pluggers, 10/29/13
Haha, it’s Tuesday a day of a week, so here’s a couple of comic strips making ham-handed jokes about Facebook! Rachel (her name’s Rachel, right? it’s actually remarkably difficult to find a complete list of Funky Winkerbean characters online) is trying to engage Funky on how he’s coping with Cory, his disappointment of a son (stepson? I’m honestly kind of pleased with my inability to pull up Funkyfacts from memory), being deployed in Afghanistan. As you can tell from Funky’s disgusted facial expression, he doesn’t want to talk about it! Yesterday he claimed that he’s never been on Facebook because “I’m an adult” (fun fact: the average age of a Facebook user is 41). Today he expressionlessly make a joyless sup-pun about how Skype, another technology he can’t be bothered to deal with, allows soldiers in a war zone to still feel connected to loved ones back home, and perhaps hold onto a little bit of their sanity. As long as those loved ones aren’t Funky Winkerbean, anyway! Funky has no desire to learn about fancy screen-phone whosits. Funky is also incapable of feeling affection for another human being, so what would the point of talking to him even be.
Pluggers, in its typical way, is taking a much simpler route to a laff. Whether you’re talking about a scary “web site” on the computer thingie that we guess we have to look at if we want to see the grandkids’ pictures now, or an actual physical book written by nerdlingers who think they’re smarter than us, “facebook” makes us sleepy! Zzzzz.
Archie, 10/29/13
How terrifying must it be to be poor, simple Archie Andrews? Imagine being so acutely aware of your own intellectual limitations that you live in constant terror of your mind being erased by some awful cerebral event, but too dumb to know what what such an event might feel or sound like!
Heathcliff, 10/25/13
It’s pizza night, everyone! And that’s why Heathcliff is on the roof playing the bagpipes. Sure, there’s literally no correlation between bagpiping and pizza, but Heathcliff doesn’t care about your square cultural consensus about the correspondence between the signifier and the signified any more than he cares about local noise ordinances. Heathcliff’s going to stand on top of your God-damned roof playing the God-damned bagpipes and then eat some God-damned pizza, because he’s God-damned Heathcliff. It doesn’t have to make sense. You know it, he knows it, so why you don’t you just stand there and listen to “Amazing Grace” or “Scotland the Brave” or whatever until he decides he’s done, hmm?
(By the way, this is another Heathcliff that works very well with the caption replaced by “I’m thinking of unfriending him on Facebook.”)
Pluggers, 10/25/13
After going to great lengths to try to convince us that pluggers are wholly incapable of sexual arousal, the strip has finally admitted that, yes, pluggers can experience faint stirrings of lust, but only if they work so hard at it that they actually experience physical pain.
Lockhorns, 10/25/13
LOOK A CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL REFERENCE THE LOCKHORNS IS DEFINITELY NOT A COLLECTION OF THOUSANDS OF CARTOONS ALL DRAWN IN A SWEATSHOP IN 1965 AND DOLED OUT TO NEWSPAPERS ONE AT A TIME OVER THE DECADES PLEASE CONTINUE READING THANK YOU
Lockhorns, 10/23/12
Never let it be said that long-running legacy strips don’t occasionally enjoy innovating! For instance, today’s Lockhorns brings us a new perspective on Leroy and Loretta — specifically, a perspective about nine inches above their bedroom floor, for some reason. Normally I think of the Lockhorns as being fairly short and squat, but today we experience what it would be like to be a tiny, tiny creature over whom they loom menacingly!
Family Circus, 10/23/13
I can’t even tell you how happy I am that Jeffy has a sweatshirt (t-shirt? it’s hard to tell, given his freakishly stumpy arms) that just says “JEFFY” across the front in big letters. Do you think it’s so that in case he forgets who he is, he can look down and be reminded, both by his name written there and by all the chicken grease stains?
Dennis the Menace, 10/23/12
“Drowning, that’s how I’d kill a man,” Mr. Wilson had said. “No fuss, no muss, not a lot of messy blood,” Mr. Wilson had said.
Pluggers, 10/23/12
Danger, Pluggers, danger! The only reason anyone from fancy-pants New York City would write into you would be to make fun of your readers and their horrible fashion sense! Do not use their suggestions in your comic! Also, you have terrible crippling osteoporosis.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/19/13
Look at your plate Rex just look at the plate she can’t know no one must ever know.
Pluggers, 10/19/13
Psst: Kitchen — eat.
Six Chix, 10/19/13
In a stunning development, Aaron Hill returns to Luann.
Judge Parker, 10/19/13
Narcissist boor Alan Parker interrogates his tablemates before introducing himself or his family, and burns with the knowledge that not only is Audrey the nemesis-critic who panned his terrible novel but this is not lemon in his martini God DAMN the world and everything in it!
Katherine slurps her cough syrup, transfixed: April was right — murder up close looks nothing like in the movies!
Ha ha ok what the hell:
Blondie, 10/19/13
Facebook and Zynga turn to Blondie for promotion, in what Wall Streeters call a “sell signal.”
News item: Longtime faithful reader Ned Ryerson, proprietor of the excellent and hilarious Gil Thorp blog
This Week in Milford, announced Thursday that he’s throwing in the towel, hanging up his spurs, and other metaphors for not going to do it any more. Despite its highly selective focus,
TWIM had lots of innovative features, and if you haven’t ever checked out the “Milford Pantheon of Hair” or “What the Hell is Going On Here?”, you should give it a look.
TWIM remains my go-to reference for Gil Thorp character names, team positions, and incidental nonsense, and I remember the day I beat Ned to a stupid golf joke in the wee hours of the morning as one of the high points of my life. Thanks for the laughs, Ned, and hope we’ll continue to see you ’round these parts!
– Uncle Lumpy
Beetle Bailey, 9/25/13
Probably you were hoping that Spec. Gizmo’s sex robot would a be a shameful, one-off joke that would never reappear in the comics pages or on the Internet again. Well, too bad, because you don’t live in your perfect world! You live in this world of unrelenting horror, with the rest of us. Anyway, panel one reveals all sorts of unfortunate things. For instance, when Gizmo’s robot was first unveiled, nobody had bothered to drape human clothes over its square metallic chassis, yet now it appears to be wearing some kind of exaggeratedly girly dress with a crinoline skirt, further gendering the fembot and making it a slightly more acceptable target of Chip’s sexual lusts. The mere act of clothing it can be seen as akin to teaching it a shame-based code of sexual morality, much like the one Adam and Eve learned abruptly after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The fembot’s rudimentary ethics may be limited to sexual matters, as it seems more than willing to use its inhuman strength to work violence against humans, though perhaps this is a sign that its advanced circuitry understands the concept of consent and believes that attempts to violate its structural integrity may legitimately be met with self-defense.
Anyway, I was going to do a close reading of panel two along these same lines, but then I read “He has to turn off the work switch and press the love button” and so I went and lied down for an hour instead.
Mary Worth, 9/25/13
OK, Mary Worth: I enjoy making endless jokes about Wilbur’s sandwich obsession as much as the next person who blogs about newspaper comic strips, but I like to do it on my terms. Frankly, if you’re going to include an entire panel of the sort of filthy talk that you might expect to hear when you dial 1-900-HOT-SANDWICH, I’m going to feel a little bit baited.
Herb and Jamaal, 9/25/13
I genuinely enjoy how insanely excited our nameless white-collar drone/Heart and Soul customer looks in the first couple of panels as he sets up his joke about how meetings make you doze off, ha ha, amiright people. He’s really going the extra mile here, and I appreciate it when people put effort into their sarcasm.
Phantom, 9/25/13
“Except for a period from the 1870s, when European powers began the wars of conquest referred to as the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ until the process of decolonization really took hold in the 1960s! I mean, the British, man! I couldn’t leave a skull mark on the chins of the entire British Empire, you know what I’m saying?”
Pluggers, 9/25/13
Pluggers remember a time, now thankfully in the distant past, when they had to engage in brief bouts of physical movement every half hour or so.
Mary Worth, 8/29/13
Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on eleven riveting days of vague worries about Shannon’s job, but here, let me sum them up for you: ever since Shannon enraged Aggie during a talk group, she’s been worried that Aggie will complain and get her fired — despite the fact that we’ve seen no evidence that she’s getting pressure from her bosses, or that she would be at all expected to be some kind of qualified talk-group leader, since she was first introduced to us as the teacher for Mary’s yoga class. Being a yoga teacher and being a therapist are not the same things, just for the record!
But anyway, Mary is determined to save Shannon’s job by any means necessary. Those means apparently include undermining the ontological structures that define the very nature of reality for the managers of Pax Wellness Resort. “Those policies that you think you have, that say the customer is always right? Those policies are false. They do not exist. Everywhere in the handbook where you see it written is a lie. Avert your eyes from it and blot it out with the darkest ink, lest your mind become unclean with falsehood.”
Gil Thorp, 8/29/13
Why has it been so long since the Mudlarks have won a championship in any sport? Maybe it has something to do with Gil and Kaz’s scouting techniques, which seem to consist of wandering the school’s corridors at random looking for big dudes. Today’s strip reminds one of 1 Samuel 9, when the prophet Samuel spots Saul son of Abiel — “From his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people” — and immediately hears the word of the LORD in his ear instructing him to anoint the man Israel’s first king. That ended up working out super for everyone concerned, so surely this mysterious hulking shadow will do great on the offensive line or whatever.
Pluggers, 8/29/13
We simply cannot emphasize enough that pluggers are wholly uninterested in sex.
