The Comics Curmudgeon

Metapost: Non-leap comments of the week

Are you ready for your final comment of the week of February 2014?

“Actually, now that I think about it, Reggie, why are we here in Jughead’s house, watching him while he sleeps? Why are we, two people who do not like each other, lovingly standing over our mutual acquaintance and talking about his faults? Could it be, Reggie, that we have gone through the other side of mutual disgust, clear through hate, and emerged into a new territory of fondness for this poor troll of a man? Or maybe have the police just not shown up yet? Either way, this is going to end with us making out, Reggie, just saying.” –Tophat

And your runners up! Very amusing!

“Here, Mr. Fox, take my money! Just please don’t eat me or my child! Oh, no, he’s throwing it back. We’re doomed!” –Digger

“If each of those pairs of dots/squiggles represents Francis’s eyes, then he’s currently displaying the entire range of acceptable reactions to one of his mother’s lacerating zingers: anguished wincing, total boredom, and blank indifference.” –Joe Blevins

“Who the hell builds a snowman mere feet from the edge of an icy precipice? Is it to attract curious children who will then inevitably slip down the slight incline and over the edge to a frigid death below?” –Joe Momma

Judge Parker: “I know it’s been weeks (months? years…?) since something exciting has happened in this strip, but I still don’t think that ‘April and her father continue talking’ deserves an exclamation point. What are you going to do when the Gardia brothers show up and the real action starts? Start bolding random words like you’re Mark Trail? It’s no way to live, guys…” –pugfuggly

“Crankshaft: where Death goes to die.” –Voshkod

“Wilbur knows what any successful tubby, washed-up hack columnist in Santa Royale’s best-kept-secret-free-advertising-circular knows: that the journey to self-improvement begins with wiping the drool off your chin.” –The Rt. Venerable Pasdordan

“I think this must all take place in an Icelandic Saga as she is required to give her lineage when she introduces herself. I guess since she’s doing remote she only has to list siblings. If she was the anchor she has to go back at least to her grandfather Thorgirn Ballew slayer of Ole Siggurdson.” –Maltmasher

“I’m glad to see Mark being a good citizen and ‘picking up’ after Andy does his business.” –Midtown

“In panel 1, Wilbur and Iris are clearly on opposite ends of table. In panel 2, Wilbur’s upper half begins sliding across the table, inching closer and closer to Iris. It’s a shame her expression is obscured.” –Inkwell

“Fortunately Wilbur knows exactly how to respond to an emotional outburst by a recovering drug addict: grimace and threaten them with a shiv.” –Christopher

“Less obvious source of humor than Tommy’s far-overblown, non-subtle panicked shriek is the hilarious suggestion that Wilbur has a ‘friend’ with connections.” –hogenmogen

“The big box store? No! I can’t! I mean… that won’t work for me! Look, old man, I did my time in the Big Box and I’m not going back! Not. The. Box. Don’t put me in the Box!” –Amos Snarkadder

“Occam’s Razor-O-Meter says: You’re a plugger if you have diabetic neuropathy.” –Baka Gaijin

Rex Morgan, M.D.: “What a … SHOCKING development! Huh? Huh? What, too soon?” –Kevin on Earth

“Pluggers remember lighting up the stage as No No LaPuta, Queen of off-strip Las Vegas revues. Your golf game may suffer, but your rendition of ‘Just Like Jesse James’ will sing in their ears forever. You’re a star, Pluggers. You’re a fucking star.” –Dan

Judge Parker: “It does occur to me that — assuming April doesn’t just intend to use Randy as a convenient cover for her espionage activities and in fact has some feelings for him — she has managed to find the man perhaps least like her father in the entire world. Say what you will about Judge Parker the Lesser — ensconced in the insulated bubble wrap of economic privilege and as ineffective, inept, oblivious, and genially low functioning as he may be, tarantulas and covert international arms deals are just not in him.” –Master Softheart

“This image of a twisted, jostling mangle of human office workers looks like something you might find if you splashed lemon juice and shined a UV light on a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape painting.” –Chareth Cutestory

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! And, just as an advertising program note, I’ve started using BuySellAds as a platform for you to buy ads directly on my site on a CPM basis. To find out more, you can go to my BuySellAds page or just click here.

Good thing this secretive group isn’t drawing attention to themselves, they’re very inconspicuous

Gasoline Alley, 2/28/14

Who knew that even with the Tommy’s triumphant return to Mary Worth it’d be Gasoline Alley that would have me riveted? I will keep bringing you reports of this formerly peaceful town’s descent into an awful bloodbath. Today the representatives of the media, ostensibly there to report on the carnage, turn on each other as society’s rules break down and the battle between print and broadcast news outlets is suddenly very much no longer metaphorical.

Six Chix, 2/28/14

It’s true: our privacy and autonomy under siege. Our own governments snoop on our communications incessantly; for white-collar workers who spend all day at their computers, their own employers are a more immediate threat, since all corporate emails and IMs are carefully monitored. Thus, our spooked office crowd has fallen back to the most primitive method of exchanging information: whispering to one another. THERE I TRIED TO MAKE SENSE OF THIS CARTOON I REALLY TRIED NOW I’M TIRED GONNA GO LIE DOWN FOR A WHILE

Mange: Pluggers’ secret shame

Pluggers, 2/27/14

After all these years of mocking this strip, I still can’t tell if the central conceit is supposed to be “pluggers are lower-middle-class exurban reactionaries” or just “pluggers are old.” Honestly, I think it wavers from day to day. Today’s panel I’m tentatively putting into the second of those two buckets, because while I wasn’t aware of this particular joy of aging, I also can’t imagine that it has anything particularly to do with anybody’s socio-cultural position within the American mosaic. So, leg-baldness is a thing? A thing that I’m going to have to look forward to? Greeeat.

Dennis the Menace, 2/27/14

Dennis has a known hatred of books and learning, so I guess it’s no surprise that his distorted, terrified vision of his own literate future involves hours of slogging through endless words in dull, aniconic tomes. Still, you can understand why he’s sad about giving up his current reading material, since it looks super rad. Is it about lions driving cars? Lions attacking cars? Just a bunch of lions, stone-cold flipping over cars, and mauling any panicked passengers attempting to flee?

Gasoline Alley, 2/27/14

Gasoline Alley has always been a strip of gentle, low-stakes whimsy — it once had a plot about trying to get a DVD player working that lasted for more than a month — and so it’s always thrilling with the action suddenly bursts into insane violence. When Slim hired a mercenary to drop tons of space-rock on some basketball-playing teens who annoyed him, the story was at least kind of cartoonish. Today’s strip, in which, as predicted, society has completely broken down into chaos due to rumors of the existence of an immortality elixir, seems much more realistic. The foregrounding of the actual jackboots of the billy-club wielding police charging into the melee to brutally restore order is a particularly vivid artistic choice.