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Pluggers and Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/25/08

Oh poor little plugger! Oh poor little Niki! You both think that you’ve just gotten off the hook, but the truth is that you’ve been hooked, and now you’re being reeled in. Once someone in authority over you has that secret, they can hold it over your head at any time, and you can’t even imagine what you’ll end up doing to make sure that secret stays secret. In the plugger-spawn’s case, it’s probably relatively innocent stuff, like keeping the South Dakota state troopers none the wiser about Grandma’s illegal oxycontin distribution ring — “Now, your dad doesn’t need to know about all those people ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night, just like he doesn’t need to know about the lamp, right? Here, this grubby, wadded-up $20 bill will help you remember that.”

In Niki’s case, us filthy minded people are of course thinking of scenarios that are much more sordid, but more realistically I worry that the character is going to have pay for his transgression somehow. His initial crime against June was redeemed by his decision to go on the straight (ha ha) and narrow with Rex, but this — will he in the not so distant future have to take a bullet for his Big? Will he die for his own sins? Will he be all moodily lit as he is in this strip when it happens? Will Rex allow himself a guarded moment, remarking only that “there was something about him” before moving on?

Family Circus, 1/25/08

This comic is disturbing. As I think I’ve noted, I’m fully in favor of Keane-on-Keane violence, so I’m not put off by the notion of Jeffy waiting outside his pre-verbal little brother’s room, waiting to pulverize him with his new boxing gloves. No, it’s the gloves themselves that bother me; their weird potato-like lumpiness and dirt-brown color make me wonder if they actually aren’t boxing gloves at all, but rather burlap sacks Jeffy’s parents have thrown over his elephantiasis-stricken hands in lieu of actually taking him to some kind of expensive big-city doctor. And even in that case I’m not so much disturbed by the thought of Jeffy suffering from painful, swollen fingers as I am by the knowledge that eventually the sacks will fall off and I’ll actually have to see them.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/25/08

I’ve remarked that Shoe sometimes seems to forget that it’s a strip about anthropomorphized birds; somewhat less often, Snuffy Smith seems to forget it’s a strip about hillbillies. I mean, I can understand why it forgets — if I had to churn out a horribly dated and vaguely offensive hillbilly joke every single day of my life, I’d probably develop a meth habit out of some combination of class solidarity, irony, self-loathing, and spite — but trying to glom it onto the traditional cartoonist “doctors sure love golf” joke, as in today’s strip, can produce baffling results. The attempt to render some kind of yokel golf attire for the doctor is bad enough, but why on earth are the ailin’ folks all standing around with their eyes closed? Is that supposed to be their angry face Are they afraid of being blinded with a golf ball? What?

Apartment 3-G, 1/25/08

Wow, so this has taken a turn for the significantly less sexy than I had hoped. Not that I couldn’t say that about every Apartment 3-G plotline ever, but still.

The backstory on Margo and her mother (and apologies to those who know this, but it’s the one sort of important bit of A3G lore that the strip just sort of assumes you know rather than hammering you over the head with the details over and over again) is that Margo’s dad was wealthy and married, and he knocked up his maid Gabriella and made her give up the resulting bastard spawn (our girl Margo) which he and his wife raised as their own. (I have to admit that I don’t know if said maid continued in the Magee family employ or not while Margo was a tyke.) Margo only found out about this as an adult, whereupon she cut off relations with her dad and the woman she had always thought of as her mother; however, she and Gabriella don’t have a really normal mother-daughter relationship for any number of obvious reasons, including Margo’s total inability to feel, and Margo traditionally just calls her Gabriella. I’m not sure why the temporary departure of her kind of dickish boyfriend has caused her to collapse into her mother’s arms while the trauma from her kidnapping and forcible enslavement was washed away by a nice hot bath. But I do know that if Gabriella has been praying to the Blessed Virgin to put Margo through something so painful that she calls her mother “mama”, she won’t be up for Secret Biological Mother Of The Year honors anytime soon.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/22/08

I swear I’m not obsessed with the sex life of the Apartment 3-G girls. If anything, I’m obsessed with how any feature that’s about three single young women in New York City can be marked by such a stunning lack of sex, which, I’ll try gamely to argue, isn’t quite the same thing. Anyhoo, I’m always open for any hint that I might be wrong, and we’re getting some hints today. Note that Lu Ann isn’t responding to Tommie coming home in the morning with “OH MY GOD TOMMIE WHERE WERE YOU WERE YOU KIDNAPPED??” but “Huh, you’re not wearing the same clothes you left the house in last night, plus I don’t see any hickeys.” So, while Tommie didn’t get lucky last night (obviously, ’cause she’s Tommie), the idea isn’t completely out of the question for even goody-goody Lu Ann.

It’s also possible that goody-goody Lu Ann thinks that Tommie and Gary engaged in some “Naughty Nurse”-style role play after their date, and is goody-goody enough that even this extremely mild kink would drive her to two question marks’ worth of shock.

I can’t really remember — is Dr. Kelly another bland lookalike vying half-heartedly for Tommie’s affection? It’s nice to be wanted and all, but I have to imagine that forcing a lady to leave in the middle of a date just so she can sew together New Years Eve drunks with you rates pretty high on the old Actionable-Sexual-Harrasment-O-Meter.

Mary Worth, 1/22/08

Panel two proves that the absence of ESP is in fact an evolutionary advantage: if your potential partners could hear what you were thinking in the moments leading up to sex, nobody would ever reproduce. I’m not sure if Drew is supposed to be adjusting his nonexistent bow tie or if he’s just relishing the thought so intently that he’s unbuttoning his shirt right there in the local cafe.

Marmaduke, 1/22/08

A roving pack of semi-feral dogs has eaten fourteen elderly residents of the neighborhood so far, luring them to deserted parks with promises of companionship and pizza. Authorities urge citizens to stay indoors until the National Guard can defeat the savage canines.

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Blondie, 1/21/08

I don’t want to come across as some kind of elitist food snob (and anyone who’s ever seen me cook and/or eat is no doubt enjoying a hearty laugh that I would ever have to preface anything I write with that sentence). But I have to say that Dagwood’s armful of foodstuffs doesn’t strike me as all that unhealthy. It’s hard to see at this resolution, but most of it appears to be the kind of fresh ingredients (including actual vegetables) of the sort that you’re really supposed to be eating, and not the boxed and/or frozen heavily processed and low-grade-corn-based stuff that most of us (myself included) actually eat. Who would have guessed that Dagwood’s love of food ran to quality, not just quantity?

Dagwood’s rejection of the modern industrial food chain might be a sign of a broader Luddism that has extended to more troubling dimensions, though. For instance, his insistence on carrying his bounty rather than putting it in a more convenient cart points to his rejection of that devil’s tool, the so-called “wheel.” Unrelated but also unsettling is the coloring error that rendered the word balloons in this strip an icy blue. As if today’s weather didn’t leave me cold enough!

Apartment 3-G, 1/21/08

Real-life chances that, in New York, a city of 8 million or so souls, a lonely, horny Margo would show up at the same bar where a lonely, horny Alan has decided to fall off the wagon with gusto, and the two would end up drunkenly making out: practically zero. Chances in Apartment 3-G’s New York, population approximately 50: very high, especially when you consider that Alan and Eric look essentially identical. If Alan’s hair settles into whatever color Eric’s was when Margo last saw him, all bets are off.

For Better Or For Worse, 1/21/08

As several faithful readers wrote me to point out, Grandpa Jim’s hand gesture in panel three is essentially the British version of giving someone the finger. While I’m not sure if the Brits left their rude hand signs in the Canadian psyche as a legacy of their Empire, it’s true that Grandpa spent most of WWII fixing up planes in the UK — plenty of time to learn how to flip off folks like a local. Once again, this poor man, trapped both in the half-responsive shell of his body and in the floundering final days of this comic strip, expresses what we’re all really feeling.

Mary Worth, 1/21/08

Dr. Drew manages to neatly combine surprise and smugness into one facial expression in panel two. “Ah, to be young and Drew Corey!” he seems to be thinking. “To be so gosh-darn irresistible that the ladies can’t even wait for you to sit down together before their need for your sweet young body becomes irresistible!” His narcissistic glow should last another five or ten seconds, until Vera starts eating his face.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 1/21/08

If my record-keeping is right, “Bob Bennett” is none other than faithful reader benro, and truly by now we should have come to expect that any TDIET that features newfangled advances like cell phones or e-mail would be from a Comics Curmudgeon reader. Cell phone glued to his ear or no, Hossbutt may have some problems hearing his wife when he calls her, considering that he and the nameless URGEd individual are apparently riding in a tiny, roofless go-cart in the middle of a multilane highway.

Pluggers, 1/21/08

You’re a plugger if your intimate life becomes a terrifying Oedipal nightmare by the time you hit 45.