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Archie, 10/30/08

Today’s Archie reveals just how primitive the AJGLU 3000’s graphics subsystem is. Rather than portraying a pizza box as a collection of surfaces and enclosed foodstuffs that can wobble, flop open in mid-air, and splatter pepperoni, sauce, and grease everywhere to hilarious effect, it instead assumes that it is a simple, monolithic object that flies into the living room serenely, describing a perfect parabola before miraculously coming to rest in Jughead’s hands. I’d guess that whole system is based on Atari System 2 hardware, which explains the mysterious paperboy reference.

Hi and Lois, 10/30/08

I was going to go into a diatribe about how it’s silly that Ditto is regarding his lunch with wide-eyed shock in panel one seeing as it’s (a) one that he packed himself and (b) awesome, but then I caught sight of those two … brown … things in panel two. Are we supposed to assume that those are his two candy bars, both of which he carefully unwrapped and then set down on the lunch table to enjoy later? Yes, yes, let’s assume that, please.

Spider-Man, 10/30/08

You have to give the creators of the newspaper Spider-Man credit for always exploring new frontiers of total lameness on the part of their characters. In one corner, we have Big Time, a criminal mastermind so committed to his laughable clock theme that he has some sort of clock-shaped pop-gun that spits out its minute hand as ammunition and is thus presumably useless after two shots; and in the other, we have the Amazing Spider-Man, who boasts of his “spider reflexes,” which will help him dodge a projectile that hasn’t managed to cover about three feet of space in the time its taken him to thought-balloon a sentence and a half — only to have said reflexes completely disabled by a loud noise. Determining the winner in this battle will be like a philosophical conundrum: can an object with no mass be moved by an infinitely weak force?

Pluggers, 10/30/08

Pluggers know it’s cheapest just to get plastered at home, in front of the TV set.

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Gil Thorp, 10/11/08

The only Marty Moon strips I like better than the ones where he passes out drunk in his car are the ones where he’s proven ragingly incompetent at his job. Surely a reporter with years of experience covering high school sports shouldn’t get rattled by some seventeen-year-old’s idea of being a difficult interview, even if he is 6′ 9″? (I note the latter fact because this may be the first strip in weeks in which Jeff Ponczak has appeared and nobody’s mentioned his height.) Anyway, Jeff has made a terrible enemy of Marty Moon, for making him look bad on his crappy public access show that nine people watch! Marty’s vengeance against his many nemeses — Cully Vale, Gil Thorp, that Ben Franklin lookalike golf hustler guy — has generally either backfired hilariously or just gone unnoticed by its intended targets, so hopefully we are in for some wacky hijinks.

Dick Tracy, 10/11/08

The current Dick Tracy plot, involving impractical robots on opposite sides of the law, will be painfully boring until the robots fight, and maybe even then, but today’s strip deserves commentary for two points. One, I am spending way too much mental energy wondering why Dick Tracy’s robot speaks in some kind of vowel-poor version of l33t-speak but the bad guy’s robot doesn’t; and two, “Elsewhere” is possibly the most minimalist and least informative change-of-scene narration box ever deployed in comics, even beating out “In another room.”

Archie, 10/11/08

Is anyone else hypnotized and unsettled by Jughead’s shirt, which offers no explanation as to who or what it’s promoting with its enormous letter “S”? Is it meant to frustrate and ultimately educate the bourgeoisie, who naively expect written text to transmit information of some kind? That explanation would seem to fit in with Jughead’s unexplained transformation from a shiftless high school student to an avant-garde photographer with a major gallery show.

Beetle Bailey, 10/11/08

OK, we get it, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC! There’s nothing in this world you love more than golf. If you had to choose between golf and your family and friends, you’d choose golf without hesitation, since if you show up at the course by yourself they’ll assign you to a foursome, so you technically don’t need them. In fact, as today’s strip shows, you love it so much that you’d rather announce that fact than, say, coming up with one of the seven weekly jokes that basically make up your job.

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Mary Worth, 10/9/08

“Yes, Toby, a, er, colleague! His name is Owen … Owen, er, Blameron. Professor Blameron confided in me that he received an e-mail that offered a surprisingly low price on a number of delectable videos, such as ‘Sexy Scottish Lassies,’ ‘Sorority Girls Can’t Resist An English Prof,’ ‘Younger Woman, Chinbearded Lover’ … well! You get the picture! This Blameron fellow could hardly be expected to resist such an offer, could he? But when the charges that appeared on his card were much higher than advertised, and then the videos never did arrive, I — er, he, I mean, he — eventually came to the conclusion that he’d been had. Sadly, the man was too embarrassed to admit what had happened to his credit card company, and when his credit rating tanked, the only mortgage he was able to afford, despite his respectable position at the top-ranked second-tier school in the University of California system, was on a pathetic one-bedroom apartment in a aesthetically blighted post-war condo complex where fun and joy go to die … where was I? Oh, yes, don’t worry about your little identity theft thing, happens to the best of us. Um, I’ve heard, from my colleague, I should say.”

Archie, 10/9/08

Ha ha, Jughead’s hunger for free hamburgers is so intense that the promise of them grants him superpowers! But Archie had better hope that said powers are only temporary, because when Jughead finds out that there are not, in fact, free burgers on offer, he’s likely to come back to the pool and crack Archie’s skull open like a walnut.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/8/08

Today’s Funky Winkerbean features two creepy middle-aged men talking about buying and selling teenage girls! It’s there to make you say, “Hey, how about another cancer storyline? That would be significantly less disturbing.”

In other news, today’s Medium Large has a special treat for Pluggers fans.