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Pluggers, 6/13/14

Boy, pluggers sure are getting in touch with their own inevitable and rapidly approaching death, aren’t they? I certainly hope that the first draft of this panel featured our dog-man hero holding up the suit in question and giving it a good, long stare; maybe there was a thought balloon in which he visualized this last good suit on his embalmed corpse, while well-wishers stood around, not looking at him, telling each other in hushed tones that it was better this way, that he was done suffering and in a better place. This panel was of course sent back to Pluggers HQ by the syndicate with “WAY TOO GRIM DUDE” scrawled across it, but I like to imagine it’s still hanging up over the drafting board, as a reminder.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/13/14

Oh hey Wally and Rachel got married this week, everybody! As you can see, the God of the Funkyverse cannot allow any happy occasion to emerge unscathed, so their outdoor wedding has been disrupted by a sudden freak thunderstorm. They tried their best to finish the ceremony, but as panel two reveals, their friends and loved ones gave up on the event a while ago.

Beetle Bailey, 6/13/14

Beetle’s primary and defining characteristics are that he’s extremely lazy and does a half-assed job at everything, so I refuse to believe that whatever desultory, fumbling, fully-clothed sex act just happened in that parked jeep merited any kind of souvenir.

Edge City, 6/13/14

There are plenty of off-putting running gags in Edge City, but obsessive neurotic Abby Ardin’s occasional attempts to get her husband interested in BDSM are among the off-puttingest.

Wizard of Id, 6/13/14

At last, it’s the Wizard of Id–B.C. crossover strip you’ve been waiting for! It’s a golf joke about getting hit in the nuts.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/11/14

Whoops, looks like June is not being a very good mother on Mother’s Day! How is little Sarah going to get by without her “assistant”/terrified thrall? This is what June is going to get as a Mother’s Day gift: she will wake up suddenly in a panic at 3 a.m., only to find Sarah standing next to the bed and staring at her with those shadowed eyes. “I’m very upset with you, mommy,” she will say. “Very upset.”

Judge Parker, 5/11/14

She’ll still be having a better Mother’s Day than stepmother-of-the-groom Katherine Parker, though! Sure, she’s being held captive by a vicious mercenary with a score to settle, but … she’ll be fine? Probably? This crazed, terminally ill arms dealer/con man says so?

B.C., 5/11/14

Typically an adolescent queen ant takes off from her birth colony on a “nuptial flight” with a swarm of males, most of whom mate with her and then die within a few days. She falls to earth, loses her wings, and begins pumping out worker-slaves, who build a new colony around her; she does nothing but eat and give birth to new workers for decades, using the sperm from her long-dead lovers that she stored inside her body to fertilize herself. That’s a scenario that would make for an interesting Mother’s Day comic, is what I’m trying to say.

Crankshaft, 5/11/14

“Happy Mother’s day! You’re a terrible person and inept mother who scarred me emotionally! I don’t love you or even like you very much! This is not a joke! It’s very very real.”

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Heathcliff, 4/21/14

The defining feature of Heathcliff’s universe is unrelenting low-grade surrealism. And the human residents of this world seem pretty inured to it all at this point: whether we’re talking about fish used as sporting equipment or word-helmets or balls of string with faces or the Garbage Ape, it’s just not anything to get worked up about. So I’m glad to see that the fishmongers, at least, are offended by this unicycle-based theft. “Oh come on this … this is absurd. Wouldn’t it have been actually faster and easier for him to grab it and run away on foot? Plus, that unicycle doesn’t even have any pedals! You’re just kicking your paws up and down in mid-air, on nothing! Damn you, Heathcliff, and your unstoppable reign of mild whimsy!”

Archie, 4/21/14

This Archie strip is clearly a modern-day joke grafted unsuccessfully onto an old one: the corny Archie versions of an iPad and Netflix and Mad Men prove that someone involved is aware of cultural developments of the ’10s, and yet the core gag makes absolutely no sense, unless some people get a secret “Netflix remote” that doesn’t let you actually look up shows by name but does let you scroll through them endlessly at random until you find the one you want. Anyway, when do you think the art from this strip originally ran? I’m thinking Jughead’s inexplicable Yankees shirt places it around 9/11, when the awful attacks on New York meant that we all had to pretend to like their sports teams, for some reason.

Dennis the Menace, 4/21/14

Ever since those hippies Woodward and Bernstein managed to screw over Nixon, Henry Mitchell has managed to blame the Washington Post for just about everything, so don’t doubt that this little fender-bender is also going to turn out to be the liberal media’s fault.

B.C., 4/21/14

Here is today’s B.C.! It’s about eating rabbit turds.