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Blondie, 12/12/18

I believe that Dagwood is a true food fetishist, in the sense that he doesn’t just enjoy the act of consuming food in and of itself, but has so centered it in his personality that he’s developed various paraphilias around it. So yeah, he’s gonna want some elaborate role play with his Christmastime pizza delivery, but here’s the thing: sex workers generally charge more as their clients’ tastes get more exotic, and this scenario is no different. You want someone to come down your chimney with pizza (not a euphemism, this is literally what Dagwood wants, this is what he’s been thinking about all day, ever since he spotted the pizza delivery guy in his Santa suit last night and wrote down the number on his car), you’ve gotta pay come-down-your-chimney-with-pizza money.

Crankshaft, 12/12/18

Speaking of people who won’t be coming down your chimney, the “joke” of the current Crankshaft arc is that Crankshaft was running late and didn’t have time to change out of the costume from his mall Santa gig before arriving at his bowling night, which, fine, but … the beard? Surely he could just take off the beard? I was thinking maybe he had affixed it to his face with spirit gum but that seems like far more commitment than Crankshaft has ever put into anything that wasn’t spiting his fellow man.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/12/18

Now, I’m not an artist or a scientist but I was kind of curious about what was going on from an anatomical perspective in that stall and this is what I came up with:

So you heard it here first, kids: pencils shit standing up!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/12/18

Ahhh, I love Holly’s mom’s expression of slowly dawning disappointment! That’s the face of a woman who just minutes ago thought, incorrectly, that she was about to get laid.

Pluggers, 12/12/18

You’re a plugger if there’s absolutely no way you’ll be able to complete your list of menial tasks before you drop dead.

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Sam and Silo, 12/7/18

I still don’t really have a handle on what Sam and Silo’s whole “deal” is. Is it a comic about a robe-wearing cowboy (?) who hangs out with nuns, or is it a comic about a generic white-collar guy who eats soup in diners? Why does the generic white-collar guy not eat soup by lifting his spoon to his mouth, like a normal person, but instead lowers his entire body down to meet it? Is “lowering his body” even what he’s doing here? Is his head retracting into his torso, like a turtle? Hopefully I’ll be able to bring you answers to these questions as this situation develops.

Crock, 12/7/18

You probably think that legacy strips like Crock are comfortable just running in their grooves, never really breaking new ground or exploring their cast of characters. But the joke’s on you, because today, more than six years after the strip promised to stop publishing, we learn that beloved character [checks Wikipedia] “Maggot” isn’t just the camp’s resident latrine digger: he’s also a cannibal, and one who’s tired of eating ordinary men and women and now hungers for celebrity flesh.

Mark Trail, 12/7/18

So it turns out Raul did not fall to his death, but instead crashed through this nice couple’s skylight and, apparently, into their dinner? Normally I can’t get enough of extreme closeups on the faces of these bug-eyed caricatures, but I’m assuming Raul is sprawled out on the dining room table, covered in delicious, piping hot cochinita pibil, sopa de lima, and other delicacies of the Yucatan, and I want to see the carnage, darn it.

Six Chix, 12/7/18

Fun fact: women absolutely do not wear strapless tube top rompers to yoga, as doing any kind of inversions would lead to embarrassing wardrobe malfunction situations. Also, snowpeople would be much more diligent about ascertaining the temperature of rooms before they enter, as prolonged exposure to heat causes them to die in agony.

Blondie, 12/7/18

“Boy, people seem to like Twitter! I guess they got games on there like they do on Facebook, huh?” –someone who has spent a lot of time playing games on Facebook and has literally never used Twitter once

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Blondie, 11/16/18

It’s a tough competition, but to my mind the legacy comic strip most aggressively out of touch with how young people talk, think, and act is Blondie. The creators of Snuffy Smith or Crock may know less about computers and social media and such, but at least they don’t build entire strips around their own perception of how those things work, revealing a mindset of mingled bafflement and contempt. Have you ever shouted the name of a popular viral video, which is of course the word “hashtag” followed by two largely nonsense words, to your fellow kid on the other end of a couch so that she can also consume and enjoy that content? Of course you have, this is an extremely relatable scenario.

Mary Worth, 11/16/18

Do you think that Toby knows that Mary is always narrating her exploits in such detail because she’s grooming her to take over as Charterstone’s meddler-in-chief once Mary passes on? As the incident Mary is describing indicates, she’s anything but subtle, but you have to take into account the fact that Toby is very dumb, so she might want to just come out and say it.

Pluggers, 11/16/18

I’m really bummed about the cowardly “bacon patch” joke that’s been grafted onto this panel at the last minute, because I thought that, in “Rhino-Man volunteers to be a subject for dangerous experimental drug trials,” we finally had a Pluggers bleak enough to serve as a sequel to “Rhino-Man hocks his TV.”