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No Star Wars puns from me this May the Fourth — isn’t that worth a couple bucks? I thought so!

Pluggers, 5/4/17

Not sure what they’re going for here: “Pluggers want all of technology’s benefits with none of the intellectual investment?” “Pluggers parade their ignorance as a point of pride?” “Pluggers are lazy hypocrites?” “Pluggers’ wives are somehow not pluggers?”

Wait, they’re at a bookstore? Ha, ha what a couple of pluggers!

Blondie, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Beetle Bailey, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Six Chix, 5/4/17

Six Chix rotates through a roster of six woman author/artists on weekdays, and separately on Sundays — sort of like girls’ softball in Gil Thorp. Here’s the current lineup, highlighting a couple of recent changes:

The rotation gimmick is really clever: at its best, it lets each Chik contribute fresh work without the pressure of daily deadlines. But at its worst, it lets the strip become an afterthought, with dashed-off artwork supporting a weak concept. A lot of recent strips boil down to “look at this thing I don’t like!”, punctuated by a knowing glance between the characters or at the audience.

Maybe before publishing one of these, the Chix should apply a variant of the Bechdel Test: if two woman characters are talking, and it’s not about men, is it about anything else?

Hm, I seem to be posting a lot of Pluggers this week. It can’t possibly mean anything, though.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Panels from Hagar the Horrible, 4/23/17

Hagar and his clan may have recently converted to Christianity, but that doesn’t meant they don’t occasionally dabble in a little paganistic future-scrying now and then.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 4/23/17

File today’s Beetle Bailey dialogue under “phrases that no human being has ever actually said aloud and yet will haunt me for days.”

Panels from Blondie, 4/23/17

If there’s a sadder commentary on what passes for pleasure in this modern age, I don’t know what it is!

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Mary Worth, 4/22/17

I feel like I’m kind of harping on this, but this Mary Worth plot is definitely what you’d get if, in Mary Shelly’s classic novel Frankenstein, the titular scientist decided to create a ghastly simulacrum of life using not pieces of dead bodies as his raw material, but rather a bunch of brochures for cruise lines. And speaking of things stitched together from severed chunks of other things, I’m sure the Hoosiers will have a blast watching this “Broadway-quality” variety show, which will be like a Broadway show except that it’s a bunch of scenes from different plays or maybe not even a play at all, just whatever monologue the bursar or the pool cleaner or whoever used as their go-to at auditions before they gave up on showbiz and decided to commit themselves to a more steady career at sea.

Marvin, 4/22/17

Haha, remember on Tuesday when Marvin’s dad was worried about what would happen if he got caught using Marvin’s car seat to commit carpool lane fraud? Welp, he used Marvin’s car seat to commit carpool lane fraud, and now he got caught! This is definitely just part of his plan to get sent to the one place where he won’t ever have to deal with Marvin again: prison. He’ll punch that cop if that’s what it takes to make that happen.

Blondie, 4/22/17

In case you’re wondering what kind of “steward of the Earth” Dagwood Bumstead is: he dreams of the day when forbidden science creates plant-animal hybrids that will literally grow slabs of flesh on nightmarish trees, the better to feed his appetites.