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Pluggers, 2/22/14

“Reflective” is not usually a term we normally associate with pluggers, but you have to admit that there appears to be a certain amount of self-reflection going through this plugger-cat’s mind as he stares at his pill container. Self-reflection and regret. “Boy, reefer and LSD sure seemed real scary back in college,” he thinks. “Seemed real important to keep away. These things are safer. That’s what they tell you. The government says so, so I guess it must be true. D’you think the guys who smoked grass are taking any more of these pills today than I am? Or the gals?” He thinks about a girl from his junior year, who had been in his math class — he never was very good at math, and she used to help him with some of the problem sets sometimes — and how he saw her at that party, and she smiled when she saw him and tried to hand him a doobie, or whatever they called it, and he stuttered and made an excuse and left, then avoided eye contact with her for the rest of the semester. What do you suppose she was up to? Did she have a daily pill organizer too? Did she ever get married? Was she on the Facebook? What was her name, again?

Blondie, 2/22/14

Blondie has been serving up non-stop Olympics jokes pretty much since the Games started, each cornier and more Olympo-sycophantic than the last, to the extent that I’m now just completely assuming that a fair amount of money changed hands between the International Olympic Committee and whatever Cayman Islands holding corporation owns the rights to Blondie’s intellectual property.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/22/14

It’s Hagar the Horrible! He’s just like you, except that he lives in a anarchic, violent, Hobbesian hellscape.

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Blondie, 2/10/14

The Winter Olympics, in addition to being a stage where the greatest athletes compete at the highest level to achieve glory, is also a carefully managed corporate product with armies of lawyers. They are not to be joked about, OK? You can’t just publish in hundreds of newspapers a dumb joke about how the kids today like texting and wouldn’t it be funny if someone at the Olympics were texting while competing in their chosen event? No, that would be unthinkable. You can only have someone make that joke, then immediately acknowledge that it was just a joke, ha ha, obviously the Olympics has no such event, that would be degrading to the sport, please, tune in for primetime coverage on NBC!

Apartment 3-G, 2/10/14

Tommie’s fiancé has stopped by her apartment in New York on the way to the airport … from … England? Which makes no sense? Anyway, he’s missed his plane now, because they’re “drowsy from happiness,” which I’m assuming is some sort of code for sex that you’re allowed to use in the comics because it’s completely opaque. But now he’s missed his plane! And his head is bobbing suggestively! And he’s going to figure out that his fiancée is a crazy person who is keeping a baby deer in her New York City apartment! Everything about this whole scenario just screams “surrealistic dream narrative” to me, starting with “somebody agreed to marry Tommie.”

Herb and Jamaal, 2/10/14

Ho ho, these fellas are lost but they won’t stop and ask for directions? Men, amiright? In unrelated news, Herb has a malignant melanoma.

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Blondie, 2/5/14

Today’s Blondie is mostly standard-issue Mismatched Marital Hijinx, but I have to say I’m pretty in love with the weird and delightful second panel. It’s as if the sudden disruption of their comfortably distant routine has sent Blondie into a vertiginous spiral; even the low-level boost in emotional intimacy that comes from just making eye contact with her husband has sent her reeling. This is a couple that deliberately arranged their living room furniture so they don’t have to see each other even when they’re in the same room, remember. After only a moment of looking at her husband, she takes the opportunity afforded by his sipping his coffee to put her head most of the way down, maybe to overwhelm her senses by taking a big whiff of whatever’s on her plate, or maybe to just calm her nerves so she doesn’t vomit. In short order, she needs the barrier between her and Dagwood again. This experiment in spousal interaction is now over.

Apartment 3-G, 2/5/14

I find it deeply hilarious that Tommie answers what I assume is either Apartment 3-G’s landline or the phone connected to the building’s intercom system by saying “This is Ms. Thompson.” I guess she wants to put her most formal foot forward because she’s been eagerly awaiting a phone call — not from her fiance, with whom I assume that not even Tommie would be on a last-name basis, but from the producers of the hit reality TV show I Can’t Stop Hoarding Baby Animals! “This is it! I’m going to be famous!” she thinks. “Just let me finish dusting up all this deer urine!”

It should of course come as a surprise to nobody that Tommie’s fiance is a Identical-Looking Apartment 3-G Male Type (Dark-Haired Model), but it is a little weird that he appears to be calling from downstairs but also sitting in an office somewhere. Maybe he got a job as the building’s doorman, to be closer to her?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/5/14

Oh no

Oh NO

The devil’s rock ‘n’ roll has finally reached Hootin’ Holler