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Blondie, 4/24/10

Why do cartoonists feel like they can’t say the actual names of products and companies in the comics? Today’s Blondie is fairly transparently referencing the “Flame” meat-scented body spray put out by Burger King. Are there trademark issues, or fears of lawsuits? Perhaps Blondie was hoping to reap product placement money from Burger King, and decided to go with this genercized reference only after the elaborate negotiations for that deal collapsed, which would explain why Dagwood is reading an article in the paper describing a product that was released nearly a year and a half ago.

Of course, this doesn’t get at the core horror of the strip. What foul meat-based sex perversions did Blondie agree to participate in on the Bumsteads’ tenth anniversary? Surely the barbecue sauce behind the ears (and whose ears?) were only the start of it. She’s still so ashamed all these years later that she won’t even make eye contact with her husband, or us.

Apartment 3-G, 4/24/10

“I mean, sure, wimps might think that having a crazy woman wave a gun in your face constitutes something bad happening in and of itself, but I say that so long as nobody gets shot, it’s just one of those moments of adrenaline-soaked terror that really make you feel alive, in the long run! Anyway, like I was saying I graduated from the school of bad choices — choices, like, say, throwing myself at a man who enabled his girlfriend’s pill habit and then had her bundled away to a mental hospital when she got too crazy. That’s good boyfriend material right there!”

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Pluggers, 4/15/10

Let us pause here for a moment to talk about Mr. James Todd Smith, aka LL Cool J! Do you know when Radio, LL Cool J’s first full-length album, was released? 1985! For you pluggers who are bad at math, this was 25 years ago. (His first single, “I Need A Beat,” came out a year before that! It sold more than 100,000 copies!) To put that in perspective, in 1985, the year Radio was released, Joan Baez celebrated the 25th anniversary of the release of her first album. Can you imagine some Reagan-era plugger saying “Wait, Joan Baez is some kind of protest singer? I thought she was your aunt’s hairdresser!” They would be laughed at! They would not parade their lack of pop-cultural literacy in a newspaper comic feature!

And don’t try to say that “Oh, it’s OK for someone to have literally never heard of LL Cool J, because he’s one of those hippity-hop artists, with the baggy pants and disrespectful attitudes.” You know, I’m not an aficionado of, for instance, contemporary country music, and could not identify by name or tune a single song by the band Rascal Flatts (a band whose career is a mere 11 years old at this point). But if in the course of casual television watching I happened to encounter the name of this band, I would not say, “Rascal Flats? Isn’t that the salt desert in Utah where they test the rocket cars?” And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t smugly send this anecdote into some sort of Bizarro-world elitist version of Pluggers; instead, I would be reasonably embarrassed about it.

In conclusion: LL Cool J is a 42-year-old man with a fairly high-profile career that is a generation old. He is so integrated into the entertainment mainstream that he now stars in America’s second-highest-rated broadcast TV crime scene investigation franchise (the ultimate origin of this strip, I suppose). You have in fact heard of him. His name is not the name of a ranch in Montana.

As a side note, this is the same plugger couple we saw yesterday in happier times. Clearly the garage cleaning and/or the post-garage cleaning mealtime and/or “garage cleaning” didn’t go so well, and now we find them in their usual position: bear-husband wedged into his recliner, drunk and belligerent, and kangaroo-wife sticking her snout into a magazine, desperately trying to pretend she can’t hear him.

Apartment 3-G, 4/15/10

Disappointed as I am that this Apartment 3-G storyline seems determined to not end in a hail of bullets (as certain other plots we could mention did), I do have to admit to being intrigued by this twist, in which an exasperated Margo has now been tasked with hiding a major piece of evidence from a crime scene, getting her sexy fingerprints all over it in the process. All indications really do point to the idea that Martin and Margo are so long accustomed to Bobbie’s actual diagnosable insanity that they have just learned to accommodate it and no longer see it as unusual or shocking. Threatening us at gunpoint? Ha ha, that’s our Roberta! No, we don’t want the cops nosing around, because they might start asking questions about all the people that she actually shot, whose bodies we helped to hide.

Blondie, 4/15/10

It’s well known that Mr. Dithers runs his company like an Orwellian police state, where employees are encouraged to constantly monitor one another for disloyalty. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s installed spycams in every room of his headquarters. Dagwood’s co-worker, who fears even mentioning the existence of the omnipresent cameras that haunt his every moment, has been reduced to the state of quivering terror expected by his sinister overlord; Dagwood, in contrast, has adopted an air of open defiance, like the true hero of liberty and freedom that he is. We will never forget you, Dagwood, even after you’ve been dragged out back for summary execution!

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Mark Trail, 4/11/10

Man, for once, I want more educational information out of my Sunday educational Mark Trail! I would like Mark to answer the following questions:

• Is “the drug [hemp] yields” actually at all potent?
• If not, why are filthy hippies always extolling hemp’s industrial purposes like some kind of unshowered white-guy-with-dreadlocks blanket-and-rope PAC? If so, since said dirty hippies no doubt also support marijuana legalization, why don’t they just come out and say that they want to grow hemp to get high?
• Did George Washington and Thomas Jefferson get high together?
• If you rolled up the Declaration of Independence and smoked it, would you get a buzz?
• If growing hemp is illegal, where the hell is the hemp in birdseed coming from? Is that bird in the final panel some kind of tiny, feathered trafficker?
• Do birds get high by eating birdseed?
• Is Mark high right now? Is that what the yellow word balloon indicates?
• Will King Features be held legally liable when the factoid at the bottom right causes particularly dim tokers to attempt to smoke nylon?

Blondie, 4/11/10

Dagwood has never been shown to have any actual friends other than Herb; thus, in order to pad this gag out to Sunday-strip length, we have to watch him hear paltry excuses from two funny-looking characters who have never appeared in the strip before to my knowledge. It would have been depressing but truer to this feature’s established universe if, after being turned down by Herb, Dagwood spent the final three panels weeping alone about his lack of meaningful social relationships.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/11/10 (rotated 90 degrees for your convenience!)

Montoni’s may not be shutting down completely, but at least we now know that the drive to establish Montoni’s New York was all that was keeping Funky off the sauce, so that’s something. Also, we know that Funky’s DT-fueled fever dreams involve getting into knife fights with sexy jungle ladies and baboons, which is frankly more than I wanted to know.

Crock, 4/11/10

Wow, Vern, your standards for desolate and perilous neighborhoods are pretty high if you aren’t impressed by a desert urchin whose only friend is a sinister vulture. Admittedly, the vulture looks less sinister wearing a baseball cap turned backwards at a jaunty angle, but consider the fact that it probably scavenged it off of a bloated corpse it just ate.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 4/11/10

I’m sort of torn about the way the Lockhorns deals with its expanded Sunday real estate, which is to just cram in five disconnected panels, any one of which could run on its own during the week. On the one hand, I do feel that artists ought to make visually interesting use of all that extra room they get in the Sunday papers; on the other hand, I suppose the Lockhorns deserves kudos for essentially producing eleven panels a week when they only really need to do seven. Anyway, this particular panel reveals that Leroy, and the creators of the Lockhorns, are familiar with the concept of a “safe word,” so, you know, HORROR HORROR HORROR.