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Baby Blues, 8/4/21

You ever see a tiny, almost invisible piece of writing that just ruins your whole day? That happened to me today, and that piece of writing was the “®” after Barbie’s name in panel one here. Why did they feel a need to do this? Why does Barbie (registration number 0810106) get a ® and not Spider-Man (registration number 3553440)? At first I thought this might be because Barbie was in origin a doll, which is a physical product, whereas Spider-Man was in origin a literary character, but then I checked a recent Spider-Man movie poster and:

which, fine, that’s a ™ and not a ®, but the comic didn’t use ™ either, so what the heck? What the heck, man? Are Mattel’s lawyers somehow even scarier and more litigious than Disney’s? And how is Zoe pronouncing this legal glyph, huh? How is she pronouncing it?

Pluggers, 8/4/21

At least today’s Pluggers is straightforward enough. Pluggers hoard napkins, because they’re thrifty! But wait. Wait. Weren’t we just assured, a mere two weeks ago, that pluggers don’t use napkins to keep themselves clean while eating? So what are they hoarding them for, exactly? This makes the “someday” in today’s dialogue all the more poignant. The dog-plugger has thousands of napkins loosely piled up in the guest room, and every time the chicken-lady begs him to let her throw them out because they’re an “eyesore” and also a “fire hazard,” the dog-man gets real anxious and just keeps saying “No, they might come in handy! Someday!”

Crankshaft, 8/4/21

Just to end on a positive note, I enjoy the crosshatching at the right end of the panel here tipping you off to the fact that this is happening at night. Just Crankshaft going door to door at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, who even knows, disturbing people’s peaceful evenings by thrusting a wheelbarrow chock-full of zucchini at them. Good stuff!

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Judge Parker, 7/7/21

Ha ha, ever since Sam was supposed to be guarding Randy and Charlotte but got punched into unconsciousness and Randy and Charlotte subsequently got kidnapped, Judge Parker Senior has been mostly sulking and getting drunk, fuming mad at everyone but especially at Sam. So for the last few days Sam’s been building up to his proposal for a mission that will give them purpose again, which I’ve assumed was going to be that they go into the deepest jungle and do whatever terrible deeds are necessary in order to find and free Alan’s son and granddaughter. But haha, nope, Sam’s just antsy and wants to rack up some billable hours so he can keep in good standing with the local bar association. C’mon, Alan, ever since the Cellino & Barnes partnership ended in acrimony and tragedy, there’s room for some new ambulance chasers in town!

By the way, it’s wholly possible that I’m not remembering Randy’s daughter’s name correctly, but I don’t care that much and I made only an extremely half-assed attempt to look it up, discovering that the Judge Parker Wikipedia page doesn’t seem to have any updates to the “story and characters” section beyond 2009. So, no word on Randy’s daughter, but the article does note that when the strip launched Randy had a sister, Ann! So, I dunno, Alan, maybe spent some effort figuring out where she went if you need to focus your energy somewhere.

Blondie, 7/7/21

One interesting thing about the weird character design in Blondie is that Dagwood’s canonical outfit is the weird modified version of a tuxedo that you see here, a holdover from the strip’s 1930s origins, when he was a dissolute rich kid and this was the sort of thing it was normal for people of his social class to wear to parties. In 2021, of course, that would be a wholly insane thing for someone to wear, so Dagwood tends to wear polo shirts when lounging around at home, and his tuxedo is now his work uniform; his officemates generally go in for more normal work attire, but I digress. My point is that Dagwood has clearly pulled out his laptop immediately upon arriving home to fact-check the extremely backhanded compliment his boss gave him, and I think that’s sad! Blondie obviously does too, as that’s a pity kiss if I ever saw one.

Crankshaft, 7/7/21

You know what I’m not sad about? Crankshaft getting straight-up scammed by the garden product catalog he’s obsessed with. Good for them, I say!

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Crankshaft, 6/28/21

In the United States, things are increasingly getting back to their pre-pandemic patterns, at least for now, but the scars on our psyches will take years to heal. For instance, today’s Crankshaft features the main character scowling and furious about how wastefully clean everyone in his family kept their anuses during the corona year, and despite a return to free-flowing TP he clearly still hasn’t gotten over it. Honestly, you sort of get the feeling that he thinks nobody should be wasting or even using toilet paper at any time, so this may not be the best example of my overall point.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/28/21

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but it’s a rare boomer-created strip that actually gets a lot right about its many millennial characters: namely, that at this point they’re by and large normal middle aged adults who are increasingly dumpy-looking and disillusioned, just like everybody else ever when they start hitting their 30s. Do real millennials speak in hashtags? No, no they don’t. I said the strip gets “a lot right,” not everything right.

Hi and Lois, 6/28/21

Speaking of millennials, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly how old Hi and Lois are supposed to be, but since their kids range from in age from teen to infant, I’m going to guess they’re in their late 30s and are thus “geriatric millennials.” Anyway, good news for your non-geriatric millennials: Hi and Lois are still horny! For now, at least.

Blondie, 6/28/21

Anyway, on the note of actually young people, Cookie and Alexander are drawn so closely to the Blondie/Dagwood character models that it can be easy to forget that they’re teenagers. What I’m saying is, I’m hoping Cookie is surreptitiously filming this to upload for her huge audience of TikTok followers who turn to her for self-care tips, and she sets it to some bleep-bloop song I don’t recognize and adds some text like “my dad’s in an EMOTIONALLY ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP with his boss … and that’s the tea, sis.”

Marvin, 6/28/21

The Marvin characters exist beyond generational discoruse, so I don’t actually care how old Jeff or Jenny or their parents are or what generational cohort they’re supposed to be in. Mostly I wanted to show you this strip, which I enjoyed because of Jenny’s sly little smile in the last panel. “Yep, that’s my husband!” she’s thinking. “He’s a real lazy piece of shit.”