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Pluggers, 10/15/20

Pluggers are lonely. So lonely! Who will talk to pluggers? Well, maybe if they just rifle through this seven-year-old phone book — the last one ever delivered to them — and see if any of the names ring a bell, they’ll find someone who will talk to them. They do this every nine months ago when everything just gets to be too much, and every time fewer and fewer people answer.

Crock, 10/15/20

Look, I’m not saying that I want characters in comic strips to be photorealistic humans. Far from it! That would ruin the fun of comics! I’m just saying if your the design of your one of your characters is an undifferentiated dumpling of flesh, whose protruding lower lip sits immediately above his hairy chest with no obvious jaw between thorax and brainpan, maybe it’s best that you don’t ask the reader to contemplate what the phrase “from the neck up” might mean to such a being.

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Crock, 9/15/20

I get that Captain Preppie’s whole thing is that he’s vanity personified, but today’s strip takes that bit to a baroque extreme. I’m not entirely sure what the joke is here: Does Preppie so identify with the high status he associates with luxury brands that he wants to become a Rolls Royce, a man-machine that combines his biological perfection with the pinnacle of engineering? Or does he believe that getting run over by a $300,000 car is the only fitting way for someone of his quality to die?

Dick Tracy, 9/15/20

Jesus, Dick, there’s a lot more to vampirism than wounding someone in the neck so they bleed out! You also have to drink their blood in order to become immortal and feed the empty place inside you where your soul used to be. That newspaper piece on vampires can’t come soon enough.

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Crock, 8/18/20

Crock is in perpetual reruns now, and it’s hard to tell when exactly any given strip was composed, which is fine when they’re making light-hearted jokes about the grueling century-long French colonial occupation of Algeria, but can get wonky when the strip tries to grapple with “current events.” Like, I guess this dates from the period (the ’90s, I think?) where Wal-Mart’s rapid expansion to retail dominance was noteworthy instead of just a historical footnote to the transition to Amazon’s stranglehold on all commerce. Anyway, I’m not quite sure what the joke here is supposed to be. Is Grossie waiting by the sign with her cart a “women be shopping” gag, which misses the fact that the gag is specifically about shopping as a high-end indulgence and doesn’t really work if it’s “women be shopping for low-priced daily necessities”? Or is her knowing grin just supposed to convey something like “Eh? Eh? Capitalism? Eh?”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/18/20

This massive wildfire may have displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but at least it’s giving Marianne a chance to really understand what it was like to be married to Les, an opportunity that she surely regrets so, so much.

Daddy Daze, 8/18/20

Is he … is he afraid his son will eventually want to have sex with a brain? Is that the joke here?

The Phantom, 8/18/20

Did … did the Phantom murder or terrorize a couple of waitresses so his daughter and her friend could have a job that earned them a little pocket money? Is that the joke here?

Marvin, 8/18/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Marvin’s poops are more deadly than a unprecedented worldwide pandemic!