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Crock, 1/27/15

“Crude” is kind of a polite way to describe what the art in Crock is like, but you have to admit that it gets the job done here. I’m assuming that the “job” in question is to show a couple of sapient animals grinning dreamily about how if they just urinate on things, they own them. Cool, right? Fun how that works out. Just cover it in piss, and it’s yours. Buy some booze so you pee more and increase your landholdings. It’s enough to give you a faraway look in your eye as you contemplate what a wonderful world this is that we live in.

Six Chix, 1/27/15

In less fun sapient animal news, these two goldfish are going to be forced to share extremely cramped quarters with their friend’s bloating corpse for who knows how long. “Is it possible that the water we need to live was too wet?” they babble nonsensically, trying to distract themselves from the horror.

Apartment 3-G, 1/27/15

The Story Of The Breakfast Eaten At The Friendly Neighborhood Cafe Which Is Also Just Two People Standing Around On The Sidewalk … continues! In today’s installment, Margo revels in her local celebrity status. Her boast of “owning that new building down the block” is interesting; this as near as I can tell picks up a vaguely remembered plotline from more than a decade ago, which established that the girls (and perhaps all the other residents?) collectively own the building they lived in, and that said building isn’t new at all but actually old enough to include a hiding place used by slaves fleeing to freedom on the Underground Railroad. If Margo’s managed to spin things so that she’s famous as the sole owner of a newly constructed Manhattan apartment building despite all available evidence, I may have to re-evaluate my low opinion of her as a publicist.

Mary Worth, 1/27/15

Say what you will about Apartment 3-G’s weird story-art disconnect, but at least it doesn’t expect us to learn about its characters’ digestive lives in excruciating detail.

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Pluggers, 1/15/15

Philosophical question: are there young pluggers? Probably not. But: are new pluggers being formed as pluggerism-susceptible youth age into a plugger-appropriate range? Even this seems unlikely, as pluggerism seems founded not just on old age and cantankerousness but on a fairly specific nexus of cultural consumption. What I’m trying to get at here is that pluggers are dying, going extinct, never to be replaced. And those surviving pluggers are going to become more and more acutely aware of their thinning numbers, and eventually will eventually spend every waking minute haunted by the grim specter of their own death. The next decade or so of Pluggers will be amazing, in other words.

Crock, 1/15/15

If I had to guess, I’d say this was an awkward attempt to graft the hip and in-the-news term “hack” onto a strip that never depicts characters using computers and that indeed takes place in some ill-defined but definitely early-to-mid-20th-century past. But still, by giving the title character the sinister power to access and alter his men’s very minds, this “joke” has made Crock more terrifying than he’s been for years.

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Crock, 11/3/14

Hey all, remember when Crock creator Bill Rechin died in 2011, and then a year later his son Kevin, who had taken over the strip in accordance with the Legacy Comics Law, declared that working on his dad’s creation made him too sad and he declared that he’d be quitting and shutting the strip down? And there was a note in passing that King Features would make “classic” Crock strips available to “foreign” newspapers for three years, and yet Crock continued to appear in American newspapers, or at least on the King Features site? And the strips that appeared didn’t seem to be particularly “classic”, but looked pretty much exactly like the strips from the decade or so leading up to Rechin’s death? ANYWAY, if you’re like me, you were probably hoping to watch Crock fade away into semi-fond and very vague memories without ever having introduced a black character possibly named “Three” who cheerfully asks people if they “ever do the ‘hip-hop.'” Today’s strip reminds us all that hoping for things only leads to disappointment.

Heathcliff, 11/3/14

I guess as purveyors of cultural/musical stereotypes go, today’s Heathcliff is significantly less problematic than today’s Crock. “These rock and rollers today, they’re all tall skinny white fellas with that ‘mop-top’ haircut, right? Like those Beatles that the girls are all screaming at? Let’s have Heathcliff sit in one of their guitar cases while he begs for change on the subway, that’ll show them. Heh heh, Heathcliff, you truly are the comics pages’ bad boy.”

Apartment 3-G, 11/3/14

Fun fact: Martin did purchase a table! For his apartment. Which is where he and Margo quite obviously are now. Definitely not in a restaurant. Real easy to get a table in your dad’s apartment, Margo. Just saying.