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Pluggers, 8/11/10

You have to give Pluggers a little bit of credit for coming up with a half-assed excuse to rerun panels (“Spotlight on readers who have nothing better to do than send in tons of Pluggers ideas!”); some cartoons just rerun strips in no-assed silence, which speaks to a certain lack of pride of craftsmanship. Anyway, as a professional comics-reader, it’s interesting to keep track of how my own immediate, visceral reaction to a panel can change from month to month. For instance, when this panel first ran back in May, I apparently was moved to write some weird diatribe about awkward sentence construction, Jewish stereotypes, and plugger sex. Whereas today, I just laughed a cynical laugh, because it’s obvious to me now that point is that pluggers are cheapskates who’ve never given anyone a tip in their lives, and plugger wife here dies a little inside every time they sneak out of the diner without leaving anything on the counter, and now Mr. Plugger is making a big joke about it. And certainly he’s not going to do anything nice for his wife, who just has to take care of him for free, without expecting any sort of reward, even emotional rewards, ha ha! You might want to keep an eye on those scissors, buddy.

Dick Tracy, 8/11/10

Considering the important social function served by the morgue in the corpse-lousy Dick Tracy universe, it’s no surprise that the building’s facade features enormous letters that presumably light up at night, so people know right away where they should be dumping the bodies.

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Judge Parker, 8/9/10

Well, it turns out that Sophie’s cheerleading-driven powers of all-knowingness only give her universal access to cold, hard facts about whose ex-boyfriends are back in town, and whom those ex-boyfriends have divorced. The underlying motivations behind those circumstances are as opaque to Sophie as ever, and it’s kind of heartening to see that the youngest Spencer-Driver foundling is still an unsettling android-child, despite her makeover into a tween fashion plate. “NEDDY-UNIT: THE SOPHIE-UNIT DEMANDS INFORMATION ABOUT LOVE AND THE EXPERIENCE THEREOF! WILL LOVE OVERLOAD THE SOPHIE-UNIT’S CIRCUITRY IF SHE ATTEMPTS TO INCORPORATE IT INTO HER TOP-LEVEL ALGORITHM? THE SOPHIE-UNIT WILL INITIATE THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘IRRITATION’ (SUCCESS OF IRRITATION-INSTIGATION SUBROUTINE ESTIMATED AT > 95%) IN THE NEDDY-UNIT UNTIL THE DESIRED INFORMATION IS GIVEN!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/10

Ha ha, the chicken has fallen in love with Snuffy, whose main source of food is the chickens that he steals and eats! This has the potential for being one of the funny pages’ great tragic love stories. Let’s hope the artists don’t shy away from the heartbreaking beheading scene!

Dick Tracy, 8/9/10

Wow, usually we don’t get to see the badly decomposed corpses until the end of the Dick Tracy storyline. What exactly is that lump floating atop the body in panel one — is there an alligator lazily feeding on the poor sap, with Officer Hugepelvis gingerly sneaking up on it with plans to taser it? This could be the greatest Dick Tracy plot ever, if by “greatest” you mean “with the highest body count,” which is really the only metric I can think of that fans of this strip would respect.

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Dick Tracy, 7/28/10

I have to admit that I enjoy Dick’s second panel dialogue: “His movies can be viewed in 3-D without glasses — thus his riches.” Part of it is that I of course wish that someone would use “thus his riches” to end a sentence outlining one of my achievements (“He created the #1 Mary Worth fan site on the Internet — thus his riches”). But I also just like the rhythm of it. I’d call it poetry, but poetry and the decadent so-called “artists” who produce it are loathed by Dick with a righteous passion.

I am a little disappointed by panel three, though; traditionally the strip never misses a chance to translate police jargon like “lifted” for the civilians in the audience.

Judge Parker, 7/28/10

At last we learn why Sam is so fond of Jules, despite his previous outrage over the young man having the sex relations with his adult daughter: he recognizes in him a kindred spirit, an artiste crushed by parental disapproval! The fact that Sam was forced into law when his true passion lay elsewhere might explains his overall emotional numbness and inability to love. He pushed his musical past down so deeply into his soul that this is apparently the first his own wife has heard about it, and he’s apparently required two beers just to work up the nerve to broach the subject.

Luann, 7/28/10

Oh, look, Brad and Toni are going to a restaurant called Something Stone, or perhaps the Stone Somethingry, so named because the building that houses it is of stone construction. See, these are the things you focus on, to avoid thinking about the sex banter. Maybe all the food on the menu is made of stones! Ha ha! Then they’ll eat them and die, and the banter will stop.