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Pluggers and Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/25/08

Oh poor little plugger! Oh poor little Niki! You both think that you’ve just gotten off the hook, but the truth is that you’ve been hooked, and now you’re being reeled in. Once someone in authority over you has that secret, they can hold it over your head at any time, and you can’t even imagine what you’ll end up doing to make sure that secret stays secret. In the plugger-spawn’s case, it’s probably relatively innocent stuff, like keeping the South Dakota state troopers none the wiser about Grandma’s illegal oxycontin distribution ring — “Now, your dad doesn’t need to know about all those people ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night, just like he doesn’t need to know about the lamp, right? Here, this grubby, wadded-up $20 bill will help you remember that.”

In Niki’s case, us filthy minded people are of course thinking of scenarios that are much more sordid, but more realistically I worry that the character is going to have pay for his transgression somehow. His initial crime against June was redeemed by his decision to go on the straight (ha ha) and narrow with Rex, but this — will he in the not so distant future have to take a bullet for his Big? Will he die for his own sins? Will he be all moodily lit as he is in this strip when it happens? Will Rex allow himself a guarded moment, remarking only that “there was something about him” before moving on?

Family Circus, 1/25/08

This comic is disturbing. As I think I’ve noted, I’m fully in favor of Keane-on-Keane violence, so I’m not put off by the notion of Jeffy waiting outside his pre-verbal little brother’s room, waiting to pulverize him with his new boxing gloves. No, it’s the gloves themselves that bother me; their weird potato-like lumpiness and dirt-brown color make me wonder if they actually aren’t boxing gloves at all, but rather burlap sacks Jeffy’s parents have thrown over his elephantiasis-stricken hands in lieu of actually taking him to some kind of expensive big-city doctor. And even in that case I’m not so much disturbed by the thought of Jeffy suffering from painful, swollen fingers as I am by the knowledge that eventually the sacks will fall off and I’ll actually have to see them.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/25/08

I’ve remarked that Shoe sometimes seems to forget that it’s a strip about anthropomorphized birds; somewhat less often, Snuffy Smith seems to forget it’s a strip about hillbillies. I mean, I can understand why it forgets — if I had to churn out a horribly dated and vaguely offensive hillbilly joke every single day of my life, I’d probably develop a meth habit out of some combination of class solidarity, irony, self-loathing, and spite — but trying to glom it onto the traditional cartoonist “doctors sure love golf” joke, as in today’s strip, can produce baffling results. The attempt to render some kind of yokel golf attire for the doctor is bad enough, but why on earth are the ailin’ folks all standing around with their eyes closed? Is that supposed to be their angry face Are they afraid of being blinded with a golf ball? What?

Apartment 3-G, 1/25/08

Wow, so this has taken a turn for the significantly less sexy than I had hoped. Not that I couldn’t say that about every Apartment 3-G plotline ever, but still.

The backstory on Margo and her mother (and apologies to those who know this, but it’s the one sort of important bit of A3G lore that the strip just sort of assumes you know rather than hammering you over the head with the details over and over again) is that Margo’s dad was wealthy and married, and he knocked up his maid Gabriella and made her give up the resulting bastard spawn (our girl Margo) which he and his wife raised as their own. (I have to admit that I don’t know if said maid continued in the Magee family employ or not while Margo was a tyke.) Margo only found out about this as an adult, whereupon she cut off relations with her dad and the woman she had always thought of as her mother; however, she and Gabriella don’t have a really normal mother-daughter relationship for any number of obvious reasons, including Margo’s total inability to feel, and Margo traditionally just calls her Gabriella. I’m not sure why the temporary departure of her kind of dickish boyfriend has caused her to collapse into her mother’s arms while the trauma from her kidnapping and forcible enslavement was washed away by a nice hot bath. But I do know that if Gabriella has been praying to the Blessed Virgin to put Margo through something so painful that she calls her mother “mama”, she won’t be up for Secret Biological Mother Of The Year honors anytime soon.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/17/08

Not to try to apply “reality” to Apartment 3-G or anything, but: don’t these people live in New York? You know, the city with one of the most extensive and useful public transit systems in the world? I don’t know if you’ve heard, but in New York lots of people ride the subway instead of taking a cab — even middle-class white girls! By themselves! This will probably shock the A3G creative team, but post-Giuliani it’s practically like riding the monorail at Disneyland, with only a slightly higher possibility of encountering a unconscious, smelly hobo.

Maybe the route from Blaze’s apartment to Lu Ann’s doesn’t lend itself to subway travel, but it is kind of weird that you never see any of these kids on the train. I mean, obviously Margo would refuse to board public transit of any kind, but Lu Ann and Alan, with their high-paying jobs of art teacher and starving artist/part-time curator/junkie, respectively, seem like prime candidates for MetroCard ownership.

Family Circus, 1/17/08

Much as it warms my black, black heart to see a Family Circus kid weeping openly, I’m a little disturbed by the sudden shift in this feature from its standard “Little kids say and/or mispronounce the darnedest things” to some kind of Pluggers-style play on words (for certain limited definitions of “play”) by an omniscient narrator. On the other hand, I admit to being pleased by the image of a perpetually sobbing PJ being hooked to electrodes and used as an alternate source of power for the Keane Kompound after they became convinced that being connected to the utility grid kept them under the thumb of the “gummint.”

Pluggers, 1/17/08

Speaking of “plays” on words: Hey, Pluggers, you get a pass on this one because it doesn’t make any sense at all, in that it’s not at all clear what if any alternate meanings of “swinger” and/or “family tree” are being referenced here, but don’t let me ever catch you inching towards doing a joke about “plugger swingers” again, OK? Ever. I mean it. There will be rage.

Mary Worth, 1/17/08

WHY YOU PUNCHIN’ YOURSELF, DR. DREW? WHY YOU PUNCHIN’ YOURSELF?

I’m assuming that Drew is assuming the “Serious High School Senior Yearbook Photo #2” pose in panel two because he’s casting his mind back to the sweet net of physical love he cast over Vera — she thought she could escape, but her struggles have only snared her further! Faithful commentors suggested a number of more plausible reasons for Vera’s change of heart. Good: Vera’s pregnant! Better: Vera got the clap, and she knows from where! (Note that these two suggestions are not mutually exclusive, obviously.)

The Phantom, 1/17/08

I’m pretty sure that tomorrow we’ll see that the stem-less word balloon in panel three is emanating from the Phantom himself, aka Ghost-Who-Buttresses-The-Patriarchy, who’s going to tell them a little something about the Jungle Patrol, specifically that it’s not for “girls.” Diana, who’s heard this spiel before, has already taken a phone call. Possible sexism aside, everyone who thought that in yesterday’s “That’s the answer! Jungle Patrol!” they had found a catchphrase for the new millennium must now admit that “Whoa, girls! Let me tell you a little something about the Jungle Patrol!” is even better.

In other news, when I first saw panel two, I thought cop-lady was grabbing waitress-lady’s left boob. I really, really want the Phantom to be more interesting than it is.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 1/17/08

Today’s TDIET is submitted by faithful reader Harold, who pushed this family-friendly feature to the brink with his demand for red-hot just-out-of-the-shower action.

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Judge Parker, 1/12/08

At last, the brownies’ “special” nature is explicitly acknowledged! Just what mind-expanding substance makes them “special” (complete with quotes) will no doubt be revealed in due time, which, since this is Judge Parker, means maybe by September. We know it’s good stuff, though, because in panel three Elvira appears to be so funky with ganja that she’s sporting visible odor lines, or perhaps her chemically altered brain is sending her down some kind of nightmare trip that’s beginning with her face melting and dissolving into the air. Normally I’d complain about the conversational discontinuity here — Elvira’s request that Biff respect neighborly etiquette and/or local general aviation regulations has little to do with her attempt to “turn on” the local squares — but these people are clearly so very high that we can’t expect them to make much sense. I’m looking forward to weeks of groovy psychedelia, Judge Parker style, which is to say that it will be slow, confusing, and ultimately frustrating, but there will be cleavage along the way.

Apartment 3-G, 1/12/08

The essential perversity of my entire blogging project can be summed up as follows: for the past four days, Rex Morgan, which I’ve ignored, has involved gunplay and our heroes fleeing into the woods in terror, whereas Apartment 3-G, which I’ve made sure to keep you current on, has involved boring people at a stupid New Year’s party. If you’re not down with that, then maybe the Comics Curmudgeon is not for you, my friend. Anyway, while we wait for Lu Ann’s inevitable discovery of Alan in the bathroom either shooting smack or offering to perform any number of unsavory acts in exchange for said smack, I want you to ponder this: of the 365 Apartment 3-G’s that were published in 2007, were there really not 13 or 14 that could have been combined, or perhaps even eliminated entirely, to so as to allow whatever Big Dramatic Moment is looming for midnight to happen in the strip actually published on December 31?

Family Circus, 1/12/08

Billy! As a native of Buffalo, the Queen City of the Great Lakes, I was doomed from birth to always have an undying affection for and rooting interest in the Buffalo Bills, despite the fact that with each passing year they find a new and exciting way to tear out your heart and stomp on it with their cleat-clad feet. Do not voluntarily pledge your love to them based merely on a coincidental match-up of names (yours being scrawled on your shirt, lest we not get the joke)!

Jeffy! There’s no such thing as the “Buffalo Jeffies”, but you’re a moron and so we expect no better of you. Your stupidity has in fact made you so well known that you don’t need any label on your clothes. Here, have a cookie.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/12/08

I have to say that I’m perturbed and unsettled by the verb tense in the first world balloon in this cartoon. “Did we ever argue like them” rather than “Do we ever” implies a certain temporal distance between the speaking couple and the ones being referenced. It would be understandable if the contentious pair in the background were a younger feller and his wife and the speaker were remarking ruefully on the tempestuous nature of early courtship among fiery rural folk, but the presence of long white beards on both men indicates that they have equal status as elders in this inbred hillbilly community. The only other scenario that makes sense to me is that the foregrounded couple are in fact dead and, like overall-clad semiliterate versions of the icy, reserved angels of Wim Wenders’ 1987 classic Wings of Desire, no longer argue about anything, but merely remark and observe. This would mean that they have been cursed by a vengeful God (who turns out to be some kind of liberal city slicker after all) to haunt the same chaw-stained shanty town where they spent their narrow, miserable lives rather than being permitted to enter the blessed afterlife.

Also perturbing and unsettling: “Honeypot.”