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Pluggers, 3/2/17

You know, Pluggers has blurred the line between beasts and beast-people before, and they’ve even hinted at the kind of sexual relations that mark a universe where there’s a spectrum of sapience, but this — this is pretty explicit. Too far, Pluggers. Too far! The fact that the credit for this “joke” is given to a name that very well could be given to a dog is extremely not helping.

Gil Thorp, 3/2/17

Ugh, fine, Aaron isn’t actually on drugs, it seems; his mom’s on drugs, like far too many economically downwardly mobile Americans these days. I’m still not sure why he does well at basketball around payday? Shouldn’t that be when his mom can afford her drugs? I kind of want the payday thing to be a total red herring just to prove that the Freezy Bomb Boys were entirely wrong about literally everything.

Mary Worth, 3/2/17

Hey, speaking of America’s out-of-control opioid crisis, what’s going on in Mary Worth? Well, once again, it turns out that Iris has been so caught up in her own frivolous hobbies (before it was pursuing higher education, and this time it was fucking a 25-year-old) that she’s neglected her pill-addict son. Don’t worry, though: Jesus, who has long been Tommy’s hairstyle icon, is now also his not-giving-in-to-the-temptations-of-sweet-sweet-Vicodin icon.

Mark Trail, 3/2/17

Haha, Cherry sure seems anxious in panel two, doesn’t she? “Wasn’t someone out there doing a black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey? A bear isn’t going to help that at all! A bear can really mess up that kind of thing! I don’t remember who it was who was doing the survey exactly, but if they run into a bear, that survey is toast! This is terrible! I’m not going to be able to sleep at night, thinking about all the work what’s-his-name is putting into that black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey, which just is going to be ruined by some dumb bear!” “How’s Johnny doing? We haven’t seen him in years!” says Doc, pointedly ignoring everything his daughter is saying.

Shoe, 3/2/17

“I tried that once. It made me constantly aware of the crushing aesthetic demands that our society places on women, and let me tell you: no thanks.”

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Dick Tracy, 3/1/17

Dick Tracy started running in 1931, and The Spirit in 1940, which means that, at these characters’ origins, the early 20th century era of enthusiastic trust-busting was still within living memory, an era marked by this sort of political iconography:

What I’m trying to say is, in taking on this criminal “Supotoc” corporation, Dick and the Spirit may be rejecting the modern neoliberal Borkian approach to antitrust law and will instead be tackling monopolies the old fashioned way: with firearms.

Gil Thorp, 3/1/17

OK, my prediction is that probably what’s happening here is that Aaron’s mom has a crappy low-paying job with no insurance so they can only intermittently afford the prescription medication he needs to stay 100%. Maybe he has ADHD? That would be charmingly ironic, considering that molly and Adderall are both amphetamines.

Still, the funnier possibility is that Aaron is just straight-up into recreational drugs, despite his previous denial. It would really bear out the old Sherlock Holmes adage, “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, maybe go back and check if you only think something’s ‘impossible’ because you asked a suspect whether he was guilty and he said ‘no’ and then you did no follow-up investigation.”

Shoe, 3/1/17

Hey man, I have to come up with funny material for this website each and every day, and I get that sometimes you’re tapped out. So when your dentist offers up a perfectly serviceable joke mid-cleaning, you don’t sit around fretting about, “Oh, my characters are all anthropomorphic birds, they don’t have teeth, this doesn’t make sense.” You use that shit, man. You use it and you don’t look back.

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Gil Thorp, 2/24/17

Today’s Gil Thorp doesn’t necessarily offer a thematically unified big laugh, but is full of little hilarious details that come together to show why I love this strip so much:

• The Freezy Bomb Boys couldn’t wait to shower or change after practice before bursting into Coach Thorp’s office with their latest half-baked theory
• Coach Thorp apparently thinks Inspector Gadget is a good go-to insulting reference when it comes to amateur detective work, even when said detectives are not, in the poetic words of the Wikipedia article on the subject, “clumsy, dim-witted cyborgs”
• Coach Thorp has misremembered Inspector Gadget’s name, and thus may have forgotten much else about him, like the fact that he’s a cyborg, and has to be smugly corrected by Coach Kaz
• Coach Kaz is wearing a black shirt and white tie like he’s the keyboardist for a middlingly derivative 80s new wave band
• This whole thing hinges on Aaron’s basketball ability being tied to … his mother’s pay schedule, maybe?
• Final planel: BAM, a classic Gil Thorp smash cut to something semi-comprehensible happening somewhere else, in this case Aaron and Molly nuzzling at a rave, where NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

Anyway! I very much look forward to this all being resolved in a wholly unrealistic fashion soon, and then the Mudlarks subsequently failing to make the playdowns.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/24/17

Do you guys think that the cop in panel two is meant to be expressing genuine love for Montoni’s, or that he’s just being extremely sarcastic as he writes Funky a ticket he definitely deserves? It’s hard to tell with this strip. I mean, either would be good, because both involve Funky being humiliated, but I feel like I want to better understand the texture of the schadenfreude I’m experiencing here.

Judge Parker, 2/24/17

Shoutout to this Judge Parker flashback for doing a pretty good job of depicting Abbey and Neddy in the Harold LeDoux era. I find the third panel pretty puzzling, though. The kids have already been let go! How are the kidnappers going to do anything with them? Unless … I was right, and “Sophie” really is a replicant replacement? As are the other supposedly free children? And this is the first step towards replacing the entire universe of Judge Parker with a better, cleaner race of beings, i.e., cyborgs? That still doesn’t seem like much of a money-making scheme, to be honest.

Mark Trail, 2/24/17

I’m not sure how often customs agents in foreign countries ask Americans travelling to America what their purpose for traveling to America is, but it sure gives Chris “Dirty” “Smith” a chance to answer in a Transparently Evil fashion! It’s not going to be very “sporting” when Mark punches Dirty’s eyepatch right off, but he’s going to have to learn the limits of his hunting abilities himself, I guess.