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Ziggy, 12/20/10

Today Ziggy has gone to see Santa for what’s at least the third year in a row, and we really have to start asking ourselves why he’s doing it. The easy answer is that he’s there for unspeakable reasons involving children, but if there were easy answers to anything involving Ziggy, the strip would have been purged from newspapers, and our collective pop-cultural consciousness, years ago. Here’s my theory: do you notice that the children in all these panels are particularly loathsome and cruel? I think Ziggy has sought out the worst children he can find — perhaps he’s managed to find out when Santa is going to visit the Home For Very Young Delinquents And Sass-Talkers — just to see them insult the jolly old elf. This is Ziggy’s way of pulling himself out of his bottomless pit of low self-esteem. “At least I’m better than these brats,” he thinks to himself. “At least I’m not calling poor Santa fat. I mean, I’m thinking it, but I’m not saying it aloud. That’s the difference between me and them. That counts for something, right?”

Herb and Jamaal, 12/20/10

Note that Herb is drinking out of his “Herb” coffee mug, while Jamaal is drinking out of a mug featuring the elaborate monogram logo of the soul food restaurant he and Herb co-own, which combines an H and a J. In other words, Jamaal is honoring their friendship and business partnership, while Herb thinks only of himself. This has much more troubling long-term implications for the duo than the personnel changes at the local high school.

Pluggers, 12/20/10

It sure is hard for pluggers to deny the same-sex attractions that shame them so, but somehow the compulsive eating helps them push it all deep down inside, where it can’t get out.

Update: Uh, as faithful reader Ned Ryerson pointed out, I made basically the inverse of this joke the first time this panel ran this year. In my defense, it’s actually a sign of good mental health that I don’t keep an infinite mental file of all the Pluggers panels I mock. I’m still working on the infinite mental file of Mary Worth strips with a team of trained psychiatrists.

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Luann, 12/2/10

When it comes to Brad/Toni slash fiction — oh, sorry, I mean, when it comes to the actual Brad/Toni comic strips that appear in newspapers across America — I’ve gone through some kind of abbreviated Kübler-Ross cycle of grief. First game the visceral disgust, of course. Then came the anger. So much anger! But now I’ve settled into just a sort of bafflement. Is there an audience out there who finds these characters compelling, and, more specifically, who finds their glacial trajectory towards physical intimacy arousing, or at least interesting? Is today’s strip blatantly pandering to America’s small but intense calf-massage-fetish community, possibly as a result of a bribe or a lost bet? Has anyone read Luann this week with a feeling more positive than mild distaste? I honestly want to know the answers to these questions, for real!

Mark Trail, 12/2/10

However, I feel confident that the comics-reading public is regarding this week’s Mark Trail with excitement and anticipation. Just as Kelly Welly is leaning back in that chair, gripping the armrests and waiting eagerly to see Mark naked, so too are we sitting back in our respective sitting-oriented-pieces of furniture, waiting eagerly to see Kelly see Mark naked.

Apartment 3-G, 12/2/10

Comics readers are also intrigued to see how this beret-wearing cab driver’s honest masculine advice will help Aunt Iris bed the bicyclist that she, in some way that I never properly understood, caused to be hit by a car. Under the cabbie’s tutelage, she’ll show up at the cyclist’s apartment with something that’s still alive, like a puppy or a stripper.

Gil Thorp, 12/2/10

Comics readers are somewhat uncomfortable with the notion of people being loaded onto buses and interned in camps far from their homes, but for the Milford football team, they’ll allow it.

Herb and Jamaal, 12/2/10

Ha ha, Jamaal, that chat room is full of other people trying to live out their fantasies! You’re just there to, uh, find out how to get away from there. Due to this strip’s trademark nonspecificity, we have no way of knowing exactly what perverse text-based lusts are being expressed in this online sin den. It’s probably a hot Brad/Toni calf-massage slash fiction site.

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Ziggy, 11/20/10

Congratulations, comics reader! You’ve managed to wait patiently through 40-odd years of Ziggy to arrive at this, the ultimate Ziggy panel: the title character stares dumbly at a window carved out of the blank nothingness that is his universe, from which a customer service professional cheerfully insults him, for no reason anyone can fathom. Having expressed its inner purpose in its purest form, the strip ought at any moment to simply disappear in a puff of smoke, giving us all a long-awaited chance to move on with our new, Ziggy-free lives.

Herb and Jamaal, 11/20/10

Expecting to see her husband and his friend drooling over other women — or, perhaps in her heart of hearts, to see the two of them expressing the deep affection for each other she had always suspected — she instead found them engaged in something so much more harrowing: chicken necrophilia.

Mark Trail, 11/20/10

“No, seriously, my wife is dangerous and violent! You’ve got to get help, fast, before she finds out I’ve been talking to you!”