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Momma, 12/14/12

I was trying to figure out a “Francis is secretly blowing people for money down at the bus station” joke here, but then decided that wouldn’t be true to his character. Not because he’s unshakably heterosexual or anything, but because he’s notoriously lazy. Francis doesn’t do anything with the word the “job” in it, and fellatio takes a dedication to craft and an interest in other people that he’s simply never demonstrated.

Pluggers, 12/14/12

The first rule of senior plugger fight club is: you do not talk about senior plugger fight club, because the details are all hazy, because of the encroaching senility.

Judge Parker, 12/14/12

“When I married your father, and you were 12 and I was 15, I thought, ‘I can’t wait to see that young man walk down the aisle.’ That isn’t creepy at all!”

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Mary Worth, 11/21/12

In keeping with its overall M.O., Mary Worth is grappling with its current high drama in a weirdly blunt and concrete way that ignores underlying motivations and issues. To wit: Jim is a profoundly emotionally damaged creep who wants to be “more than friends” with Dawn because she reminds him of his dead sister (gross). He also has an irrational fear of water due to his own tragic boat-themed accident, and refuses to go to the pier because it’s “not safe” (because WHO KNOWS when some ferry is just going to stone cold slam into it, without warning?). Naturally instead of thinking, “Gosh, Jim is profoundly delusional and also creepy and controlling,” Dawn has managed to simplify this into a conflict about whether they should go down to the pier or not. If only some arbitrary compromise could be found to paper over this conflict, Dawn could live happily ever after with the guy who wants to have sex with and/or dictate every move of someone who looks just like his dead sister.

Judge Parker, 11/21/12

So it looks like this Judge Parker storyline is going to end without any chainsaw murder, but with all the newly introduced characters getting what they want — Bea a new business partner and/or boyfriend, Bubba a road out of the precarious marijuana business and into the no-risk, sure-to-succeed solar power industry, and Avery with a financial interest in both, a romantic interest in one, and a fishing hole he can go to whenever he wants to boot. But where is the lucrative financial windfall for our main characters, which is an important part of the resolution of any Judge Parker plot? At first I thought Avery’s back-cast talk was some specialized bit of movie jargon — remember, Sam and Avery’s completely conflict-free negotiations over movie rights to Judge Emeritus Parker’s book set this whole plot in motion — but no, it’s some kind of fishing thing, boring.

Shoe, 11/21/12

Longtime readers know that the patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror, in which a character reacts to a mildly corny punchline as if they’ve been told they have less than a month to live, are one of my favorite visual tropes in the strip. They’re a particularly funny overreaction when, as here, the character sporting them was the one who set up the joke in the first place. “Look, I just wanted to make a little joke about how the gender-coded cultural constructs of romance inform marketing for Mattel’s Barbie toys, and how that construct contrasts with real-world experience of monogamous, state-sanctioned relationships, but you … you took it too far!”

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So ends the Comics Curmudgeon Fall 2012 fundraiser. Thank you, generous readers!

Gasoline Alley, 11/16/12

Any hopes of social acceptance for coal-eyed monster Boog — from the cruel attentions of bullies to his prospects of a future mate — hang on the slender thread of his mother’s ability to keep his school — nay, the entire town — stuffed and brain-addled from her carbohydrate-laden snacks. Bake, Hoogie, bake! Bake like you’ve never baked before!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/16/12

Rex Morgan, M.D. plots are notorious for starting from an intriguing premise — Rex and June investigate a brothel — and then larding in so many trivial digressions that readers lose track, and eventually interest. And so we have Honey’s plumbing emergency, Ginger’s stockkeeping crisis, Edna’s heart attack and Herb’s gratitude, June’s free clam lunch (with extra free crab cakes — come back again for more free!), Dolores’s battle with cancer, Nurse Amber Thomas coaxing Rex into a TV spot for CPR training and his consequent public acclaim, Ginger’s Rex-poaching plans and backstory conflicts with the Marine-pilot wife of an former paramour and scheming clamshack waitress Rose. The shame in all this is that when the whole rickety edifice finally collapses in a hail of gunfire or ceremonial award of yet another boat, no one will much notice, let alone care.

Gil Thorp, 11/16/12

Talented and yet somehow Irish footballer Terry Gallagher has let his largely-fictional triumphs on the American gridiron go to his head! Here, the Cool Girls conspire in some vague iPhone-related plot to take him down a peg, because if the stars of the NFL have shown us anything, it’s that a deep and abiding humility is the key to football success.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/16/12

OK so Big Walnut Tech is obviously a Designated Villain in Funky Winkerbean: they routinely crush the Westview Scapegoats in football, and it was team star Frankie who got Dead Lisa pregnant (she was not yet dead at the time), so that Les could heroically give her a lift to the hospital and the Fairviews could get Darrin to adopt. And today Big Walnut Tech bests the Westview High crowd yet again, this time by remote control.

Sounds like a pretty interesting place, doesn’t it, this Big Walnut Tech? I’d like to know more about how their coach managed to maintain a consistently successful football program over so many years, and how they built an academic environment that develops clearly marketable skills in fields like robotics. And what about Frankie? Did he build on his high-school social and athletic successes to become a man of consequence? Were his dreams bigger than Westview?

I like to think of Frankie taking his final box of trophies out to the curb and drawing a last deep breath of Westview air, with its faint smell of bad pizza and flop sweat — then firing up his trusty old van, scene of so many conquests, and driving it down the sad main street out of town forever without a single glance in the rearview.

Judge Parker, 11/16/12

All along, Avery was just looking for a place to hang his hat and park his trout. He would see it clear enough if he took off those ridiculous glasses.

— Uncle Lumpy