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Archive: Judge Parker

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The hidden cost of Sunday dinner

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Beetle Bailey, 6/25/17

This is an example of a strip that only really works with the top row of throwaway panels — so called because they’re often excised by papers looking to cram more into their comics section — in place. Without them, this is just a basic Beetle Bailey strip about General Halftrack giving a long, boring speech about himself. But those first panels drive home a pair of exquisite yet offsetting tragedies: that Halftrack, desperate for affirmation and yet wholly unloved, has arranged this ceremony for himself; and that Halftrack’s creeping dementia has caused him to forget that he’s done so, which might allow him to feel briefly good about his life during the ceremony. I assume that the award is small scale model of the pyramid in which he will soon be buried, along with his staff.

Dennis the Menace, 6/25/17

Wow, if I had to guess which Sunday strip was going to peel away our assumptions and get us talking about the hidden nature of uncompensated domestic labor, Dennis the Menace would not have been high on the list.

Judge Parker, 6/25/17

“You always ask that five minutes before it’s done. And you always ask me, as if I’m making dinner! Our paid servant is doing all the work! She’s right there, you could at least make eye contact with her.”

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He’s not even using binoculars! He’s just that good

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Blondie, 5/24/17

I gotta respect today’s Blondie: at first I thought it was going to try to go back to the well of “Oh no, the scientific classifications of objects in our solar system have changed since I was a child, and I have not gotten over it despite the fact that it happened literally more than a decade ago.” But then it took a sharp turn into much less explored territory: ever since the turn of the millennium, all of what we perceive as our “existence” is really a vast computationally generated simulacrum that we can dimly understand by thinking about our own crude social networks. What is a planet? What is real? The only ones who know are those who set the rules for our reality — and those rules, and their makers, are utterly inscrutable to us.

Dick Tracy, 5/24/17

Meanwhile, Dick and the Major Crimes Unit are closing in on the Margies, who are not only mid-level cosplay convention grifters but also, apparently, anti-Semitic vandals? Ugh. Anyway, all Dick Tracy trufans are going to be thrilled when Dick cracks this case using one of his most beloved and widely known skills: satchel recognition at a distance.

Judge Parker, 5/24/17

Wow, Abby’s dad shaves and puts on a nice suit when he poses for a photo with his secret family. But when he’s just chillin’ at home, arguing with his real wife about his infidelities, he grows a gross mustache and wears a collared shirt on top of another collared shirt for some reason. Sad!

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FUN FACT FOR THE DAY: We’re all slowly dying!!!!

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Judge Parker, 5/16/17

Everyone who had “the kidnapper is Abbey’s half-sister from her dad’s secret family” in the pool, stand up and take a bow! I’m enjoying the punchline of “Sam doesn’t recognize what his own wife looked like as a child,” though I suppose in a scenario where you see a picture of a kid that looks more or less like pictures you’ve seen of your wife as a kid, and the kid in the picture is standing in front of someone who’s definitely your wife’s dad, you would just kind of assume. Plus the hair! Who else would have that clownish color of hair? It must be a Spencer gene that passes down through the male line but only expresses itself in females! The fact that the grownup kidnapper has bland brown hair means nothing: clearly she’s keeping her Spencertude in disguise, waiting to reveal it at just … the right … moment. Either that or the syndicate coloring folks have been doing it wrong this whole time, ha ha, who can tell!

Pluggers, 5/16/17

A Twitter follower pointed out to me last week that the length of time I’ve been writing this blog is longer than the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes, which is definitely a fact that doesn’t make me want to hop into a coffin and close the lid behind me, at all! Anyway, one of the signs of time’s inevitable passing and my own impending death is the treatment of technology in Pluggers. Way back in the early years of this blog, in the mid ’00s, pluggers hated and feared the Internet so much that they’d rather thumb through an almanac than get access to the wealth of knowledge online. Today, they’re still eschewing the Web’s more educational functions, but they are definitely not above joining their children and grandchildren in the performative dance of social media, in which our every waking moment becomes a quantum of digital information to be shared and ranked.

Crankshaft, 5/16/17

At least I’m not so old that I’m excited about the appearance of some pro golfer in Crankshaft, though! CONFIDENTIAL TO PEOPLE WHO EXPERIENCED ANY GLIMMER OF ENTHUSIASM FROM READING THIS STRIP: it’s just a drawing, and there are lots of reference photos online, he didn’t actually have to participate in the creation of it in any way, SORRY