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Blondie, 11/4/19

I was going to say that Dagwood, who is apparently willing to stick his tongue into some sort of measuring/scanning apparatus and have the details of his mouth biology stored indefinitely in the cloud in order to prove his “loyalty” to a restaurant and get few percent knocked off his bill, represents the ultimate version of the modern human, willing to trade away his privacy for pennies. But then it occurred to me that restaurants could just do this with facial recognition, which makes me assume that this is actually just some kind of sick fetish idea on Dagwood’s part.

Mary Worth, 11/4/19

I fully expect that I’m going to be bringing you my close analysis of Wilbur’s Drunken Double Date multiple times this week. Today, as we learn that Zak does not subscribe to the cult of the grind prevalent among so many tech founders and game industry execs, we should pause and appreciate Wilbur’s facial expression in panel two, which is a pretty good illustration of a very, very drunk guy trying and almost succeeding in holding it together.

Dustin, 11/4/19

One of the core bits of Dustin lore that I already hate myself for knowing is that Dustin is a temp who gets assigned to generic white-collar office jobs from which he almost immediately gets fired because he sucks at them, but somehow his temp agency keeps finding him more work. Anyway, it’s definitely out of character for him to suddenly be given a job in the skilled trades, and I’d like to believe that it represents some narrative shift in the strip, but I’m assuming the cartoonist saw the phrase “Quick Lube” and thought, “Ha ha, you know who wouldn’t be quick at lubing things? That incompetent millennial Dustin!” We should probably be glad the strip ended up like this and not about sex stuff.

The Lockhorns, 11/4/19

My favorite thing about this strip is that Leroy has turned away from his wife and is heading into the bar while she narrates her disdain for him to some passerby. “Wife making mouth noises, but no time to process them,” he thinks. “Daylight waning, along with it opportunities for day drinking.”

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Pluggers, 10/18/19

The point of Pluggers, it seems to me, is that it’s meant to draw a distinction between pluggers and … the rest of the world, defined however you want (liberal elitists? big city folk? the young and the hip?). We might disagree on what exactly those distinctions are, on what communities the plugger community defines itself as not being, but I think we can all agree that today’s panel — “A plugger uses an extremely common slang term in an everyday situation” — is terrible, just terrible, carrying almost no semantic content to speak of. The good news: this means we’ve run out of meaningful things to say about pluggers, and can shut down this strip forever.

Dennis the Menace, 10/18/19

Wow, this is the Dennis the Menace that’s going to be haunting my nightmares! “What if he was your son, George?” asks Martha — his wife with whom, of course, he has no children — while George looks down at Dennis with a sort of detached contemplation. I have so many questions about this! Is this some weird little game they’re playing? Is Dennis already a participant in this fantasy, or do they hope he’ll catch on and play along? Why does she say “your” son instead of “our” son??? I guess the “punchline” is supposed to be turning that back on her — he’s not my son, I just married into him when I married you — but it’s such a weird way of doing it! What the hell, man? Seriously, what the hell?

The Lockhorns, 10/18/19

Honest to God, the first time I read this, I thought Leroy was talking to Loretta, and that he really had missed his trial and was going to jail soon. Which would be good, honestly! He should go to jail, for his crimes!

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Judge Parker, 10/5/19

Hey, remember back in April, when Marie quit her job as the Spencer-Driver compound’s primary servant so she could go to grad school? Well, turns out grad school’s expensive, so it looks like she will once again be taking on a job as a Spencer-Driver compound servant, only this time to “work part-time at” the ill-advised B&B Abbey launched in a fit of aimless mania, and by “work part-time at” we mean “do 100% of the management of as Abbey immediately stops paying attention to it once Marie shows up to bail her out.” Fortunately, Abbey is so far removed from the little people and their financial concerns that Marie will be able to write a truly staggering number of zeroes on that post-it note, safe in the knowledge that the Spencer-Driver money guy will just sigh heavily and sell a certain percentage of the family’s krugerrand reserves after Abbey hands it to him without ever having looked at it.

The Lockhorns, 10/5/19

The Lockhorns is not a strip known for its verisimilitude, but it is absolutely true that every single comedy club has a name that sounds like someone was held at gunpoint and forced to come up with twenty “funny” nonsense names for comedy clubs, and then they used the twentieth one the poor victim came up with, the one that came only after five minutes of them crying and begging to be allowed to see their family again someday. So, yeah, I absolutely believe that the place Loretta would try to drag Leroy into in an attempt to be able to spend time with him without talking and maybe have him get made fun of by touring comic who’s not at all happy to be there would be called “Cachinnation’s,” and I find the font believable as well.

Pluggers, 10/5/19

Pluggers have long centered their identity around living in exurban communities that are so completely built around the automobile that pedestrians are considered cultural aberrations, but it’s honestly surprising to me that they’re being so up front about it.

Mary Worth, 10/5/19

So … it looks like Mary Worth has chosen, over the next several weeks, to show us, in a very deliberately paced series of strips, Wilbur and Estelle having sex? I guess … I guess we deserve this, for something we did, somewhere along the line.