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Beetle Bailey, 12/14/17

The thing about this strip that most irritates me is that it presumes an entirely unearned affection readers have for Beetle Bailey’s antic wackiness. “Ha ha, that’s our Camp Swampy!” says literally nobody. But to get into the specific details that annoy me, let’s take on the fact that panel two is a crowd scene and Beetle Bailey has tons of established but rarely used characters to draw from and yet the background is populated by people we’ve enver seen before. I’m not sure who I feel more drawn to: the two ladies running by in wide-eyed, manic glee, one of whom I’m reasonably sure is holding a giant knife over her head, or the dead-eyed, joyless guy who seems to be thinking “Really? I’m the only black person in this strip and they’ve got me playing basketball? Really?”

Spider-Man, 12/14/17

Oh, hey, MYSTERY SOLVED, it turns out that scruffy dude hanging out in the swamp rescuing Mary Jane from various reptiles wasn’t some random low-level superhero/Marvel character at all but was actually the Incredible Hulk! Or, I guess, it was Bruce Banner, who’s a nuclear physicist and … I’m not sure why he’d be in a swamp, actually? Or why he’d have the knife skills to chop of a snake’s head to save MJ? Still, the important thing is that, as scientists who occasionally transform into monstrous green creatures, Doctors Banner and Connors are gonna have a lot to talk about, eventually! Like, for instance, that terrible deep gash on Dr. Connors’ leg, and whether he should just double down and root around in his box of potions to see if he can find one that will regrow two limbs.

Lockhorns, 12/14/17

Usually characters trapped in endless, unchanging comic-book time go through their eternal-now lives blissfully unaware of the strangeness of their existence. However, thanks to this seemingly innocent question posed by their therapists, the Lockhorns, who have been in their middle age for almost fifty years now, have been forced to confront the eternity that stretches before them. Having both long consoled themselves that at least death will free them from their mutual prison, they are understandable despondent.

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Pluggers, 10/4/17

Do you guys know about Just Watch? It’s a great site where you can plug in pretty much any movie or TV show you can think of and it’ll tell you which of the innumerable streaming and paid download sites out there has it available. (There are probably tons of others, but this is the one I use.) Anyway, I plugged Gunsmoke into it and found…

So I immediately take back all the unkind thoughts I had about Older Dog-Man here. You’ve hit the jackpot, buddy! Your meticulously catalogued collection of videotapes, kept secured in your locked Gunsmoke Closet,represent a resource more precious than gold in the plugger community. Of curse, videotape is an analog medium, and with each viewing the tape degrades, so you’ve got to be smart about rationing wholesome Western entertainment. That’s why you have to make sure that your fellow pluggers pay a price that reflects both market demand and the irreplaceable nature of the resource before you allow them to sit enraptured and watch 333×480 black-and-white imagery flicker across the flat-screen TV that your nephew, after much coaxing, finally hooked up to your wheezing old VCR. He doesn’t get a cut. You sent him $5 for his birthday every year until he turned 18. And you dutifully hit “Record” on the tape machine every night at 11 for years when they still played decent syndicated TV on that UHF channel that’s all half-hour commercials for kitchen stuff now. You’ve earned this.

Lockhorns, 10/4/17

Even see a comic that just seems really stuck in a specific time period, like the Lockhorns with its sort of early-to-mid ’60s suburban vibe, and think, “You know, this strip should really get in touch with a more modern set of cultural touchstones if it wants to stay relevant”? Well, be careful what you ask for, is all I’m saying.

Marvin, 10/4/17

Wait, does Marvin’s dad think that women … don’t use toilets? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it seems this strip has yet to fully explore all of its characters’ terrible and wrongheaded ideas about urination and defecation.

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Six Chix, 9/24/17

This comic is like one of those ambiguous Gestalt pictures from Psych 101 — how you interpret it depends on where you focus.

Concentrate on the pavement crack that disappears in the lower panels, and the horrifying Cyclops-girl somehow “poings” all the concrete back into place, trapping the pavement worker’s jackhammer, and he struggles to release it. But focus on the resemblance between the jackhammer and the pogo stick, and the worker suddenly realizes that tedious work with a noisy tool has replaced carefree play with a favorite toy, and he cries for his lost childhood.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/24/17

Funky prepares a Thermos® of coffee to take on his run but leaves it at home. Now Runner’s World seems to favor drinking coffee before a run, but I’ve never heard of anybody drinking it during one. And out of a Thermos®? He’s not wearing a backpack; how did he plan to carry it? How would he drink out of it, anyway — wouldn’t he have to stop, pull it out, and open it to fill his cup? And wouldn’t most of it spill out once he started running again? Maybe that’s the plan, to bring coffee along so he has an excuse to stop every once in a while? He might need to stop a lot, since he has prostate problems and probably needs to pee pretty often. Maybe all that’s wrong and he drank his coffee at home before his run, but out of a Thermos® instead of a mug? But why would anybody do that when there’s a set of drinking glasses right there? Wait, why is there a set of drinking glasses next to the coffee maker?

Why are the throwaway panels on the bottom this week?

Lockhorns, (panel) 9/24/17

I would’ve gone with A Rake’s Progress, but OK. What’s the conflict here? Border dispute? Feud between the Binner and Bagger clans? Mulch ado about nothing?

That’s it for me — thank you for a lovely time!

— Uncle Lumpy