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Pluggers, 7/10/15

I had a little difficulty parsing the text of today’s Pluggers — it’s actually a pretty good example of why I’m O.C. (Oxford comma) for lyfe. There was a brief moment where I thought maybe “Beltone and the Scooter Store” were a wacky morning DJ duo on the most old-person-friendly radio station around. In fact, they are, respectively, an apparently perfectly respectable hearing aid manufacturer and a company that manufactures mobility scooters that went out of business in 2013 after being having perpetrated upwards of $50 million in Medicare and Medicaid fraud. In other words, even Pluggers’ old-people cultural references are several years out of date! But the overall theme of today’s panel still stands: the U.S. Postal Service largely exists as a marketing tool for companies that try to make money off the elderly.

Mark Trail, 7/10/15

“Yes, we can afford this expensive office in a Manhattan high-rise because unlike literally every other print publication on the planet, Woods & Wildlife Magazine is insanely profitable, thanks to one thing: boat explosions. Our readers can’t get enough of them! So I don’t care what that wife of yours says, you’re going out on that boat, and if it doesn’t explode on its own, you make it explode, do you hear me?”

Heathcliff, 7/10/15

I spent a lot of time trying to relate this joke to the octopus having eight tentacles and Heathcliff having two feet and that adds up to ten, but then I realized that two of the octopus’s tentacles are being held aloft like arms and then also I checked with my perennial beginner surfer wife and she told me that the whole point of “hanging ten” is that all your toes are off the board, which is exactly what we’re not seeing here, so you know what? Screw you, Heathcliff. Screw you.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/10/15

“The reunion…! The one … foretold … in prophecy!” I have no idea where this is going but I’ll bet it’s gonna be pretty grim!

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Slylock Fox, 7/8/15

There’s a lot about this strip I find perfectly reasonable. It makes sense, obviously, in a world where predator and prey animals both recently found themselves suddenly sapient, that whatever social structures the earth’s new rulers borrowed from vanished humanity or created anew would have difficulty weighing a new morality against some citizens’ need to eat. It’s reasonable that our two police officers — a plant-munching rabbit and an omnivorous bear — wouldn’t have much sympathy for the hypercarnivorous wolf. It also makes intuitive sense to me that wolf would cast off his clothes before reverting to his animal nature and devouring a pig who, in theory, is his equal in the new dispensation. But the smiles on the faces of those other pigs? “Better him than us,” they seem to be thinking, and it chills me to the bone.

Mark Trail, 7/8/15

I do remember what happened to that boat, Cherry. It blew up, and it was awesome. Are you trying to deny another exciting boat explosion to Mark Trail readers, Cherry? What kind of monster are you?

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Apartment 3-G, 7/4/15

FUN FACT: Current Apartment 3-G artist Frank Bolle did the interior illustrations for many of the beloved Choose Your Own Adventure books published in the 1970s and ’80s, and I’m sincerely hoping today’s strip is a tribute to this. What exactly will the confusing, unsatisfying explanation for the recent weirdness in the strip surrounding Margo be? It all depends on you!

Mark Trail, 7/4/15

This Mark Trail strip is definitely from the opening minutes of a movie where a terrible plague makes the jump from shark to man, maybe transforming those unlucky few who don’t die right away into monstrous shark-human hybrids. So it’s probably for the best that Ken is calling in Mark Trail instead of, like, an actual veteranarian or some other kind of biologist or medical professional. We’ll need all of those we can get once the mass deaths really start getting underway; no need to expose them to the virus on day one.

Mary Worth, 7/4/15

Oh my God, Adam’s eye, staring emptily into the middle distance as Terry moves in for her smooch, is my everything. He’s finally won her heart — but at what cost? He suddenly realizes that the only way to stoke the fires of love within her is to join with her in escalating acts of violence. Sure, tonight they just subdued a convenient mugger, but he knows that won’t sate her bloodlust for long. Soon they’ll need to maim, to kill, and soon they won’t even use vigilante justice as a pretense. You’ve made your bed, Adam, and now you’ve got to lie in it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/4/15

This comic is here to remind you that the desperately poor are generally too busy with trying to survive to work for political change, and most revolutions erupt when an emerging middle class finds that they lack a political outlet for the rising economic power. Happy Fourth of July, America!