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Crock, 3/18/25

I kind of admire the thought process that went into constructing the current installment of “The Men Of Outpost 5 Read Letters From One Of The Men’s Hillbilly Hometown.” Obviously, you have this great joke about how the one guy is a dumb hillbilly who may have mastered the mechanical art of tying a shoe but doesn’t understand how the process fits into the larger context, where you generally tie both your shoes at once. But what gets me is how they decided to set that punchline up. What if he’s prompted to reminisce on this subject because his beloved friend and mentor died? What if he’s in mourning? That sure adds a fun little twist to the gag!

Marvin, 3/18/25

Marvin, the comic strip, debuted in 1982, so if time flowed normally for its cursèd inhabitants, then Marvin, the character, would be in his early 40s, and his parents would have long ago forgotten his awful infancy, which only lasted a couple of years, after all, or at least they would have sanded down the edges in constant retelling into a “we can laugh about it now” situation. But time doesn’t flow normally, and Marvin will remain a baby forever, and his parents will neither know the escape of him growing up nor ever truly get used to the horror. Thus the exclamation points in the second panel here: while this is the sort of bad behavior we expect from this terrible child, his parents are forever shocked anew, each psychic wound inflicted never healing into protective scar tissue.

Pluggers, 3/18/25

Pluggers long ago lost the ability to feel sexual arousal. But products? Well, pluggers sure do love a good product — looking at them, assessing them, trying to figure out how much they cost, then either nodding their head at a good price or shaking their heads at how expensive things are these days. They still have those pleasures, at least, even though others have long passed them by.

B.C. and Wizard of Id, 3/18/25

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the courting mores of modern times were mapped onto a previous era — the Stone Age, say, or a vaguely medieval period that also had magic in it? Well, today’s B.C. and Wizard of Id have the answers for you, my friends!

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Marvin, 3/1/25

When I was in graduate school, I was the TA for a class taught by an elderly British professor who was eccentric in ways that were variously entertaining (he took snuff in the middle of lecture, much to the students’ confusion and horror) and off-putting (the class was “Intro to Western Civ” but he built it around four or five specific and obscure topics from ancient Greece and Rome for which the students had no real context but which he found interesting). He wanted no contact with undergraduates beyond lectures, and we were expected to run interference for him. I didn’t think much of him as an educator, as you might be able to tell, but I didn’t wish any specific ill upon him. I later learned that he had, after being married his entire adult life, been recently widowed; because he no longer had anyone to cook for him, he was losing weight, but he also didn’t have anyone to pick out new clothes for him, and so one day, in the middle of lecture, his pants started to slowly fall down. There was a brief moment when my fellow TA and I looked at each other in horror — was it our job to intervene? — but he did eventually realize what was happening and pull them up, continuing to write on the chalkboard the entire time, and nobody ever said anything about it, not even the students, who generally liked to ask about his odd behavior during section in an attempt to avoid talking about the ancient world. This incident made a big impression on me, and I’ve thought a lot about what it says about what happens when you age or when your life circumstances abruptly change, and I bet a not insignificant number of older men go through something similar. So if I were the syndicated newspaper comic strip Marvin, I don’t think I’d be so cavalier about old people losing a bunch of weight and their pants falling down in public, because let me tell you, even though this strip is ostensibly about a baby and his parents, old people are reading it. Old people are all the comics have left! Don’t freak them out!

Archie, 3/1/25

When I was in high school, I was on the speech and debate team, and my senior year we organized a tournament at our school, with us students put in charge of doing a lot of the scut work for it. One of my tasks was to get the trophies, and let me tell you, discovering that you could just go to a store and buy a trophy that says you’re the best debater or whatever completely rewired how I thought about trophies and awards. They’re just things you can buy! They’re not even that expensive! Anyway, as a high school principal, I assume Mr. Weatherbee has a preferred trophy vendor and buys in bulk, and under those circumstances I have to imagine that temptation to do little bits like this would be overwhelming.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/1/25

Not sure why, but I really enjoy the choice to set this cartoon on a plane. They could’ve done the same joke in a restaurant, but this just seems more specific, which I like. I’m sure that smells great in an enclosed space!

Luann, 3/1/25

How’s Luann’s date with some guy named “Phil” or whatever going? Well, good news: she’s been told up front that she will not be getting any action at the end of it, which should really make it an enjoyable experience overall.

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Pluggers, 1/31/25

I actually sleep with a second pillow — not because it prevents me from falling out of bed, how would that even work, honestly it makes no sense to me and looking at the drawing doesn’t make it make more sense, also do grown adults fall out of bed, this is insane — but just because I like to hold onto something while I sleep, probably a habit I picked up with stuffed animals as a kid and never truly grew out of. Very early in our relationship my wife started referring to this pillow as my “girlfriend,” a term that has stuck to this day. Anyway, that’s a long way to explain why the first thing I thought when I saw this panel was “the caption should be ‘plugger polyamory,’” which is bad, but you have to admit a lot less bad than a lot of Pluggers panels that could be captioned “plugger polyamory” might be.

Marvin, 1/31/25

Honestly if I had to pick a favorite kind of Marvin strip, it would be the ones where it’s made obvious how much Marvin’s parents dislike each other. I presume it’s because each holds the other primarily responsible for the creation of Marvin, whom they dislike even more.

Family Circus, 1/31/25

God, look at how happy she is. He’s almost asleep! Several blessed hours of unconscious Jeffy time, coming right up!