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Family Circus, 8/17/22

The Keanes have been on vacation in New York City for a couple weeks now, in a series of panels that are actually reruns from decades ago; Don McHoull on Twitter pointed out that the Twin Towers were replaced by the modern-day Freedom Tower in last Friday’s episode, which was a surprise to me because I had been assuming that the originals were from before the Twin Towers were built in the first place in 1972. Very little else has been done to modernize the strips; today’s, for instance, reminds us of an era when telling the world that your restaurant was AIR CONDITIONED was a solid way to differentiate yourself from your competition. Sadly, I initially misread the awning sign as AIR CONDITIONERS, and got irrationally angry at Billy (it doesn’t take much) and was about to write a whole screed here on the theme of “You little shit, you think you’re gonna order a HAMBURGER at an APPLIANCE STORE???” His actual transgressions is a bit more normal than that so I’ll leave it be.

Pluggers, 8/17/22

I feel very protective of the idea that pluggerdom represents a specific cultural and socioeconomic position, but here we have yet another canonical Pluggers panel taunting me with the fact that sometimes the whole gimmick is just “all-number calling was rolled out nationwide by the early 1960s, so you’re a plugger if you’re older than about 63.” Why this particular take on the plugger mythos is accompanied by a particularly pissed-off bear in overalls holding up a sign the size of a license plate that doesn’t have enough digits on it to be an actual phone number is not clear to me, but I guess Pluggers knows its business.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/17/22

I am a middle-aged married man without children and so it goes without saying that I am very out of touch with what the kids today are up to, but I am given to understand they will often say they’re “talking” to someone as a euphemism for the early stages of romance, which can run the gamut from flirting in DMs to having actual sex but not yet defining their relationship or committing to monogamy. I guess the son half of this father-son duo, who appears to be 5-10 years older than I am and is therefore one of the younger characters in Rex Morgan, M.D., is at that stage in the process of wooing a nice lady he met at a funeral, but is showing his maturity by referring to it as “chatting.” Anyway, he’s gonna leave his dad alone to go get laid! Hopefully the old guy isn’t gonna drop dead while he’s gone, that would make the whole thing pretty awkward.

Mary Worth, 8/17/22

“Oh, yeah, your dad? Your terrible, terrible dad? I’ve been watching you turn into him for years, honey, but I wasn’t gonna say anything until you came crawling to me begging for help.” Truly Mary must completely break down her victims in order to build them back up in her image.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/16/22

Feel like it’s been a long time since I saw someone actually smoking a tobacco cigarette in a newspaper comic strip, and while I hadn’t thought about it much, I think I unconsciously assumed there was some kind of Hayes Code-style agreement that we wouldn’t depict such a thing in a medium intended for children. But maybe I’m wrong about that, or maybe there was a collective recognition over at Beetle Bailey central that nobody cares anymore and definitely no children are reading Beetle Bailey, so why not be free, for certain limited definitions of “being free,” which is to say free to depict Rocky, the camp’s resident “bad boy” (non-sexual division), enjoying a cigarette held at arm’s length and Beetle being weirdly passive aggressive about it.

Mary Worth, 8/16/22

Part of being a true alpha predator like Mary is knowing when to sit back and let your prey come to you. Dawn is wasting absolutely no time in flinging herself emotionally prostate at Mary’s feet, and Mary, as you can see in panel two, is sitting absolutely still, with a fully neutral facial expression, to allow the maximum emotional purging to take place on its own before the meddling process begins. I assume she’s about to lift that lemonade to her lips and make the quietest sip humanly possible as Dawn spirals into a vivid description of her hateful emotional inheritance.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/16/22

Oh, sorry, I guess we’re gonna be spending this week doing a wellness check on all of this strip’s elderly characters. How is this dynamic duo of pinball maniacs doing? Well, I guess I hope to one day live to be quite old, and maybe by that time I’ll have earned the right to answer innocent conversation starters like “How’s it goin’, pop?” with musings on my own mortality that are faux cheery and also reveal that I don’t really understand how aging and dying works.

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Mary Worth, 8/14/22

Behold DaWnilbur, everyone! I love the way this matches up with realistic dream logic in that Dawn was spending hours before falling asleep saying “It’s like I’m turning into my father!” but once in the dreamscape she’s totally unsuspecting and when her hair starts falling out she doesn’t immediately grasp the metaphor, but just looks at it quizzically as the Transformation gets underway. Anyway, I truly enjoy the next-to-last panel here, in which we learn that even fully Wilburized, Dawn will still have pretty, pretty eyes.

Dick Tracy, 8/14/22

It’s never been entirely clear what form of energy the Lunarians harness/generate with their antennae, but I guess we now know that it definitely raises temperature, right? Like if poor Marina had been torn apart by, like, magnetism or antigravity or something, her killers wouldn’t be staring at the carnage in icy disdain making a cruel remark about how it all smelled, the way they would about charred flesh? Or maybe they would. I don’t know what it smells like when someone is killed horribly by space aliens, I live my life correctly, thank you very much.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/14/22

Here’s a strip where the throwaway panels at the beginning make the whole thing profoundly sad. Like, Jughaid was explicitly invited to join a band, and but then sometime afterwards either left or was forced out and is now trying and failing to make it as a solo act. What emotionally fraught Fleetwood Mac-level band drama are we not being shown here?