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Pluggers, 11/27/20

I’ve done a lot of “This is not what a plugger is, come on, man” yelling on this blog of late, so you’d be forgiven for thinking I might rant similarly here. But if you, like me, enjoy the Star Trek franchise enough to spend any amount of time interacting with its online fanbase, you know that there are large swaths of said fanbase who are very mad about any of the newer shows because they’re too “woke” and violate series canon and aren’t real Trek and the only thing those people more passionate about than that is arguing about which of the older shows are also not real Trek. So yes, I regret to inform you that plugger Trekkies are absolutely 100% a thing.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/27/20

As various pharmaceutical giants announce what look to be very effective coronavirus vaccines and we begin to glimpse the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, we need to start looking back and assessing what happened over the past strange and sad year. And while it’s just a tiny little blip on the cultural landscape, I think we should take a moment to marvel at the fact that the only newspaper comic strip dedicated to medical drama took the biggest real-world medical story in the past hundred years and used it as grist for “Rex reacts grumpily to minor domestic irritations” material.

Mary Worth, 11/27/20

You think that’s going to impress Brandy, Tommy? A big pyramid of liquor bottles pointing triumphantly at the red star of communism? Brandy likes patriotic American boys, so better luck next time.

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Crankshaft, 11/25/20

Aw, look at Pam’s little smile in panel three! She’s like, “Normally Dad’s malapropisms make me cringe, but that one … that one’s OK.” She’s wrong, it’s not, it sucks just as bad as all the rest of them. She’s trapped in a horrible wordplay version of Stockholm Syndrome.

Mary Worth, 11/25/20

Tommy, no! Your descent into opioid-fueled madness began when you threw out your back lifting some heavy boxes! You’ve made so much progress — don’t fall back into addiction by eagerly volunteering to tempt fate just to impress Brandy or (even more pathetic) your boss!

Daddy Daze, 11/25/20

Today’s Daddy Daze dispenses with the pretense that the Daddy Daze baby is a “ba”-based interlocutor and shows us its reality for what it is: the Daddy Daze daddy just blathering baroque nonsense to nobody.

Slylock Fox, 11/25/20

I know I say a lot of Slylock Fox scenes have powerful “IT BEGINS” energy vis à vis the moment when the animals rise up to destroy human civilization and create the animal-ruled world where Slylock plies his trade as a detective, but you have to admit that the “IT BEGINS” energy in today’s strip is in fact extremely strong. Those birds are going peck that kid to death, then they’re going to eat the whole bag of birdseed, then they’re going to figure out how to run the birdseed factory, after pecking to death everyone who works there.

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Marvin, 11/21/20

I have to say, I really assumed that Marvin would quickly lose interest in Finn and Gill, the goldfish who hate Marvin, hate each other, and hate themselves, and would fall back into its easy rhythm of jokes about how babies — get this — aren’t toilet trained and almost seem to take a certain joy in pooping themselves. But obviously the narrative appeal of two goldfish who are condemned to spend the rest of their miserable lives with one another is impossible to resist. I was going to say “short, miserable lives” but a little Googling reveals that goldfish when well cared for can live longer than a decade, and anyway Marvin’s been a baby since 1982, so who knows how much longer these guys have to suffer with one another! They’re definitely going to be suffering a lot more once the Marvin crew realizes that fish just poop in their own bowl and then swim around in their own poop until someone cleans it out, which doesn’t strike me as something that’d be a particularly high priority for Marvin’s feckless family.

Mary Worth, 11/21/20

“I know your issues with family addiction and my own drug-using past make you nervous, baby, but let me assure you: you’re my drug now, and you’re the one I’ll do anything to possess, no matter who tries to stop me” –an email from a very smart and self-aware person who definitely is not going to be disappointed