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Blondie, 6/5/17

Hi there, I’m a guy who reads and writes about the comics every day and yet I’m genuinely baffled about what the “joke” is in today’s Blondie! Is it about how Dagwood’s shoes are large and clownish? (Does the Blondie artistic team even recognize how large and clownish Dagwood’s shoes are anymore?) Or is it just that, ha ha, joining the circus sure is an inappropriately whimsical fantasy for an adult to have! Anyway, joke’s on you, buddy: nobody wants to see the circus anymore, either.

Beetle Bailey, 6/5/17

Wow, Sarge looks genuinely sad in panel two, full of regrets about the vicious beatings his delivers on the daily to his hapless subordinate. Not sad enough to do anything about it, of course — the world doesn’t change so easily. But the thrill is clearly gone.

Pluggers, 6/5/17

Ha ha, pluggers’ cars are just straight-up full of garbage! Just like their kitchen cabinets, and the rest of their homes! I’m starting to worry about pluggers, guys.

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Spider-Man, 6/3/17

OH MY GOD, NEWSPAPER SPIDER-MAN, WHICH I ALREADY DECLARED MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO COMIC OF ALL TIME, HAS JUST NAME-CHECKED AN OBSCURE FIGURE FROM LATE ANTIQUITY, THE HISTORICAL PERIOD THAT I STUDIED DURING MY ABORTIVE ACADEMIC CAREER! Was today’s strip written specifically for me? Probably! Anyway, let’s go through a quick rundown of all the interesting details and historical inaccuracies they’ve managed to pack into just a few sentences:

• The historical figure in question was actually named Romulus, which (IRONY ALERT) was also the name of the legendary founder and first ruler of Rome. The -ulus ending was a diminutive in Latin, so Romulus means “Little Rome.” Augustus was one of the Roman titles for emperor, and during his reign Romulus was known as Romulus Augustus; Augustulus, meaning “little emperor,” was a nickname given to him by later historian.

• Romulus was, if not little, at least young: he was emperor for only a year, and he was 16 at the time. His father Orestes, who was a Roman general, was the real power behind the throne.

• Tyrannus is the origin of our word tyrant, but in Latin in the 5th century A.D. it didn’t necessarily mean “a cruel ruler,” as it’s come to mean in English; instead, it meant someone who had usurped a throne from a legitimate ruler, without much by way of value judgement beyond that. This is actually an appropriate name for Romulus, then, because he became Emperor when his father overthrew Julius Nepos, the legitimate Romen ruler.

• Romulus’s claim to be “the last Roman emperor” is actually pretty tenuous. In the 5th century A.D. there were usually two Roman emperors, one ruling from Italy and the other from Constantinople; over the course of the century, the western half of the empire fell apart due to external invasion and internal fragmentation, while the eastern pulled through in one piece; by the 470s, the Western Roman government only controlled Italy and the western Balkans. When Orestes put Romulus on the throne, Julius Nepos fled to Dalmatia, where he was from, and continued to rule there. Then, a year later, Odoacer, the German general who was in charge of most of the Western Roman army, killed Orestes, deposed Romulus, and placed himself under the authority of the distant Eastern Emperor, although in practice he ruled Italy as his own kingdom. Julius Nepos, the legitimate Western Emperor, ruled Dalmatia until he was killed in 480, and the emperors in Constantinople kept doing their thing (and called themselves “Roman Emperors,” although the empire was eventually almost entirely Greek) all the way until 1453.

• Because Romulus was only a teenager, Odoacer spared his life, sent him to live with his family in southern Italy, and even gave him a pension. He pretty much vanishes from history at that point, though there’s a preserved letter from a Roman administrator that might indicate that he was still receiving his pension more than 30 years later. So is it possible that he became eternally undead due to forbidden sorcery and now seeks to claim an underground empire to compensate for the realm that was stolen from him when he was a boy? Sure, why not!

Marvin, 6/3/17

Marvin may be an awful-hell infant who’s willing to stew in his own shit-filled diapers forever just to annoy his parents, but even he understands the basic concepts of consent.

Pluggers, 6/3/17

No matter how deep pluggers get into hoarding, they can never fill the hole in their lives left by the family that abandoned them.

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Blondie and Beetle Bailey, 5/29/17

Memorial Day is supposed to be dedicated to honoring those who died in the service to the United States. As it originally developed in the 1860s, this was generally understood to mean specifically those who died defending the Union in the Civil War, which is why it wasn’t observed in the South until after World War I, but in recent decades the “killed” part is more and more frequently elided until now people mostly treat it as an extra Veterans Day, where you’re supposed to be nice to people in the military generally, like Dag and Blondie are to their neighbor who has a wildly differing anatomy than they do. I can’t decide if Beetle Bailey’s refusal to mention Memorial Day at all is better or worse than Blondie’s take. Perhaps they want to acknowledge that, since Camp Swampy seems to exist in a division of the military completely isolated from any combat activities, none of the characters even know anyone killed in battle, so a Memorial Day strip would be inappropriate.

Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 5/29/17

But no matter who we supported during the War of Northern Aggression, we can all agree about one thing when it comes to Memorial Day: grilling is fun! Almost as much fun as contemplating the tangled chronology of the Funkyverse strips, something said strips seem determined to force me to do no matter how little I want to! Today’s strips really bring home the comic book time nature of the Funkyverse’s chronology. If one of us living in the ordinary space-time continuum mentioned “something that happened every year, ten years ago” it would sound like nonsense, but it fits in with the nature of Funky-reality: Funky Winkerbean takes place a decade after Crankshaft, and both strips cycle through the calendar but never actually move forward into the future. The implication that those Centerville explosions stopped around ten years ago is truly chilling, because it means that Crankshaft himself is always on the verge of dying, but his cruel creator will never let him cross over to the other side of the veil.

Crock, 5/29/17

I know that most of us read the colorized comics online these days, but keep in mind that the daily strips are still created with a black-and-white newspaper medium in mind. That means that the original artist punted an important decision to the syndicate coloring staffer today: are we to understand these implements to be made of camel flesh, and thus the same color as the rest of this beast, as the lack of any line at their bases might indicate? Or should they be thought of as metal blades that have burst forth through the camel’s skin and muscle? While the colorist has clearly gone the second route, I’m disappointed that he didn’t follow that idea to its logical conclusion and add copious amounts of blood.

Pluggers, 5/29/17

Pluggers are of course nightmarish man-animal chimeras who realize that they are abominations against God’s law, so obviously they go out of their way to avoid looking at themselves. (I was originally going to write “Ha ha! Pluggers hate their bodies and are full of self-loathing,” which is of course the actual joke of this panel, but then I got too sad.)