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Pluggers, 5/25/17

Here’s a true story: I turned 40 just before I moved to LA, and for like a solid year, I thought, “Wow, this place is so hipper-than-thou that they have low mood lighting in all the restaurants! I can’t read any of these menus!” It wasn’t until the day I took my wedding ring off to read the inscription, only to find it had somehow become a series of illegible blurs, that it occurred to me that maybe it was my eyes that were the problem.

Now I wear bifocals and getting them honestly made me feel like I had been faith-healed, and so when I stumbled on this panel, in which a dog-man is reading his anniversary date off the inside of his wedding ring without any vision correction help, I had to ask myself: who’s the real plugger here? This dog-man, whose eyesight is as keen (and presumably whose sense of smell is as powerful and coat is as shiny) as it was the day he was married? Or me, who looks at his wedding ring inscription through glasses for sentimental reasons only, since my anniversary (and a one-week-in-advance alert) has long ago been synced to all my devices’ calendars via iCloud?

UPDATE: haha, he IS wearing glasses, darkness is closing in all around me, welp

Crankshaft, 5/25/17

Haha, yesterday Lillian proposed to these girls that they do some “research” and I almost made a joke that they were off to do some murders or something! Anyway, obviously this is just classic harmless old lady stuff where you do suspicious things and offer no explanation because how could anyone suspect you of being a bad person, and I’m very much looking forward to Lilian’s trial for attempted murder and child endangerment.

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Mary Worth, 5/22/17

Oh, did you think that Entertainer Esmé’s sinister plan to win Derek’s love by locking his wife Katie in a Haitian bathroom failed just because Derek quickly found and rescued her? Well, you’ve got another thing coming! Look at the sinister, knowing way she’s gazing down at the grateful but rattled Hoosiers. Obviously she never expected Katie to stay in that bathroom for long. Obviously that was just the first move in a very long game of sexual chess that ends with Derek as her lover. I remain extremely here for this storyline, is what I’m saying.

Marvin, 5/22/17

I don’t really keep up with the “game show scene” so I had to actually Google to see if Can You Top This? were a real game show. It’s not, unless you want to count an “unrehearsed” “radio panel game” from the 1940’s “in which comedians told jokes and tried to top one another”, which, around here we call that a podcast, not a game show. Anyway, it took me a minute to realize that, unlike poor Bubba Watson, Drew Carey isn’t quite being referred to by name here, which makes sense because you’d think drawing a public figure presiding over a game show where dead-eyed contestants describe getting hit in the face with streams of urine would open you up to lawsuits.

Blondie, 5/22/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Mr. Dithers’s wife doesn’t want to spend time with him!

Pluggers, 5/22/17

Pluggers’ day-to-day lives involve coming up with coping strategies as their accumulated filth piles up around them. It’s really quite sad!

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Dennis the Menace, 5/20/17

Ooh, look at that facial expression on Dennis: that’s the look of a kid who, against his better judgement and true sentiment, is about to agree with a bigger, meaner kid and mock his good pal Mr. Wilson for his low-tech ways. Dennis is about to become the most menacing things around: someone who, under social pressure from a bully, turns on one of his friends.

Pluggers, 5/20/17

Whoa there, this panel is veering dangerously towards questioning plugger orthodoxy on the Second Amendment, which among other things dictates that boxes of ammunition should be the easiest kinds of packages to open! Anyway, this plugger’s facial expression indicates that someone in the supply chain that produced this bag of chips is soon going to be tasting hot lead; unfortunately, it’s probably going to not be the packaging engineer who designed the bag but rather the poor sap at the gas station who sold it to him.

Family Circus, 5/20/17

As a rule, I assume all Family Circus panels consist of repurposed art from 1975 or earlier, and sometimes when the caption refers to contemporary pop culture or technology, I try to guess what the original was. In this case, I’m thinking it was “You hang that up right now, Jeffy! Phones don’t work in cars! This is the devil’s work, do you hear me? THE DEVIL’S WORK”