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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/4/16

So the Morgans seem determined to buy a bloated modern house instead of a fusty, antique-cluttered Victorian with bad romantic karma. But even soulless McMansions from the ’90s have a little character, as Sarah is discovering in the delightful little “hidden” “awesome” “kid-sized only” “playroom” under the stairs that someone less whimsical might call “storage space” or “a terrible accident waiting to happen.” Anyway, note the little “SECRET CLUBHOUSE FOR KIDS ONLY SIGN” already hanging up on the wall, indicating that the “little character” I mentioned in the previous sentence is the ghost of the six-year-old who died after getting trapped in there in 2004.

Shoe, 10/4/16

Haha, I absolutely love the emotional turn this strip takes in the final panel. It would’ve been easy to have our lady bird deliver the punchline with heavy-lidded, languid bitterness, and maybe that was her intention; instead, upon just thinking about her ex-husband, her eyes bug out with anger as she realizes, in a rush of emotion, that she isn’t past the awful end of that relationship, and probably never will be.

Pluggers, 10/4/16

Little-known fact: about ten years ago, I made a list of signs that will indicate that we live in a truly degraded age, and “Pluggers does a Viagra joke” was pretty close to the top! Anyway, pluggers gave up on sex years ago, and their main hope for a big romantic encounter is that their joints stop hurting for a few hours, at least enough so they can focus on what their date is saying.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/3/16

I make fun of the Funkyverse visual convention whereby flashback panels are depicted as sepia-toned photographs that look like they’re supposed to be in a photo album, but really, that’s perfectly fine as a quick signal of what we’re looking at, even if, since most of the time periods being flashed back to are well into the era digital photography, it doesn’t really make literal sense. It’s like Microsoft Word using a 3.5 inch floppy disk as a symbol for “save to disk,” or your smartphone using an outline of a classic bakelite phone handset for the app you actually use to make phone calls: sure, it’s kind of goofy, but everyone pretty much knows what it means, and it’s not like I have any ideas for how to do it better.

But unless today’s strip is the result of a complete brain fart over at Ol’ Daily Comics Coloring Central, I’m really at a loss to understand what’s supposed to be going on here. My first thought was that maybe the Starbuck Jones movie is being shot in black and white, for nostalgic purposes, or maybe because it seemed to work for Schindler’s List. But then I realized that of course we’re not looking at the movie itself but the process of filming said movie, so, like, I dunno. Maybe they think this is how you make a black and white movie: by putting all the actors in grey makeup and shooting them against a grey background and grey props. Everyone on set needs to be made up, too. Not a single speck of color can be even accidentally visible!

Pluggers, 10/3/16

Things pluggers don’t have access to, as near as I can tell from today’s Pluggers:

• Computers or Internet-capable cellphones of the sort that could give a complete list of football scores at a moment’s notice.
• A television that might recap those scores (I guess we already knew this)
• Friends who might be up on what happened in this week’s games
• Any sense of community or connection to society at large
• Even extremely small amounts of money

Beetle Bailey, 10/3/16

Guys, have … have we considered that Beetle might be dead?

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Shoe, 9/21/16

You know how you can look at something for every day for years and never really notice it, until one day a slight shift in perspective totally blows your mind? Well, I read this dumb joke about how Shoe, the title character of the strip Shoe, spends a lot of time at strip clubs, and I was starting to work myself up to a joke about how the very idea of sexy live nude bird-women really brings to the fore the uncomfortable realities of how the bird-people of Shoe have both avian and mammalian characteristics, when suddenly I realized:

Shoe doesn’t wear clothes.

Every other bird-person in this strip wears clothes! Not Shoe. He wears white low-top sneakers and smokes cigars but otherwise goes around fully nude. And everyone just goes along with this! What … what is going on here. Why is he naked all the time. WHYYYYY

Mary Worth, 9/21/16

I’m kind of surprised that this SAMHSA-approved substance abuse counselor is doing his intake with his newest adult patient with his mother sitting right there in the room with him, or that he seems to be taunting him for his inability to score Vicodin. I’m not that familiar with the treatment modalities for opioid addiction, though. I’m learning just like you all are!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/16

Becky’s wordless emotional arc here, as she goes from hope that her husband’s obsessive geekery might actually improve their family’s financial situation for once to mingled anger and crushing despair, is legitimately the best-executed thing on the comics pages today.

Pluggers, 9/21/16

Pluggers haven’t had sex for years, guys. Years.