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Judge Parker, 5/16/17

Everyone who had “the kidnapper is Abbey’s half-sister from her dad’s secret family” in the pool, stand up and take a bow! I’m enjoying the punchline of “Sam doesn’t recognize what his own wife looked like as a child,” though I suppose in a scenario where you see a picture of a kid that looks more or less like pictures you’ve seen of your wife as a kid, and the kid in the picture is standing in front of someone who’s definitely your wife’s dad, you would just kind of assume. Plus the hair! Who else would have that clownish color of hair? It must be a Spencer gene that passes down through the male line but only expresses itself in females! The fact that the grownup kidnapper has bland brown hair means nothing: clearly she’s keeping her Spencertude in disguise, waiting to reveal it at just … the right … moment. Either that or the syndicate coloring folks have been doing it wrong this whole time, ha ha, who can tell!

Pluggers, 5/16/17

A Twitter follower pointed out to me last week that the length of time I’ve been writing this blog is longer than the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes, which is definitely a fact that doesn’t make me want to hop into a coffin and close the lid behind me, at all! Anyway, one of the signs of time’s inevitable passing and my own impending death is the treatment of technology in Pluggers. Way back in the early years of this blog, in the mid ’00s, pluggers hated and feared the Internet so much that they’d rather thumb through an almanac than get access to the wealth of knowledge online. Today, they’re still eschewing the Web’s more educational functions, but they are definitely not above joining their children and grandchildren in the performative dance of social media, in which our every waking moment becomes a quantum of digital information to be shared and ranked.

Crankshaft, 5/16/17

At least I’m not so old that I’m excited about the appearance of some pro golfer in Crankshaft, though! CONFIDENTIAL TO PEOPLE WHO EXPERIENCED ANY GLIMMER OF ENTHUSIASM FROM READING THIS STRIP: it’s just a drawing, and there are lots of reference photos online, he didn’t actually have to participate in the creation of it in any way, SORRY

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Pluggers, 5/11/17

I kind of admit I’m not … entirely sure what’s going on here? Like, it doesn’t matter whether you like iced tea or lemonade (THE ONLY TWO ACCEPTABLE DRINKS, and don’t try mixing them together to form the abomination that is an “Arnold Palmer”), and it doesn’t matter if you’re fundamentally an optimist or a pessimist if you’ve got … friends? I approve of friendship, of course, but I don’t understand why it needs all these false binaries as a setup. I also am a little unsettled by the anxiety behind the “just happy to have a glass.” Maybe this is why the plugger dog-man is sitting on an overturned bucket instead of a chair, because he had to sell all his chairs, and he only has his bucket and two glasses left. Remember, Pluggerville’s pawn shop is the most depressing place on earth!

Dick Tracy, 5/11/17

So it turns out the Margies’ CosplayCon scam involved a fake robbery to grab the cash prize for best costume, yawn. Anyway, with that out of the way, they’ve really kicked it up a notch for their next crime: digging up the corpses of prominent comics artists and reanimating them, using forbidden science! It’s a little on the nose for new-look Dick Tracy, but I’m on board.

Spider-Man, 5/11/12

Say, were you wondering how this week’s super-powered combat played out??? ANSWER: a guy hit another guy in the shin with “some kinda stick” and then ran away. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!!!

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No Star Wars puns from me this May the Fourth — isn’t that worth a couple bucks? I thought so!

Pluggers, 5/4/17

Not sure what they’re going for here: “Pluggers want all of technology’s benefits with none of the intellectual investment?” “Pluggers parade their ignorance as a point of pride?” “Pluggers are lazy hypocrites?” “Pluggers’ wives are somehow not pluggers?”

Wait, they’re at a bookstore? Ha, ha what a couple of pluggers!

Blondie, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Beetle Bailey, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Six Chix, 5/4/17

Six Chix rotates through a roster of six woman author/artists on weekdays, and separately on Sundays — sort of like girls’ softball in Gil Thorp. Here’s the current lineup, highlighting a couple of recent changes:

The rotation gimmick is really clever: at its best, it lets each Chik contribute fresh work without the pressure of daily deadlines. But at its worst, it lets the strip become an afterthought, with dashed-off artwork supporting a weak concept. A lot of recent strips boil down to “look at this thing I don’t like!”, punctuated by a knowing glance between the characters or at the audience.

Maybe before publishing one of these, the Chix should apply a variant of the Bechdel Test: if two woman characters are talking, and it’s not about men, is it about anything else?

Hm, I seem to be posting a lot of Pluggers this week. It can’t possibly mean anything, though.

–Uncle Lumpy