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Beetle Bailey, 3/24/17

I can’t stop looking at that weird little gadget (?) propped awkwardly on Killer’s pillow in panel one. It’s like someone drawing this realized that “uh, probably military hospitals use, like, advanced medical technology now???” but wasn’t sure what exactly that might entail, so rather than just draw a groggy-soldier on a cot, they drew a groggy soldier on a cot with a cell-phone-sized black box hanging off the side of his pillow, like maybe it’s clipped on, I dunno. And it’s recording his … heartbeat or blood pressure, even though it’s not connected to him at all? Or his breathing? Maybe his breathing? All this high-tech business really gets in the way of a solid gag about how Killer’s “illness” is that he’d rather be on the beach, gambling and looking at tits.

Crankshaft, 3/24/17

Ha ha, yes, this is just another in an endless, soul-crushingly eternal series of “Crankshaft says the darndest things” gags, but wouldn’t it be great if some lady did give Ed a Trojan hearse for Christmas? Like, you know, a big black car with space in the back for a coffin, and Crankshaft accepts it thinking it’s an offering to the gods and brings it inside his walled fortress, but inside are dozens of hidden Achaean warriors, who emerge at night and wreak terrible destruction. I’d like to see this storyline depicted over a period of six to eight weeks, with particular focus on the lamentations.

Pluggers, 3/24/17

Welp, the bedroom eyes the she-plugger is flashing here seems to confirm something hinted at earlier: NCIS has such high ratings among the plugger set because it’s a Pavlovian sex trigger. Nobody actually watches it.

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Pluggers, 3/2/17

You know, Pluggers has blurred the line between beasts and beast-people before, and they’ve even hinted at the kind of sexual relations that mark a universe where there’s a spectrum of sapience, but this — this is pretty explicit. Too far, Pluggers. Too far! The fact that the credit for this “joke” is given to a name that very well could be given to a dog is extremely not helping.

Gil Thorp, 3/2/17

Ugh, fine, Aaron isn’t actually on drugs, it seems; his mom’s on drugs, like far too many economically downwardly mobile Americans these days. I’m still not sure why he does well at basketball around payday? Shouldn’t that be when his mom can afford her drugs? I kind of want the payday thing to be a total red herring just to prove that the Freezy Bomb Boys were entirely wrong about literally everything.

Mary Worth, 3/2/17

Hey, speaking of America’s out-of-control opioid crisis, what’s going on in Mary Worth? Well, once again, it turns out that Iris has been so caught up in her own frivolous hobbies (before it was pursuing higher education, and this time it was fucking a 25-year-old) that she’s neglected her pill-addict son. Don’t worry, though: Jesus, who has long been Tommy’s hairstyle icon, is now also his not-giving-in-to-the-temptations-of-sweet-sweet-Vicodin icon.

Mark Trail, 3/2/17

Haha, Cherry sure seems anxious in panel two, doesn’t she? “Wasn’t someone out there doing a black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey? A bear isn’t going to help that at all! A bear can really mess up that kind of thing! I don’t remember who it was who was doing the survey exactly, but if they run into a bear, that survey is toast! This is terrible! I’m not going to be able to sleep at night, thinking about all the work what’s-his-name is putting into that black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey, which just is going to be ruined by some dumb bear!” “How’s Johnny doing? We haven’t seen him in years!” says Doc, pointedly ignoring everything his daughter is saying.

Shoe, 3/2/17

“I tried that once. It made me constantly aware of the crushing aesthetic demands that our society places on women, and let me tell you: no thanks.”

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Pluggers, 2/23/17

I’ve been doing this job (if making fun of Pluggers is a job, and I would argue that it is, and an important one at that) for more than a decade, which is enough time to see broad swaths of the culture change. Still, with a comic like Pluggers, which is focused largely on down-home country folks who suspect that maybe things used to be better than they are today, you expect a certain amount of small-c conservatism. You expect stability. You expect that it’ll be more or less the same, in almost a comforting way. You don’t expect it to be about tits, and you don’t expect the joke to basically be a slightly updated version of this classic Playtex ad from 1982. You don’t expect that you’ll spend time staring at a Pluggers panel thinking “Did the artist pick entry this because he was excited to draw a ‘plugger gal’ exemplifying the ‘lift and separate’ catchphrase, or did he run out of usable suggestions and decide, ‘Welp, it’s come to this’”? You don’t expect a lot of things in this life, but if you live long enough, you end up encountering almost all of them.

Mark Trail, 2/23/17

Ahahah, ladies, always whining about how they can’t find a man, but when a perfectly good one with terrible facial scarring and a dumb self-applied nickname that he makes everyone use walks right into them at the airport, somehow they can’t seal the deal, because they talk too much about themselves or whatever! Probably this is feminism’s fault. If you’re serious about getting married and having kids before your biological clock stops ticking, you need to check out my new self-help book, Play Dirty: How To Turn Your Back On Misguided Gender ‘Equality’ And Snag A One-Eyed Man Who Will Pull You Into His Violent Revenge Plot.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/23/17

God damn it, Horrible Hank in Rex Morgan isn’t dead after all. We now return you to thrilling tales of dehydration and old-man naps, already in interminable progress.