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Slylock Fox, 2/13/17

I can’t remember where I read it now, but there’s a line in a review of Rogue One that I liked, discussing Darth Vader’s appearance. This is the first film where David Prowse didn’t play the body of the character, and the reviewer said that in the new movie Spencer Wilding, the new actor, looked and moved differently, so “he just looked to me like a guy in a Darth Vader costume, which, I suppose, is what he was.” Don’t we all, in essence, play-act the roles in life we aim to inhabit, uncertain of when the moment will come when we finally make them our own? And isn’t this made more difficult when someone else is so strongly associated with the job? It might’ve been the dogs, with nostalgia for their now vanquished nemeses, who explained to the other animals the utility of the postal service after the beasts took over; and, like all the creatures trying to ape the infrastructure of human society, this mailbear is doing the best he can. But it’s his hesitancy, his sense that he’s not really a postal worker, that he’s just a bear wearing an XXL uniform torn off a long-ago-eviscerated H. sapiens letter carrier, that Shady Shrew is exploiting here. Who’s to say that he isn’t in disguise, after all? Who’s to say that they aren’t all going through a vaguely absurd pantomime of their vanquished betters, with their bowler caps and trench coats and magnifying glasses?

Dick Tracy, 2/13/17

Meanwhile, over at Dick Tracy’s heist plot, the Brush, a man with a freakish shock of hair coming down from his forehead and completely covering his face, is about to change out of his landscaper’s uniform and into a security guard’s uniform, two disguises that will definitely let him blend in undetectably and not draw any attention to himself whatsoever.

Dennis the Menace, 2/13/17

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Mr. Wilson is planning to murder Dennis — he’s old, he’s lived a long life and there isn’t much left to it, prison and the electric chair don’t scare him, etc. — but it’s pretty shocking to see him admit it so openly to his wife.

Marvin, 2/13/17

I spend a lot of time grappling with the horror of Marvin’ endless poop jokes, but it’s only with today’s strip that I feel like I get the rationale behind them: apparently they’re part of some misguided Freudian belief that we’d all be better adjusted if we didn’t have to obey society’s oppressive rules about going to the bathroom in a toilet and just, like, shat whenever, man, you’re not the boss of me and my gastrointestinal tract.

Pluggers, 2/13/17

Pluggers’ dreams of a sex-robot companion became a lot more attainable once they realized that due to their age and general physical decrepitude they had lost interest in sex a long time ago.

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Pluggers, 2/4/17

Pluggers today made me realize that it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a house of worship for non-wedding-or-funeral-related reasons — long enough that it never occurred to me that the same people who infuriate me for blithely texting throughout a movie (WHY WOULD YOU PAY $16.50 A TICKET TO SEE SILENCE, A QUIET AND EMOTIONALLY GRUELLING CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE FROM A MASTER FILMMAKER, ON ITS OPENING WEEKEND, AND THEN BE ON YOUR PHONE THE WHOLE TIME? YOU’RE A GROWN-ASS ADULT! YES, I CAN SEE YOU!) also do it while they’re at church, to the extent that beleaguered clergy have to beg parishioners to put their gizmos in their pockets for just a little while, for pete’s sake, just how flight attendants have to specifically point out that you can’t vape in 30,000 feet over Nebraska or whatever.

And, while my irreligion probably differentiates me from most pluggers, I do have to say that as a person with a hearing aid I very, very strongly related to today’s panel. Like, the ability to turn a hearing aid off is easily one of the top five best things about having one. It’s not that I can’t hear with it off, but … well, it’s sort of like when you open a beer right when you get home from a hard day’s work. Your problems don’t go away, but it takes the edge off, you know?

Shoe, 2/4/17

I know it’s something I harp on a lot, but the emotional disconnect between the jokes and dialogue in Shoe is one of my favorite bizarre things about the strip! Usually this takes the form of the patented goggle eyes of horror in reaction to a punchline, but today’s strip gets even more intense. “Roz, I need something to release all this tension I have” is mildly concerning in isolation; but when accompanied with the Perfesser’s bug-eyed stare, it seems like the last thing you hear a guy say before you become the first victim in his multi-state killing spree.

Mary Worth, 2/4/17

Oh my God, Iris just told Zak she loves him … in German! Safe in the knowledge that sweet, dim, uncultured Zak would never in a million years understand it! This is a delight because it’s a move she chose to make wholly predicated on her boy-toy’s ignorance, but it makes me sad because it probably means she’s going back to Wilbur when he blows back into town. Hopefully he hasn’t picked up any nasty Antarctic venereal diseases!

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Six Chix, 2/1/17

I’ve always been fascinated by how cultural images become detached from their origins and eventually become just bits of iconic flotsam in our collective consciousness. Like, skeletons have been associated with death for most of human history, for obvious reasons, but then in the West we started putting a hooded cloak on our skeletal death-figure, and then we started forgetting that our skeletal death-figure had a full body beneath that cloak, as the skull-face faded out of his representation. So that’s how we get cartoons like this, where a dentist is staring into the empty void where a face should be, not seeing flesh or a skull or even the back of a hood, just an infinitely dark emptiness that goes on forever, a yawning portal into the not-life that awaits us after our demise. The dentist seems remarkably unfazed by it, to be honest! Dentists have seen some shit, man.

Pluggers, 2/1/17

There are plenty of Pluggers panels that demonstrate that pluggers feel all the sorts of anxieties the rest of us do, from the financial to the familial to the creeping existential. I have to assume, then, that at some point in this joke’s history, the line was about “plugger performance anxiety.” Get it? Because usually that phrase involves inability to get an erection, but here it’s about peeing in a cup, because pluggers gave up on sex long ago. While usually I endorse complete freedom of expression in the comics, I can’t say I regret an editorial decision that spared innocent newspaper-reading Americans everywhere from thinking about the boners that these downwardly mobile exurban beast-men may or may not have.