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Marvin, 3/18/16

Sure, we make fun of Marvin for the poop jokes a lot around here, but definitely worse than the poop jokes are the jokes about how Marvin and his fellow babies have romantic lives. At least pooping is a normal and healthy thing babies really do! Gross, but normal and healthy! This week’s storyline has involved a weird inverse evil Cyrano de Bergerac scenario where Marvin’s “girlfriend” (ugh) wants to watch musicals with him, and Marvin doesn’t enjoy them and can’t bring himself to perform even this incredibly basic bit of emotional labor, so he’s brought in some kind of lookalike ringer to take his place. But it turns out that if someone does all the work of a relationship on Marvin’s behalf, Marvin isn’t necessary … at all? This is definitely the worst thing you’ll read in the comics today, and will make you glad next week when all the jokes are about Marvin stewing in his own feces.

Judge Parker, 3/18/16

Sure, we make fun of Judge Parker for always having every story end with someone handing the protagonists money, but definitely worse than someone handing the protagonists money is someone literally abusing their position of state-sanctioned power to help the protagonists, because they’re good and/or rich and thus deserve to have the law bent on their behalf. Like, remember when Rocky Ledge assaulted a photographer, then felt bad about it, and Sam had the local constabulary run the guy out of town? (The guy who had been beaten up, not the guy who had done the beating.) Anyway, definitely a good use of some highway patrolman’s time and tax-funded paycheck will be driving around looking for a rental car and then informing some random private citizen about said rental car’s location. But why stop there, really? Why not just send a special ops team to “extract” Rocky from his romantic getaway with his secretary, eliminating any potential witnesses to his infidelity in the process?

Pluggers, 3/18/16

You know you’re a plugger when you choose to live someplace so unrelentingly hostile to pedestrians that, to stave off that coronary for another month or two via the sort of “exercise” that used to be a basic reality of the human condition, you have to drive your polluting automobile onto a vast expanse of asphalt so you can walk dully in circles through a gently decaying indoor mall.

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Dennis the Menace, 3/2/16

I dunno, guys, I think we’ve got ask ourselves who the real menace here is? Is it Dennis, who after all is literally a five year old and mostly just repeats what adults say? Or is it Mrs. Wilson, who consistently welcomes a little boy into her home who she know annoys her husband, and then trash-talks her husband in front of him? “Tee hee!” she says, as she hides behind a closet door extremely unconvincingly. “George is fat! This child is saying what we’re all thinking!”

Family Circus, 3/2/16

It took me a minute to figure out that the “joke” here is that Ma Keane is asking her husband to dry the dishes in the most passive-aggressive way possible. Much funnier to me is Big Daddy Keane’s look of pure disgruntlement as Jeffy waves a towel in his face. “What? Participate in the unpaid labor that keeps the household I live in running smoothly? Me? But … but … the patriarchy!”

Pluggers, 3/2/16

You’re a plugger if the struggle between you and your spouse over your possessions ends with your rooting through you neighbor’s garbage.

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Pluggers, 2/26/16

I’m gonna tell you something: at first, this panel made me actively angry. And not for the reasons that Pluggers usually makes me angry, which is that it generally posits that city dwellers who keep up with pop culture are effete traitors who will be “dealt with” after the real American resurgence. No, I’m mad because the “plugger sippy cup” depicted here is from Starbucks or one of its ubiquitous knockoffs, which is exactly where effete city dwellers go for overprices frappawhatevers, whereas true pluggers drink cheap and horrible coffee out of a ceramic mug at a diner with a free refill policy. But then I realized that, no, that’s the plugger of 10, 15 years ago I’m thinking about. Starbucks has long penetrated every suburb and exurb out there, and those nostalgia diners have been by and large driven out of business, only surviving in cities where kitsch appeal keeps them going. This, after all, is the essence of pluggerdom: embracing the newfangled when it isn’t newfangled anymore, all the while maintaining that this is how you’ve always done it, and that Other People out there are doing it newer, and wronger, and badder.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/26/16

Remember, Hagar is a warrior chieftain in a society built entirely on plunder, so yeah, he “fought like an animal” in the sense that he was merciless and probably the other guy was dead by the end of the process.