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Pluggers and Gasoline Alley, 2/25/24

Old people! Do you enjoy the Sunday comics as one of your last pleasures in life? Well, the whimsical “funny pages” are here to remind you that as you age, you will be beset with endless aches and pains, so much so that you will begin to believe that even in your life on Earth, you are experiencing a taste of what the damned go through in Hell. But still, one must cling to this life, imperfect as it is, as it could be swept away from us at any moment and then — nothingness, no more pain but also no more frosting. Something to think about!

Daddy Daze, 2/25/24

And don’t get too smug, young people! The time when your young body begins to fall apart is coming! And sooner than you think.

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Pluggers, 2/13/24

Wow, I feel like the backstory that lead up to today’s Pluggers is even grimmer than usual. Chicken-lady is thrusting this inoffensive but uninspiring plate at her husband, her facial expression seemingly indicating that she’s drunk or angry or confused or maybe all three, belligerently telling him he can shove it up his ass if he doesn’t like it; dog-man’s eyes are wide with shock, as he gingerly reaches out to grab the plate before she erupts. The way they’re both standing in the middle of this room implies that he’s going to take the plate somewhere else, as they retreat to different corners of the house to have dinner in wounded silence. Take it or leave it! Ha ha!

Shoe, 2/13/24

A fun fact is that Shoe and Pluggers were created by Jeff MacNelly, who worked for much of his career at the Chicago Tribune, so I guess it makes sense that Shoe would be a Cubs fan, even though we’ve seen no evidence that sleepy Treetops is a bird-world analogue of Chicago or that baseball even exists in the bird-ruled Shoeniverse. This also just could be something the doctor is saying passive-aggressively, though; if he doesn’t have the nerve to tell Shoe not to smoke cigars in his office, he definitely doesn’t have the nerve to tell him that his high blood pressure has been caused by all those cigars he smokes constantly.

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Six Chix, 2/7/24

I said my piece a while back about why I’m not the biggest fan of cartoons about hell, but you know me: I can’t resist looking at a comic and thinking about the world-building, even in cases, like this one, where the world is hell. I’m kind of intrigued by the fact that the dude on the left here has one puff of chest hair on his otherwise smooth torso. Do the souls of the damned continually regrow their body hair, only to have it burn painfully off now and then as the temperature of the hellfire varies at random?

Pluggers, 2/7/24

This is a pretty subpar Pluggers in the sense that the plugger in the panel isn’t contributing to an overall joke or even giving us any new information over and above what’s in the caption. Feel like the dog-man should either be saying something jokey like “I want you to have my Lawrence Welk albums if I don’t make it” or just going all out with “They’re going to gut me like a fish, Bob! No, I’m not going to calm down!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/24

“Your nephew? Your nephew!?! You’re telling me that if your sibling has a son, that person is considered part of your family, and there’s even a special word you use to identify them? Holy shit, this changes everything.”