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Beetle Bailey, 1/17/15

Hey, it’s my favorite Beetle Bailey running gag, The Halftracks Hate Each Other With An Awful Intensity That Makes The Lockhorns Look Like A Nicholas Sparks Novel! Like many awful things in the comics, I originally “liked” this ironically but have come over the years to respect its terrible purity. Anyway, today General Halftrack tells the woman he’s been married to for decades that he has very little idea how to love a woman, but he’s quite sure that women are incapable of loving him or anyone else back.

Family Circus, 1/17/15

BuzzFeed, like all other secular entertainment, is forbidden within the walls of the Keane Kompound, and so Billy has been forced to cobble his own version together from available materials.

Pluggers, 1/17/15

Say what you will about pluggers, but they can promise you this: they will never, ever subject you to the sight of their nipples on national television.

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Pluggers, 1/15/15

Philosophical question: are there young pluggers? Probably not. But: are new pluggers being formed as pluggerism-susceptible youth age into a plugger-appropriate range? Even this seems unlikely, as pluggerism seems founded not just on old age and cantankerousness but on a fairly specific nexus of cultural consumption. What I’m trying to get at here is that pluggers are dying, going extinct, never to be replaced. And those surviving pluggers are going to become more and more acutely aware of their thinning numbers, and eventually will eventually spend every waking minute haunted by the grim specter of their own death. The next decade or so of Pluggers will be amazing, in other words.

Crock, 1/15/15

If I had to guess, I’d say this was an awkward attempt to graft the hip and in-the-news term “hack” onto a strip that never depicts characters using computers and that indeed takes place in some ill-defined but definitely early-to-mid-20th-century past. But still, by giving the title character the sinister power to access and alter his men’s very minds, this “joke” has made Crock more terrifying than he’s been for years.

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Marvin, 1/10/15

You know, sometimes, when it comes to Marvin, I feel like something of a scold. I mean, the poop joke has a long and honorable tradition across cultures. I like poop jokes. I make poop jokes. So why does the constant steaming stream of poop jokes in Marvin make me react with such humorless horror? I think today’s strip answers that question pretty well, which is that they’re not funny, and are actually pretty revolting above and beyond the whole poopiness aspect of it. Like, does anyone anywhere enjoy the image of a baby gleefully shoving brown (brown!) food down his maw while thought-balloon-boasting that he’s shitting at the same time? Do grandmas chuckle and cut out this strip and hang it on their refrigerator, because they like the image of organic matter going into one end of a human and coming out the other in a sort of awful continuous flow? No. I’m guessing no. I’m hoping no. Please, please, let the answer be no.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/15

“Haw haw! No, but seriously: we’re going to keep on murderin’ each other for no good reason, just like the biblical patriarchs.”

Pluggers, 1/10/15

I have a hearing aid, and one of the best things about it is the ability to turn it off. I’m not deaf and this doesn’t envelop me in a cone of silence or anything, but in public situations when I’m hearing conversations I don’t want to hear, it just kind of takes the edge off, you know? Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that having hearing deficits is no picnic, but you always have to look on the bright side, and having an excuse to willfully misconstrue sexual advances from pluggers is a very, very bright side.