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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/23/15

Oh hey were you wondering what was going with the story of Kelly the teen, who’s being gifted with a free car and a zero-tolerance contract in order to ferry around Sarah Morgan and fulfill the nebulous art-education whims of a lovable old gangster moll? (Haha, I love trying to construct the most implausibly absurd sentences that are nevertheless 100% accurate descriptions of soap opera plots.) Anyway, Bugsy the driver, who is totally reformed and absolutely no longer a brutal mob enforcer, probably, is taking Kelly to get her free car, and it’s a hearse! It’s also free to Bugsy and Mrs. P., because of some ill-defined relationship between garishly suited hearse salesman “Tony” and Mrs. P.’s criminal syndicate. When Bugsy says Mrs. P. “sends her best to you and your family,” does that mean that Tony’s family has now been released from captivity? When Tony thanks Bugsy for “what she did for us,” is that a reference to her mob’s long reign of violent terror really boosting the market for hearses?

Pluggers, 1/23/15

You know you’re a plugger when you’ve never cooked anything even remotely healthy in your entire life.

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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.