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Pluggers, 4/23/14

I certainly don’t begrudge the Pluggers creative team their occasional week off to run Plugger Classics, as I’m sure depicting honest, hard-working Americans making do the best they can as freakish man-animals gets exhausting after a while. I am a little unsettled by today’s vague double entendre, which may be intended to dovetail with the whole “spring break” theme. However, if Friday’s installment is “PLUGGERS GONE WILD” and features the pluggers casting off their clothes, cars, and other anthropomorphic aspects and just straight up going at each other like predator and prey, I’ll be willing to forgive a lot.

Mark Trail, 4/23/14

Speaking of predators and prey, new-school Mark Trail not only loves his wife but engages in straight-up combat with enraged bears. ALL HAIL THE NEW ORDER.

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Shoe, 4/3/14

The workings of the human mind are mysterious and arbitrary. My own particular mind, for instance, struggles to remember the identities of the advanced hominids in B.C., but uses valuable neurological space to retain the names and schticks of each and every one of the bird-people of Shoe. Loon, for instance, is a sort of noble fool character whose jokes often revolve around his simplistic misunderstandings of life events. Thus, despite Roz’s Goggle Eyes of Murderous Rage here, I think we’re supposed to read his statement not as cruelty but as a harmless literal interpretation of a metaphorical product name. Still, he seems awfully sanguine for someone who casually believes that a substance exists that makes face-flesh invisible and, when applied properly, leaves its wearer’s brain and sinus cavities visible to anyone who wants to take a look.

Beetle Bailey, 4/3/14

I’ve never been in the military and I’m not a gun guy, so I could be wildly off-base on this, but my guess is that Sarge is less mad about Gizmo’s unauthorized but high-tech modifications to his rifle and more about his appalling attitude towards weapons safety, since he appears to be casually pointing the barrel without really looking in the direction of his fellow soldiers (and, more specifically, in the direction of Sarge’s crotch).

Funky Winkerbean, 4/3/14

Last year we breached the narrative space-time barrier between Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, two strips existing in the same universe but 10 years apart, and reality wasn’t torn to shreds, so we have more of that to look forward to, I guess? It appears that the current dullsville “Cory’s mom looks is trying to complete his comic book collection while he’s in Afghanistan” plot is going to dovetail with the even snoozier Crankshaft “Jeff finds his beloved comic books in the attic” storyline (for certain limited definitions of “story”) from earlier this month. Glad you enjoyed those comics again, Jeff! In ten years, your daughter is going to sell them to some lady. Anyway, for everyone who reads Crankshaft and hates its title character, the good news we get today is that 10 years in his future he’s ranting and raving in a squalid old folks’ home somewhere, where nobody’s listening to him.

Pluggers, 4/3/14

PLUGGERS WERE USED TO THINGS BEING ONE WAY BUT NOW THEY’RE ANOTHER WAY WHY ARE THINGS ALLOWED TO CHANGE WHHHYYYYYYY

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Mark Trail, 3/31/14

As was foretold in prophecy Friday, Mark has shrugged off a sucker-punch to the face and responded with fisticuffs of his own, somehow managing to wind up and knock Marlin down with a right hook despite literally being an inch and a half away from him. Still, this victory is bittersweet, as Mark looks poignantly at the avalanche of sea turtle eggs cascading comically out of Marlin’s green poachin’-sack. Yes, there’s an exclamation point at the end of his dialogue, but based on his stricken facial expression I would guess that this is as close as we’ve ever come to seeing Mark on the verge of tears, bereft over the senseless loss of endangered animal life.

By the way, is sea turtle egg-poaching an actual thing? Like, could those eggs ever hatch now that they’ve been removed from their nest and plopped in a big pile in a bag? Do people try to keep sea turtles as pets? Do people eat sea-turtle eggs? Have we been reading the wrong meaning of “poaching” in this storyline all along?

Apartment 3-G, 3/31/14

Thank goodness Tommie has rented a freakishly enormous car from the 1940s so that there’s plenty of room for her deer friend to … sit? stand? … in the back seat. I love the way Tommie just talks to Lily like she can understand English, while the deer stares ahead with its black soulless eyes, thinking about murder.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/31/14

Good lord, Snuffy’s disgust with Jughaid is palpable. “I don’t care if he is kin, I ain’t gonna have no aesthete living under my makeshift roof!”

Pluggers, 3/31/14

Pluggers are just straight-up car thieves and don’t care what you think about it.