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Six Chix, 3/21/14

Comic Sans: Origins

I always knew it went something like this. The grinning, disfigured jester, seducing his unsuspecting queen into forcing her court monks to create a new font, an abomination whose every blasphemous curve traces the foul arc of Baphomet’s own horn. The trembling monk, sighing “Yes, Majesty” as he struggles to ignore far-off laughter and the whiff of sulfur rising from his quill where it scratches the parchment.

B.C., 3/21/14

The original joke, “I don’t need to outrun him, I just need to outrun you” is at least as old as the human race, which, if you read Genesis 1:31 literally, is just six days less than the age of the universe. The implication is that if dinosaurs existed at all, they must have coexisted with humans — though not for long, if that determined-looking velociraptor has anything to say about it.

Marvin, 3/21/14

Wow, Marvin’s callous abuse of his family is even more repulsive viewed through the lens of post-Edwardian British class structures. And you can bet Team Marvin is right now putting the finishing touches on their next miniseries, Slavemaster Marvin: a Tale of the Old South.

Pluggers, 3/21/14

Pluggers are beyond shame, and no longer even try to hide their depravity. Please, if you know the first thirteen Plugger Theories, in the name of everything holy keep them to yourself.

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P.S. Comments of the Week will appear Monday, when Josh gets back.

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Judge Parker, 3/7/14

April’s dad may be an amoral arms merchant who deals with ex-Romanian secret police and has a “retirement fund” made up entirely of blood diamonds, but at least he likes Judge Parker Senior’s terrible book, which puts him one step above the real monsters: liberal Ivy League college professors.

Heathcliff, 3/7/14

Heathcliff only loves his owner-family for financial reasons.

Herb and Jamaal, 3/7/14

Herb has been having sex with the restaurant’s catering truck for years, but is now starting to question his auto-monogamy.

Pluggers, 3/7/14

Pluggers’ electronics are covered with more disgusting slobber and drool than you can imagine.

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Pluggers, 2/27/14

After all these years of mocking this strip, I still can’t tell if the central conceit is supposed to be “pluggers are lower-middle-class exurban reactionaries” or just “pluggers are old.” Honestly, I think it wavers from day to day. Today’s panel I’m tentatively putting into the second of those two buckets, because while I wasn’t aware of this particular joy of aging, I also can’t imagine that it has anything particularly to do with anybody’s socio-cultural position within the American mosaic. So, leg-baldness is a thing? A thing that I’m going to have to look forward to? Greeeat.

Dennis the Menace, 2/27/14

Dennis has a known hatred of books and learning, so I guess it’s no surprise that his distorted, terrified vision of his own literate future involves hours of slogging through endless words in dull, aniconic tomes. Still, you can understand why he’s sad about giving up his current reading material, since it looks super rad. Is it about lions driving cars? Lions attacking cars? Just a bunch of lions, stone-cold flipping over cars, and mauling any panicked passengers attempting to flee?

Gasoline Alley, 2/27/14

Gasoline Alley has always been a strip of gentle, low-stakes whimsy — it once had a plot about trying to get a DVD player working that lasted for more than a month — and so it’s always thrilling with the action suddenly bursts into insane violence. When Slim hired a mercenary to drop tons of space-rock on some basketball-playing teens who annoyed him, the story was at least kind of cartoonish. Today’s strip, in which, as predicted, society has completely broken down into chaos due to rumors of the existence of an immortality elixir, seems much more realistic. The foregrounding of the actual jackboots of the billy-club wielding police charging into the melee to brutally restore order is a particularly vivid artistic choice.