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Beetle Bailey, 9/25/13

Probably you were hoping that Spec. Gizmo’s sex robot would a be a shameful, one-off joke that would never reappear in the comics pages or on the Internet again. Well, too bad, because you don’t live in your perfect world! You live in this world of unrelenting horror, with the rest of us. Anyway, panel one reveals all sorts of unfortunate things. For instance, when Gizmo’s robot was first unveiled, nobody had bothered to drape human clothes over its square metallic chassis, yet now it appears to be wearing some kind of exaggeratedly girly dress with a crinoline skirt, further gendering the fembot and making it a slightly more acceptable target of Chip’s sexual lusts. The mere act of clothing it can be seen as akin to teaching it a shame-based code of sexual morality, much like the one Adam and Eve learned abruptly after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The fembot’s rudimentary ethics may be limited to sexual matters, as it seems more than willing to use its inhuman strength to work violence against humans, though perhaps this is a sign that its advanced circuitry understands the concept of consent and believes that attempts to violate its structural integrity may legitimately be met with self-defense.

Anyway, I was going to do a close reading of panel two along these same lines, but then I read “He has to turn off the work switch and press the love button” and so I went and lied down for an hour instead.

Mary Worth, 9/25/13

OK, Mary Worth: I enjoy making endless jokes about Wilbur’s sandwich obsession as much as the next person who blogs about newspaper comic strips, but I like to do it on my terms. Frankly, if you’re going to include an entire panel of the sort of filthy talk that you might expect to hear when you dial 1-900-HOT-SANDWICH, I’m going to feel a little bit baited.

Herb and Jamaal, 9/25/13

I genuinely enjoy how insanely excited our nameless white-collar drone/Heart and Soul customer looks in the first couple of panels as he sets up his joke about how meetings make you doze off, ha ha, amiright people. He’s really going the extra mile here, and I appreciate it when people put effort into their sarcasm.

Phantom, 9/25/13

“Except for a period from the 1870s, when European powers began the wars of conquest referred to as the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ until the process of decolonization really took hold in the 1960s! I mean, the British, man! I couldn’t leave a skull mark on the chins of the entire British Empire, you know what I’m saying?”

Pluggers, 9/25/13

Pluggers remember a time, now thankfully in the distant past, when they had to engage in brief bouts of physical movement every half hour or so.

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Mary Worth, 8/29/13

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on eleven riveting days of vague worries about Shannon’s job, but here, let me sum them up for you: ever since Shannon enraged Aggie during a talk group, she’s been worried that Aggie will complain and get her fired — despite the fact that we’ve seen no evidence that she’s getting pressure from her bosses, or that she would be at all expected to be some kind of qualified talk-group leader, since she was first introduced to us as the teacher for Mary’s yoga class. Being a yoga teacher and being a therapist are not the same things, just for the record!

But anyway, Mary is determined to save Shannon’s job by any means necessary. Those means apparently include undermining the ontological structures that define the very nature of reality for the managers of Pax Wellness Resort. “Those policies that you think you have, that say the customer is always right? Those policies are false. They do not exist. Everywhere in the handbook where you see it written is a lie. Avert your eyes from it and blot it out with the darkest ink, lest your mind become unclean with falsehood.”

Gil Thorp, 8/29/13

Why has it been so long since the Mudlarks have won a championship in any sport? Maybe it has something to do with Gil and Kaz’s scouting techniques, which seem to consist of wandering the school’s corridors at random looking for big dudes. Today’s strip reminds one of 1 Samuel 9, when the prophet Samuel spots Saul son of Abiel — “From his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people” — and immediately hears the word of the LORD in his ear instructing him to anoint the man Israel’s first king. That ended up working out super for everyone concerned, so surely this mysterious hulking shadow will do great on the offensive line or whatever.

Pluggers, 8/29/13

We simply cannot emphasize enough that pluggers are wholly uninterested in sex.

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Mark Trail, 8/27/13

Welp, Rusty’s dino-dream only lasted a week and he avoided being eaten, so we’re spared any Inception-inspired musings about how if you die in a dream you die in real life or enter some weird limbo state or whatever. Still, I’m a little miffed that Mark is giving credence to his ward’s assertion here. The fevered images that Rusty’s REM sleep recycled from whatever outdated dinosaur books were available at the local library do not provide any kind of scientifically rigorous evidence about what human-dinosaur interaction would have been like! It’d be more accurate for him to say that “it probably is a good thing that humans and the burgeoning proto-sexual anxieties that my subconscious represents as terrifying beasts of yore don’t coexist.” OH WAIT WE HUMANS DO HAVE TO COEXIST WITH THOSE, RUSTY, THANKS A LOT.

Later, Rusty returns to Lost Forest and expresses his pathetic delight at whatever terrible room-temperature pizza Cherry drove an hour to get from an off-brand convenience store at the nearest highway exit. I’m kind of surprised that the pizza isn’t being depicted on panel, though? Just add some pepperoni to a pre-existing pancake drawing and boom, there you go!

Spider-Man, 8/27/13

OK, Spidey, look, we get it, you’ve voyaged to a foreign land where you don’t speak the language, it’s not ideal but lord knows many of us have done it, I certainly have. Also, you’re hanging out with a friend who, in addition to being a native speaker of the local language, is also fluent in your language. You know what bilingual people aren’t really impressed by? Monolingual people picking out occasional words in languages they don’t speak and being super self-satisfied about understanding them! I mean, if your spider-sense can’t protect you from being banged in the back of the head, why should we expect it to protect you from social embarrassment, I guess.

Pluggers, 8/27/13

Today, Pluggers takes a break from blurring the line between dog-men and actual dogs and blurs the line between bird-ladies and actual birds instead.