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Ziggy, 12/20/10

Today Ziggy has gone to see Santa for what’s at least the third year in a row, and we really have to start asking ourselves why he’s doing it. The easy answer is that he’s there for unspeakable reasons involving children, but if there were easy answers to anything involving Ziggy, the strip would have been purged from newspapers, and our collective pop-cultural consciousness, years ago. Here’s my theory: do you notice that the children in all these panels are particularly loathsome and cruel? I think Ziggy has sought out the worst children he can find — perhaps he’s managed to find out when Santa is going to visit the Home For Very Young Delinquents And Sass-Talkers — just to see them insult the jolly old elf. This is Ziggy’s way of pulling himself out of his bottomless pit of low self-esteem. “At least I’m better than these brats,” he thinks to himself. “At least I’m not calling poor Santa fat. I mean, I’m thinking it, but I’m not saying it aloud. That’s the difference between me and them. That counts for something, right?”

Herb and Jamaal, 12/20/10

Note that Herb is drinking out of his “Herb” coffee mug, while Jamaal is drinking out of a mug featuring the elaborate monogram logo of the soul food restaurant he and Herb co-own, which combines an H and a J. In other words, Jamaal is honoring their friendship and business partnership, while Herb thinks only of himself. This has much more troubling long-term implications for the duo than the personnel changes at the local high school.

Pluggers, 12/20/10

It sure is hard for pluggers to deny the same-sex attractions that shame them so, but somehow the compulsive eating helps them push it all deep down inside, where it can’t get out.

Update: Uh, as faithful reader Ned Ryerson pointed out, I made basically the inverse of this joke the first time this panel ran this year. In my defense, it’s actually a sign of good mental health that I don’t keep an infinite mental file of all the Pluggers panels I mock. I’m still working on the infinite mental file of Mary Worth strips with a team of trained psychiatrists.

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Pluggers, 12/11/10

One of the running jokes with which I routinely irritate my friends and family comes up every time anyone discusses their plans for their mortal remains after their death. I always claim that I intend to have my corpse taxidermied and arranged in a heroic pose — possibly holding a sword, definitely naked — and that whoever wants to inherit my vast fortune will be required to place me somewhere prominent in their home. Now, this is all good fun (or at least it will be until my will is unsealed), but it did make my mind go someplace particularly grim upon seeing a typical Pluggers man-animal in a storefront taxidermist. At least pluggers don’t simply feast on the rotting flesh of their dead fellows, as the bird-inhabitants of their sister strip Shoe do. I for one would like to see a “plugger cemetery” (glassed-in display case) if only in the hopes that the taxidermist’s art provides the various schlubby, ill-dressed dead pluggers with a modicum of dignity and dynamism that was wholly lacking from their lives.

Gasoline Alley, 12/11/10

You don’t have to be following the current typically dull Gasoline Alley plot to appreciate today’s strip, in which the loathsome Slim’s mother-in-law does her best to pretend that he simply doesn’t exist.

Gil Thorp, 12/11/10

Oh, also, in Gil Thorp Jamaar died for our sins.

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Dick Tracy, 12/8/10

Oh, hey, Dick Tracy has been happening! The new plot involves Dick taking an inhuman maniac mass murderer, who’s wearing a terrifying gimp mask that also kind of looks like a toaster, to his sentencing, for reasons too unrealistic and dumb to go into here. However, I thought today’s strip was worth mentioning because of Dick’s dialogue in panel one — “Doctor, or whatever you are.” “I mean, I didn’t look at your CV or anything before they put you, draped and shackles and fetish gear, in the back of my low-slung sedan. Are you a medical doctor? Should I call you ‘professor’? Alls I know is that a depraved monster like you had to come out of the so-called ‘higher education’ system.”

Judge Parker, 12/8/10

Sam being garden variety smug about his wealth and privilege is all good fun. But Sam being smug about how his friend Judge Parker wrote especially erotic sex scenes involving his fictional stand-in, “Hank Austin,” and a beautiful assassin? That’s … that’s kind of gross, actually.

Mary Worth, 12/8/10

Obviously Jill’s drunken tirade wasn’t going to end nicely, with her storming out in a huff. I think that we all should have realized that the only way she was going to leave this hideously decorated reception hall was by being dragged out bodily, raving like a lunatic, clinging to her precious, precious bottle of wine. As usual, Jill’s apparent emotional state is all over the map: in the first panel she’s all rage, but in panel two she looks genuinely terrified, convinced that Adrian is making a terrible, fatal mistake. She reminds me of nothing so much as the final scene in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

YOU’RE NEXT, ADRIAN! YOU’RE NEXT! Foolish Jill — did you not realize that you’re already in a room full of pod people?

Pluggers, 12/8/10

Dear Pluggers: If you’re trying to make a double entendre like this, keep in mind that we look at the cartoon before we read the caption, which kind of ruins the effect. Also: never, ever make a double entendre again, for reals.