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Blondie and Crock, 5/10/10

One of the defining features of legacy comic strips is of course their trapped-in-amber quality, which goes beyond just the characters’ archaic motivations and gender roles and goes right down to their homes’ decor. In fact, incidental details are even less likely to change than major points; Blondie might have started a business with much fanfare sometime in the ’90s, but the Bumsteads will apparently only have a single corded phone, sitting atop an early 20th century credenza in some out of-the-way location in the house, forever. (At least it’s a modern push-button model!) It’s such an ingrained part of the Blondie universe that I can’t decide if today’s strip is some kind of knowing wink to it, or just the logical extension of having the layout of chez Bumstead so burned into your brain that its anachronisms seems totally natural to you.

Crock, meanwhile, shockingly manages to be more in touch with modern reality today, in the sense that it acknowledges that phones untethered by wires do, in fact, exist. Of course, the strip artists seem to believe that you can create one merely by detaching the handset of a classic bakelite phone from its base, but hey, baby steps.

Apartment 3-G, 5/10/10

At long last, all distractions will be put aside and we’ll now enjoy unfettered A3G-girl-on-A3G-girl-on-A3G-girl action! Three will enter — how many will leave? I suppose this is supposed to be the first time Tommie has seen Margo since the latter’s spa vacation, but I prefer to believe that our redhead has taken to just groveling before Margo every time they encounter each other, to reduce the frequencies the beatings. “O Margo, our days were like nights without the warm glow of your sun! Please, do not remove your divine presence from us again, for we cannot stand the thought!” Meanwhile, Lu Ann has finally decided to face Margo’s tyranny head-on, the prospect of which fills Tommie with obvious terror. Lu Ann knows there’ll be bloodshed, which is why she’s prepared herself by putting on a butcher’s apron.

Mark Trail, 5/10/10

Sassy’s wide, haunted eyes in panel three don’t say “excited” to me so much as “my God, I’ve seen things no living thing should have to bear, and which you can’t even begin to imagine.” Oh, but we can imagine them, Sassy! We’ve seen panel two!

Pluggers, 5/10/10

Longtime Pluggers readers know that Reed Hoover is a relentless, unstoppable Pluggers-idea-submitting machine, whose name pops up in this feature with unsettling regularity. Thus, it comes as no real surprise that the Chief Plugger has just given up and gone on vacation for a week and handed the strip over to some classic Hooverisms. Reed is no doubt celebrating pretty mightily down there in Dallas, presumably by hiking his pants all the way up to his nipples.

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Lockhorns, 4/29/10

You’ve probably wondered: what would be a fouler expression of marital loathing than Loretta killing people and cooking them to feed to her unsuspecting husband? Hiring someone to dig up mouldering corpses from the graveyard, which she then cooks and feeds to her unsuspecting husband? Yeah, that sounds about right. Thanks goodness for his discriminating palate!

Crock, 4/29/10

Usually I’m annoyed by comics that just present two or more characters standing around describing things rather than actually depicting the action. But I have to say that I would much rather see two poorly drawn Legionnaires looking at a white square while standing in a mysterious numbered tube than see a new bride and groom being pelted with bloody chicken viscera in a scene of unimaginable horror, so big thanks to Crock!

Mark Trail, 4/29/10

Cherry has apparently decided that the root cause of the Trails’ terrible sex life is Mark’s terror of sensuality of any sort. Before he can be expected to serve as a satisfying sexual partner to her, he must first start from square one and “work on” himself — possibly while Cherry watches.

Marmaduke, 4/29/10

In I Samuel 18, we learn that the young David, in order to win the hand of King Saul’s daughter Michal, had to provide as a bride-price 100 Philistine foreskins. In order to ascend to the dignity of Demon-King of Earth, Marmaduke must prove himself a more gruesome killer than even the Biblical patriarchs.

Mary Worth, 4/29/10

Mary’s thought balloon today begins The Smuggening, which is crucial, as she can only effectively meddle in the lives of others from a place of superiority. “I also grew up poor, and yet my condo unit isn’t cluttered with stacks of boxes! Hmm, how sad that not everyone has my fortitude of character.”

Pluggers, 4/29/10

Pluggers have nowhere in particular to go and nobody to see, so why not show up for appointments 45 minutes early? The nice lady at the doctor’s certainly can’t leave the her desk, so if I say things to her while I’m waiting, she’ll probably have to talk to me!

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Pluggers, 4/15/10

Let us pause here for a moment to talk about Mr. James Todd Smith, aka LL Cool J! Do you know when Radio, LL Cool J’s first full-length album, was released? 1985! For you pluggers who are bad at math, this was 25 years ago. (His first single, “I Need A Beat,” came out a year before that! It sold more than 100,000 copies!) To put that in perspective, in 1985, the year Radio was released, Joan Baez celebrated the 25th anniversary of the release of her first album. Can you imagine some Reagan-era plugger saying “Wait, Joan Baez is some kind of protest singer? I thought she was your aunt’s hairdresser!” They would be laughed at! They would not parade their lack of pop-cultural literacy in a newspaper comic feature!

And don’t try to say that “Oh, it’s OK for someone to have literally never heard of LL Cool J, because he’s one of those hippity-hop artists, with the baggy pants and disrespectful attitudes.” You know, I’m not an aficionado of, for instance, contemporary country music, and could not identify by name or tune a single song by the band Rascal Flatts (a band whose career is a mere 11 years old at this point). But if in the course of casual television watching I happened to encounter the name of this band, I would not say, “Rascal Flats? Isn’t that the salt desert in Utah where they test the rocket cars?” And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t smugly send this anecdote into some sort of Bizarro-world elitist version of Pluggers; instead, I would be reasonably embarrassed about it.

In conclusion: LL Cool J is a 42-year-old man with a fairly high-profile career that is a generation old. He is so integrated into the entertainment mainstream that he now stars in America’s second-highest-rated broadcast TV crime scene investigation franchise (the ultimate origin of this strip, I suppose). You have in fact heard of him. His name is not the name of a ranch in Montana.

As a side note, this is the same plugger couple we saw yesterday in happier times. Clearly the garage cleaning and/or the post-garage cleaning mealtime and/or “garage cleaning” didn’t go so well, and now we find them in their usual position: bear-husband wedged into his recliner, drunk and belligerent, and kangaroo-wife sticking her snout into a magazine, desperately trying to pretend she can’t hear him.

Apartment 3-G, 4/15/10

Disappointed as I am that this Apartment 3-G storyline seems determined to not end in a hail of bullets (as certain other plots we could mention did), I do have to admit to being intrigued by this twist, in which an exasperated Margo has now been tasked with hiding a major piece of evidence from a crime scene, getting her sexy fingerprints all over it in the process. All indications really do point to the idea that Martin and Margo are so long accustomed to Bobbie’s actual diagnosable insanity that they have just learned to accommodate it and no longer see it as unusual or shocking. Threatening us at gunpoint? Ha ha, that’s our Roberta! No, we don’t want the cops nosing around, because they might start asking questions about all the people that she actually shot, whose bodies we helped to hide.

Blondie, 4/15/10

It’s well known that Mr. Dithers runs his company like an Orwellian police state, where employees are encouraged to constantly monitor one another for disloyalty. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s installed spycams in every room of his headquarters. Dagwood’s co-worker, who fears even mentioning the existence of the omnipresent cameras that haunt his every moment, has been reduced to the state of quivering terror expected by his sinister overlord; Dagwood, in contrast, has adopted an air of open defiance, like the true hero of liberty and freedom that he is. We will never forget you, Dagwood, even after you’ve been dragged out back for summary execution!