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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/21/07

Oh, Rex Morgan, M.D., you’re working overtime to get back into my heart, and … heck, I’m gonna let ya. A couple more weeks of this and we could get to the level of Rex and Troy’s Big Gay Golf Game. Sure, if you wanted to have some kid clean your garage at 8 o’clock at night or so, you’d tell him to “go relax” while you “finish up” what you’re doing. “Yes, Mrs. Morgan, I’m happy that I’m going to ‘clean’ your ‘garage.’ You know, with my ‘tongue.’ We are talking about oral sex here, right? I mean, just checking.”

Niki actually looks a lot more like a slightly younger Rex in panel two and a lot less like the thirteen-year-old boy that I thought he was supposed to be. If there’s any shred of decency left in this world, we may be about to discover that this whole thing is some sort of elaborate role play that the Morgans are doing in a desperate attempt to keep their marriage fresh.

Pluggers, 2/21/07

THERE! YOU SEE? YOU SEE? PLUGGERS SMELL TERRIBLE! ROLLY CHURCH OF CRETE, NEBRASKA, SAID IT, NOT ME!

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Pluggers, 2/16/07

You know, sometimes you don’t know how good you have it until suddenly you have it much, much worse. For instance, for all the crimes that Pluggers has perpetrated against humor and good sense, before setting eyes on this I never had to contemplate the concept of a “sexy plugger.” Nor did I have to lay eyes on her “erotic” undergarments. Nor did I have to consider the fact that someone out there, presumably after accidentally discovering their “little plugger” masturbating furiously to Internet pornography, thought back wistfully to his own younger days, when he much more innocently masturbated furiously while spying on his next-door neighbor. Possibly after stealing her underwear off of her clothesline for use as an aid.

Slylock Fox, 2/16/07

Fun observations about this Slylock Fox:

• The Tooth Fairy is freakin’ enormous. Isn’t she usually depicted as being as tall as a finger is long?
• The Tooth Fairy has tooth-shaped earrings.
• The Tooth Fairy wears big high-heeled shoes, in spite of (or maybe because of) the fact that she can fly instead of walking.
• Kids today apparently get folding money for their teeth, rather than the quarter that was the going rate when I was a kid.
• When your trivia questions are about things that don’t exist, you can just make the answers up!

Judge Parker, 2/16/07

“Like, oh my God! I’m rich and pretty and American and I never have to wait for anything! Don’t make me vomit all over you! I’ll do it!“

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/13/07

For reasons I can’t explain I find the hillbilly library in panel one of this strip incredibly charming. It’s not just a thatched-roof, ill-built wooden shanty — it’s a thatched-roof, ill-built wooden shanty with a wooden monumental neoclassical entrance, complete with columns, which are presumably the trunks of local trees. It’s like the cargo cults of New Guinea: these poor mountain folks, having once been exposed to book-learnin’ during the heyday of the Tennessee Valley Authority but unable to produce any themselves, built this shell of a library and filled it with fake books in hope of recapturing the city slickers’ magic.

For Better Or For Worse, 2/13/07

In the interest of keeping foobish vitriol to a minimum, I am only going to discuss Weed’s dialogue in the second panel here; frankly, it arouses quite enough vitriol to go around. Mainly it strikes me as a particularly egregious example of Things Nobody Actually Says, to wit:

• “B.Y.O.B., right?” As the lead-off to his party description, this makes it sound like “B.Y.O.B.” is shorthand for something awesome rather than something tight-fisted that 22-year-olds do. It’s possible that it means something else in Canada, though. Like, since everyone drinks domestic beer all the time up there, this is going to be an all-import party, featuring Budweiser, Yeungling, Old Milwaukee, and a variety of beers from Belgium.
• “We line up a food trough…” Dear God, if these party-goers arrive at this party to discover to their horror that the only food available is a six-foot long, three-foot deep box of Chex Mix, I will be very, very happy.
• “…score some seats…” It’s true that Weed’s bizarrely spacious loft seems to remarkably free of sitting surfaces, other than some uncomfortable-looking ultramodern couches. However, the verb “score” conjures up a pleasing image of Weed and Mike driving in to the seedy side of Toronto, looking for this guy a friend of a friend of guy they work with knows … “Yo, I got Eames, I got Barcoloungers, I got Aeron, check it out … hey, you guys aren’t narcs, are you?”
• “…wind up the tunes…” Yes, we’ll gather ‘round the Victrola! We have the latest Dixieland platters! It will be delightful!
• “…an’ ta-daah!” I’m willing to accept dropped “d”s as a fundamental aspect of the Patterson patois, but somehow I expected better from you, Weeder.

Mary Worth, 2/13/07

Take a good look at Jeff’s facial expressions in these two panels. In the first, he’s actually grinning a little, as if he’s pleased that Mary, to the extent that she’s capable of expressing human need, is begging him to come home with her. Then she reaches out to touch his face, and he recoils in anger and disgust.

Pluggers, 2/13/07

Generally speaking, a plugger will barricade himself in his bedroom, shrieking about how he’s not going to turn his motherfucking back on you for one God-damned second, you cocksucker, on the sixth day of his meth binge.