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Baby Blues, 8/4/21

You ever see a tiny, almost invisible piece of writing that just ruins your whole day? That happened to me today, and that piece of writing was the “®” after Barbie’s name in panel one here. Why did they feel a need to do this? Why does Barbie (registration number 0810106) get a ® and not Spider-Man (registration number 3553440)? At first I thought this might be because Barbie was in origin a doll, which is a physical product, whereas Spider-Man was in origin a literary character, but then I checked a recent Spider-Man movie poster and:

which, fine, that’s a ™ and not a ®, but the comic didn’t use ™ either, so what the heck? What the heck, man? Are Mattel’s lawyers somehow even scarier and more litigious than Disney’s? And how is Zoe pronouncing this legal glyph, huh? How is she pronouncing it?

Pluggers, 8/4/21

At least today’s Pluggers is straightforward enough. Pluggers hoard napkins, because they’re thrifty! But wait. Wait. Weren’t we just assured, a mere two weeks ago, that pluggers don’t use napkins to keep themselves clean while eating? So what are they hoarding them for, exactly? This makes the “someday” in today’s dialogue all the more poignant. The dog-plugger has thousands of napkins loosely piled up in the guest room, and every time the chicken-lady begs him to let her throw them out because they’re an “eyesore” and also a “fire hazard,” the dog-man gets real anxious and just keeps saying “No, they might come in handy! Someday!”

Crankshaft, 8/4/21

Just to end on a positive note, I enjoy the crosshatching at the right end of the panel here tipping you off to the fact that this is happening at night. Just Crankshaft going door to door at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, who even knows, disturbing people’s peaceful evenings by thrusting a wheelbarrow chock-full of zucchini at them. Good stuff!

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Gasoline Alley, 8/3/21

Folks, let me confide something in you. I was relishing the prospect of just tearing in to today’s Gasoline Alley for using a “joke” that, I was very sure, had been passed around by old people via Facebook and emails with “Fw: FWD: Fw: Re: Fw: Its good to laugh” in the subject line for years if not decades. I even went through the trouble of confirming that Rufus and Joel’s mule was indeed named “Betsy” so I could joke that Betsy looked absolutely furious about this shameful reuse of mediocre folk humor in a professional syndicated comic strip. All that remained was for me to do a little advanced Google searching, narrowed by date, to figure out exactly how old this joke was. But at the very beginning of my quest, I was confronted by something that truly shook me to my core:

There it is, everybody: proof that somehow, this goofy line about GPS standing for “getting places sooner” (and yes, I also checked “gettin’”, same results) was apparently invented by the Gasoline Alley creative team, and yet it has the feel of the sort of thing down-home salt-of-the-earth folks have been saying to each other since GPS was widely commercialized in the early ’00s. I hereby retract anything cruel I may have said about this strip’s cornpone vibes. Gasoline Alley is in fact frighteningly efficient and accurate about its mission in ways I never could’ve dreamed of.

Pluggers, 8/3/21

Meanwhile, over in Pluggers, I think we’re finally ready for Pluggers to just settle in with a series of increasingly baroque versions of “pluggers are old, meaning that they were born in years that are earlier than most other people’s birth years.”

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Dick Tracy, 7/27/21

Look, I have no insider knowledge and I’m not saying that the Dick Tracy creative team is in the midst of a contract dispute with their syndicate, but I am saying that if they were, claiming that “I don’t need the comics pages, I could get into the lucrative game design business” wouldn’t be the worst negotiate tactic! It would work a lot better if they actually owned the rights to Dick Tracy so they could turn it into a game, though.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/27/21

Say, have you somehow, against all odds, gotten emotionally invested in the character of Kyle Vidpa/Jake Rowling? Well, if so, the fact that he appears to be on the verge of fatherhood is probably making you feel … something? This is making you feel something, right? Sound off in the comments to let us know that that might be, exactly!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/27/21

We all, of course, are familiar with Grimm, one of the beloved title characters in Mother Goose and Grimm. Today’s installment of that strip poses the question: what if Grimm died, and was condemned to eternal torture in Hell, forever outside of God’s grace? That’s a real knee-slapper, if you think about it!

Pluggers, 7/27/21

AWWW YEAH IT’S THE PLUGGERS WET T-SHIRT PANEL YOU ALL ASKED FOR

WAIT, WHAT’S THAT? YOU DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS? YOU NEVER COULD’VE EVEN CONCEIVED OF ASKING FOR THIS?

HUH! LOOKS LIKE WE’RE ALL BEING TORTURED FOREVER OUTSIDE OF GOD’S GRACE, I GUESS