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Mary Worth, 2/16/21

OK, I don’t want to tell anyone how to open up and share their past trauma, but I do think it’s wild that Eve led with a big reveal that her late husband used to trip her, a sinister but relatively mild form of abuse, only to later casually drop into a fun conversation about how great dogs are the fact that, oh yeah, he also tried to murder me with a gun except that my dog saved me by getting shot in the neck. Don’t worry, the dog is fine, though! He’s right there in that strip I linked to above, looking fine! Unless Eve has had … a series of identical dogs named Max? Who she treats as the same dog? Best not to think about it, although now I can’t think of anything else.

Pluggers, 2/16/21

I didn’t think anything could make me more simultaneously angry and confused than “pluggers like to ‘accidentally’ drop their pants in public,” but “non-pluggers get food particles out from between their teeth like this, but pluggers get food particles out from between their teeth like this,” so, uh, congrats to today’s Pluggers, I guess!

Shoe, 2/16/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Shoe, the character, doesn’t know what an escape room is, and possibly Shoe, the comic strip, doesn’t either!

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Beetle Bailey, 2/9/21

I guess the point of this strip is that each of these characters is responding to the question of what to get Sarge for his birthday in his own way, according to his own character (in Beetle Bailey, “character” means “whatever dumb on-the-nose collection of tics and running gags they’ve accrued over the years”). So, Plato wants to give him a book, because he’s a nerd; Killer wants to give him a box of candy, because he’s so monomaniacally focused on getting laid that his only context for gift-giving is the cliches of heterosexual courtship; Zero wants to to give him a comic book, because he’s dumb (?); and Rocky wants to give him a music mix, because he’s named “Rocky” due to the fact that when he was introduced into the strip, his one-note character was focused on liking rock ‘n’ roll music, which was as novel then as omnipresent personal computers were when Specialist Chip Gizmo was introduced in the early ’00s, because that’s just how long Beetle Bailey has been around. Anyway, I wanted to point out that all of these people are giving Sarge something they’d like, not something that he would actually want to receive. Can you visualize Sarge reading a book? Of course not. Only Beetle’s proposal is actually thoughtful. Sadly, it will not be appreciated.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/9/21

After kicking off his life as a diagnosed diabetic with one last indulgent fast-food meal, Buck’s blood sugar numbers got real bad, but then he came home and exercised, and they got OK again! Is this … how diabetes works? I don’t know much about it but I do know that Rex Morgan, M.D., is a rigorously fact-checked comic that aims primarily to spread accurate medical information, so I’m just going to assume that this is, in fact, how diabetes works. Good job, Buck! Looks like you’re on your way to a healthy lifesty[finally gets to narration box at bottom of second panel] OH NO

Pluggers, 2/9/21

I mean, duh, of course he’s not going to fold up his underwear. The wrinkle lines are a further turn-on for fans of the sick sex thing that Pluggers, in one of 2021’s biggest surprises, has become.

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Shoe, 2/3/21

The “punchline” here isn’t a new joke; I’m reasonably sure I said this more than a decade ago about Michael Phelps, who owned the pool where I swam in Baltimore and who I therefore saw in the locker room multiple times, and I certainly didn’t make it up. In fact, I’d argue it’s barely a joke at all, more just a funny turn of phrase, really. But I do appreciate that they’ve given this cliche that special Shoe twist, which is to say they’ve put it in the context of one of the main characters’ devastatingly depressing personal lives. “I’m tellin’ ya, Shoe, he had muscles in places I don’t even have places! No wonder she left me. I hate my body and myself.”

Pluggers, 2/3/21

Pluggers, like all comic strips, must evolve to survive, and it could go in any number of ways. But I think I speak for all of us when I say that I sincerely did not want or expect it to go with [late middle-aged dog-man doing a sexy baby voice] “Hey, it’s a shiny quarter. Oopsie, did my pants fall down again?”