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Mary Worth, 1/6/20

Good lord, these two unmarried persons are loitering together … within touching distance … at the mall … without their dogs being there as chaperones? Like a pair of whores? I certainly hope Mary doesn’t hear about this, or they’ll return to Charterstone to find their pathetical belongings piled up on the curb!

Pluggers, 1/6/20

In big cities and small villages, most elderly people can walk to the store for basic errands, or take public transportation, so they can live independently even when they’re no longer able to drive a car. But in modern America’s increasingly socially atomized and sprawling suburbs, many must resort to offering sexual favors just so they can leave their subdivision and access basic services. Sad!

Beetle Bailey, 1/6/20

My initial thought reading this was that there’s no circumstance where you get a phone call saying “We have detected a problem with your computer, send us your password and we’ll fix it” and the caller isn’t a scam artist, but then I realized that this strip still falls under today’s “eldersex” heading, because the reason nobody can fix the General’s computer is all the extremely dodgy porn sites he looks at.

Curtis, 1/6/20

I judge this year’s Kwanzaa storyline to be pretty good based on the freaky animal factor alone, though it has wrapped up with the somewhat banal conclusion of “the real magic is friendship, and also listening to good advice.” It’s also wrapped up on a … Wednesday? … so I hope that we at least get a few days of Curtis complaining about the story’s initial premise failing to pay off in truly weird fashion.

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Gil Thorp, 12/10/20

Well, it looked like Gil’s little stunt — benching his feuding #1 and #2 QBs and putting his #3 QB in at the helm of a wacky offense — worked! It didn’t work in the sense that it brought the team a championship (they’re playing for conference runner up here in their last game) but it worked in the sense that it taught his fractious starters a lesson, a lesson they learned so well that neither of them has much interest in playing football at all anymore. I assume in panel three we’re meant to understand that they’re doing “No, after you” pantomime gestures down on the sideline that are so exaggerated that they can easily be interpreted by their wide-eyed classmates sitting up in the stands.

Pluggers, 12/10/20

Reed Hoover may have passed away more than a year ago, but his utter dominance of Pluggers will never end. Like longtime and recently retired artist Gary Brookins before him, new guy Rich McKee isn’t afraid to turn a cold eye on the pathetic, eager suggestions clogging the pluggermail@aol.com inbox and say sneeringly “Sorry, folks, none of you can hold a candle to Reed.” Then he selects one of Reed’s banked Pluggers pitches at random, which I assume he keeps in an ornate wooden box.

Crock, 12/10/20

I never think the jokes in Crock are any good, so it’s kind of a relief to see a strip where they didn’t bother to include one! Just a little vignette about an incompetent military officer and his men, who are about to murder him.

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Pluggers, 12/7/20

So before this year, I was never really a coffee guy, and my wife had her coffee when she got to the office. But I decided as a New Year’s resolution to find out if it would be better for me, anxiety-wise and not-consuming-massive-amounts-of-artificial-sweetener-wise, to have one cup of coffee in the morning rather than chain-drinking cans of Coke Zero all day, and a couple months later due to COVID my wife’s office moved from an office building in Koreatown to our dining room table, so now we both make coffee here in the morning, and we have different tastes in coffee (I like a lighter roast!) so we actually have a little one-cup coffee maker and we each make our own. I bring this up because I’m fascinated by the fact that all of us in this world have our own way of doing little things like this, and that makes me look at this plugger’s situation with some curiosity. Do some people just make a big multi-cup pot of coffee in their house and everyone drinks it continuously until it runs out? How many coffee drinkers are in the average plugger household, anyway? How long does coffee last in a pot, really? How many times can you reheat coffee and have it still be drinkable? I guess my real question is: my first impression looking at this comic was that this plugger stumbled downstairs in his underwear, hungover, he has no idea what time it is, maybe it’s the middle of the afternoon, who even knows, and he’s like, “did I make this coffee yesterday? last night, when I was drunk? did my wife make it this morning? did my wife leave me yet? I’m gonna need some coffee to figure this out”, and I really want to believe that that’s a passably realistic interpretation, you know?

Hagar the Horrible, 12/7/20

You guys, I went to grad school with hopes of being an actual history professor because I used to have deep curiosity about historical questions. But today I read this and thought, “Huh, I wonder if Vikings actually had a taboo against cousin marriage” and I did a little Googling — like, very little Googling — like, just enough to find this explainer about Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins’s wife and this Tumblr post from 2014 from someone claiming to be an archaeologist who said that Viking cousin marriage wouldn’t have necessarily been the norm but wouldn’t have been frowned upon by anyone either, and you know what? I decided that was good enough for me! Either my brain is atrophying or I’m maturing, or maybe those are the same thing.