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Shoe, 11/13/20

I’m honestly not exactly sure, but I’m assuming the punchline here is that the mayor is not, in fact, living the high life thanks to thrift and good financial planning? Usually when Shoe does a joke about a comically corrupt politician, the strip deploys Senator Batson Belfry, but since senators pull down six figures, I guess he wouldn’t really work for the joke. But look: do you really believe that Treetops, a town that isn’t exactly Hootin’ Holler but is definitely depicted as having seen better days, somehow has enough opportunities for graft that its mayor can “live like a multi-millionaire”? I mean, the Perfesser is at this official city government press conference sitting on a crate, and I assume he brought it in from home.

The Lockhorns, 11/13/20

It can be difficult to ascertain the full social context of any given scene in the Mostly Featureless Lockhorns Void, but it really seems like nobody else is as this “party” and that Leroy went to the trouble of getting party hats and a cake just to give Loretta this cruel card. I like that he’s stepped a few feet away from her as she reads it, to be sure that he’s fully out of her emotional penumbra as the message really hits home.

Anyway, what do you guys think is going on over at Pluggers? I’ve gotten over that whole chicken leg business, probably they aren’t dabbling in body horror anym–

Pluggers, 11/13/20

AAAHHH

AAAAAHHHH

AAAAAHHHHH

WHAT IS THAT

WHAT’s GOING ON

This can’t be right, right? This has to be some weird Pluggers man-animal chimera nightmare bullshit. I’m just gonna Google Image search “rhino teeth” and s–

JESUS CHRIST, this is even worse, what the fuck am I even looking at, that can’t be right, keep scrolling through the images, there has to b–

NOOO I HATE IT I HATE ALL OF IT WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING

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Beetle Bailey, 11/7/20

I guess the joke here is that Sarge is an ape-like brute who took Beetle’s first-panel retort as an invitation to pound him into a pulp in traditional Beetle Bailey fashion. But I’d like to imagine that in fact Sarge took Beetle to a zoo or gorilla sanctuary and threw him into an enclosure to be attacked, or perhaps released a gorilla he keeps captive for just such occasions, because he is a very literal ape-like brute.

Hi and Lois, 11/7/20

Faithful readers of this blog know that I’m extremely on board with Hi and Lois reclaiming Thirsty’s original characterization as a sad, desperate alcoholic. I’m sad that the colorists of today’s strip, apparently unaware of the comics’ rich history of using alcohol-inflamed rhinopehyma as a visual gag, spent all their red-yellow gradient efforts on the fall leaves and not on Thirsty’s cross-hatched nose. Because Hi is trash-talking his neighbor and best (only?) friend well within hearing distance, I assume that Thirsty is fully passed out in that chair.

Pluggers, 11/7/20

I am dying to know the relationship between this strip and the infamous “Rhino-Man Hocks His TV” panel, not least because that appears to be the identical model of television, which was decades out of date even when Rhino-Man hocked it back in 2006. I don’t know if we’re supposed to understand that Dog-Man is superior to Rhino-Man in fixiness, the quality most valued in a plugger after down-home smugness and sexism, or if this is in fact the exact same TV, which the guy at the pawn shop gave Dog-Man at no charge just to free up some space on his shelves.

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Pluggers, 10/15/20

Pluggers are lonely. So lonely! Who will talk to pluggers? Well, maybe if they just rifle through this seven-year-old phone book — the last one ever delivered to them — and see if any of the names ring a bell, they’ll find someone who will talk to them. They do this every nine months ago when everything just gets to be too much, and every time fewer and fewer people answer.

Crock, 10/15/20

Look, I’m not saying that I want characters in comic strips to be photorealistic humans. Far from it! That would ruin the fun of comics! I’m just saying if your the design of your one of your characters is an undifferentiated dumpling of flesh, whose protruding lower lip sits immediately above his hairy chest with no obvious jaw between thorax and brainpan, maybe it’s best that you don’t ask the reader to contemplate what the phrase “from the neck up” might mean to such a being.