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Family Circus, 8/6/20

I get what’s going on here — the water is icy cold, which Dolly is blissfully oblivious about — but I have some notes on the visuals being used to convey this information. I guess those are supposed to be “shiver” lines around Big Daddy Keane’s legs, but they look more like steam (giving the exactly opposite impression of what the panel’s going for) or maybe stink lines, which one also doesn’t usually associate with cold. Although that is a creepy combo, isn’t it? A cold stink. Very Lovecraftian. Also Daddy’s skin seems to be turning black below the knee, representing some kind of horrific rapid-onset gangrene. I take it back, this panel is amazing, actually.

The Lockhorns, 8/6/20

This panel manages to pack two incredibly sad facts into a single efficient gag: that once, long ago, when Loretta met and fell in love with him, Leroy was actually a thoughtful, careful person, but now he leans into his own incompetence as if performing for some invisible audience, all the time.

Pluggers, 8/6/20

Pluggers are familiar with the technology that was prevalent when they were younger, in ways that others, who didn’t grow up with that technology, are not. That sure is a Pluggers joke, all right!

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Pluggers, 7/29/20

You know, sometimes I feel like you guys don’t appreciate what I go through to bring you the densely referenced metatextual content you’ve come to expect here on josh reads dot com, so I thought I’d pull back the curtain on the “process” behind this post I’m writing right now, which involved searching my archives for posts that featured Pluggers and contained the word “dying.” Was it harrowing? You bet. But it was worth it because I confirmed my hunch: as a rule a plugger only owns one suit, and his primary reason for wearing it is to go to a funeral. You can understand why he might eventually buy some more, though, what with the constant parade of death and their bodies waxing and waning with the vagaries of their medication regimen. That’s what I love about these pluggers, man: I get bigger, and they stay the same age (i.e., dead).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/29/20

GET IT, REX? ARE YOU GETTING THE PICTURE? THE MEDICAL PRACTICE COMES AT A PRICE, AND IT’S A LOT MORE THAN A DOLLAR

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Mark Trail, 7/22/20

Let me tell you all a story from the misty prehistory of this blog. When I moved in Baltimore in the now-ancient fall of 2002, the local print newspaper, to which I subscribed, still had four glorious pages of comics, including all the soap opera strips that I had heard of but never actually encountered in the wild. In Mary Worth, I arrived right in the middle of a long dinner conversation between Mary, Jeff, and Smitty Smedlap, a former chef who hated new-fangled cooking and particularly didn’t care for fish (or, as he called it, “feesh”), showing open contempt for Mary’s beloved Bum Boat. In classic soap opera strip pacing fashion, Smedlap’s monologue went on uninterrupted for days and days and I was completely fascinated by it. He was clearly an asshole, but did the other characters think he was? Were they ever going to talk and break the tension? What was going on? By the end, when Mary replied to him passive-aggressively and decided he wasn’t her kind of people, I was hooked on the strip, and on the soaps as a form, which led directly to the advent of this very website just a couple years later.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I am absolutely furious that we jumped directly from yesterday’s invitation to today’s aftermath and didn’t get to see Jeremy Cartwright talking shit about homemade LoFo cuisine while Mark openly seethed and Cherry, as usual, pushed all her emotions deep down inside. How boorishly ungrateful was he? Did the man insult flapjacks? Mark Trail readers want to know, damn it.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/22/20

Have you ever wondered how exactly Vikings relieved themselves during the long journeys of exploration, raiding, and commerce they made in narrow, open longship? Or, perhaps more accurately, have you always kind of assumed that they just peed and pooped over the sides into the ocean, but wanted confirmation from a trained historian, or at least from a newspaper comic strip about Vikings? Well, today’s your lucky day, my friend.

Plugger, 7/22/20

To a plugger, the prospect of a moment of blessed unconsciousness, no matter how brief, carries more erotic charge than any sexual encounter possibly could.