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Spider-Man, 6/4/18

There are of course plenty of different schools of thought on storytelling. Some people will say that every detail should point towards the eventual resolution of the narrative, and if that’s the template Newspaper Spider-Man is going for perhaps this angry cabbie will show up up at a crucial part of the climax, out for revenge. But many writers like adding little grace note details to their stories, which make the world of their tales feel more filled out and lived in, and clarify the nature of their characters, without really pertaining to the plot. I assume that’s what’s going on here as Peter Parker is berated by a cabbie as a cheapskate. While Peter himself doesn’t make much money, his wife is a successful actress and, honestly, he doesn’t even attempt to beg poverty. “Sorry. Didn’t have that much money on me,” he says casually. “I just didn’t think ahead, and now you have suffer for it. Oh well!”

Dennis the Menace and Pluggers, 6/4/18

Here we have two men in the twilight of their lives evaluating their priorities in very different ways. Mr. Wilson rejects Dennis’s extremely non-menacing nutritional advice, for a number of obvious reasons: he’s already lived a good long life, and why not enjoy the time he has left, or at least use the fleeting joy of a sugar rush to distract from the fact that what should’ve been his golden years are being spent constantly feuding with the child who lives next door? Then there’s our elderly dog-man plugger, whose house and body are in equal states of disrepair. He could try getting out the toolbox and fixing up the house — he is a plugger, after all, and that’s the sort of thing they do — but, you know, he’ll be dead soon, so why bother? The stair will outlive the knee, at least, and soon he won’t be able to walk down the steps anymore to hear the squeak. Then it’ll be somebody else’s problem.

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Blondie, 5/26/18

There’s really no circumstance under which this joke would’ve “worked,” but it would’ve not worked less if Dagwood had been wearing something vaguely cool or even interesting. Still, as a not-particularly-hip incipient old person myself, only the extreme out-of-touchness oozing from every pixel of this image prevented me from briefly wondering if wearing polo shirt tucked into black slacks had, against all odds, suddenly become fashionable.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/26/18

It’s kind of interesting that Hagar’s reputation as an illiterate precedes him, and not, say, his reputation as a wanton, destructive plunderer.

Beetle Bailey, 5/26/18

We interrupt our usual military antics for this nightmare vision of the human race as nothing more than a buffet of flesh and blood to be devoured by eager, ravenous parasites!

Pluggers, 5/26/18

If I’m interpreting this correctly, these plugger dudes are definitely going to have no-strings-attached sex on that filthy, filthy couch.

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Dennis the Menace, 5/2/18

Ha, yes, Dennis, we do exist in a world of corruption and decay, where we ingest not only the cooked and dismembered corpses of our fellow beings but also the dead microorganisms that once hitched a ride on, and in, their bodies, a slurry of organic matter from a thousand different ecological niches, most of it invisible to us. This is what being an animal is, of course: you eat other things that used to be alive. Like most of Dennis’s menacing, today’s incident is just ripping the polite mask off of our brutal, grotesque, and complex reality.

Pluggers, 5/2/18

One thing that I will always say when I try to explain why Pluggers annoys me (and I seem to annoy other people when I say it, but so it goes) is that it’s smug. Not always, but often! The not-so-subtle implication is that these salt-of-the-earth folks are better than you, you big-city elitist, somehow simultaneously simpler but also smarter. Today’s a great example: A plugger just sleeps on an ordinary pillow filled with feathers and not … some presumably much more suspect alternative to this? Yes, if you’re like me, you had to Google “My Pillow” to discover that it’s a poly-foam pillow heavily advertised on late-night infomercials, marketed by a company that was forced by numerous lawsuits to stop making various specious claims about its health benefits. Anyway, who’s morally superior? Pluggers, who are extremely smug about not having been taken in by the “My Pillow” scam that they’ve seen advertised endlessly? Or me, who’s never heard of it in the first place because I don’t watch infomercials but instead spend my aimless late nights reading articles about subway systems and 18th century wars on Wikipedia???? CHECKMATE PLUGGERS!!!!!!

Marvin, 5/2/18

So Marvin is sucking the life force out of his grandfather so he can remain forever an infant, un-potty-trained for all eternity? Sounds about right!