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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!

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Hi and Lois, 4/25/18

They called it the Day of the Second Sun: one morning, people woke up to see another luminous star blazing in the sky. The disasters began almost right away, of course: the effects on the tides, the ecosystem, the atmosphere, and the Van Allen belts were swift and catastrophic, to say nothing of the corrosive effects of endless day on the world’s collective psyche. But still, in those first few moments of that first awful day, there were a few scattered reactions of naïve hope and even delight.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/25/18

Man, you ever publish a comic strip for, like, literally 35 years, so long that you basically forget that there was at one point a conceit to the strip, something about fairy tales, or maybe that was only the title and it was never used as a joke, it’s been 35 years so who can remember at this point, but then — but then! — you suddenly come up with a perfect punchline that ties into this long-forgotten strip origin story, and it’s just in time to be only a week too late to be topical?

Pluggers, 4/25/18

Pluggers have developed their own elaborate version of hanky code, in which the various colors and labels of the work shirts they hang on their clothesline indicate their availability for various sex acts.

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Spider-Man, 4/23/18

Welp, as of last week almost all of the dramas in the current Spider-Man plot had been resolved — Dr. Connors is no longer the Lizard, Bruce Banner can once again turn into the Hulk, and we’re all just going to agree to not talk about whatever the implications of that whole blood transfusion swap business were. All that’s left is Jameson’s threat to out Connors as the Lizard, even though we just established that he wasn’t the Lizard any more. Spider-Man came up with an actually effective, if extremely brutal, solution to this problem, which was to leave Jameson in the swamp to die, but now that the cowardly publisher has promised on fear of his life not to do the bad thing he was threatening to do, I guess they’re going to let him live. Definitely he’s completely dependable on this point and will honor a pledge extracted from him under duress! All that’s left for us to learn is whether Spidey’s extremely efficient “carry the other two guys out of the swamp tucked under your arms” transportation method can scale up to three guys.

Pluggers, 4/23/18

Pluggers are just completely insufferable. Straight-up narcissists. When you have a conversation with a plugger, is he really listening to you? Does he care about you, as a person? He most definitely does not.