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Pluggers, 9/23/24

An oft-noted source of malaise in American life is a rise of loneliness, as “third spaces” — places where people socialize that aren’t home or work — decline, and more and more people spend all their time with immediate family, coworkers — or, as they age, themselves. My new crackpot theory is that this explains why individual Plugger entries have gotten increasingly weird and idiosyncratic over the years that I’ve read the strip. They used to be the sort of corny and relatable content that emerged from consensus as you and your buddies griped or joked about life’s little foibles at the bar or on the job site. But now? Now that you took your pension and your wife has died and the VFW hall has closed, now that mostly you just sit on the couch with the TV turned on way too loud, so you can hear it and also can’t really think, which is maybe the whole point? Well, now who knows what your old pals who you exchange occasional texts with do. Do they mute the TV before they reply to your text? Probably, right? You do it, so it stands to reason that they do too. Maybe that’s why they haven’t replied to your text yet. Maybe they’re just waiting for their show to end so they can focus some attention on it. That’s probably it.

Gasoline Alley, 9/23/24

In addition to being obviously annoying, Rufus and Joel are also uncanny, in the sense that they alone among the cast stay the same age even as everyone ages around them. Are they truly human at all, or are they strange visitors from the fae realms? Well, today’s strip at least establishes that Rufus was in fact pushed down a human birth canal, which may be more information than any of us ever wanted, but now we have it.

Shoe, 9/23/24

I love the fact that the Perfesser’s eyes are closed here. He’s not just daydreaming about these culinary delights: he appears to be deep in the act of prayer, as if he’s trying to manifest them. This probably hurts Roz’s feelings, as she runs the restaurant where he’s currently sitting and from which he could presumably simply order them.

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Beetle Bailey, Blondie, and Shoe, 9/4/24

Look, we’d all like to believe that works of art spring from the pure, isolated genius of their creator’s mind, but when you’re talking about a commercial and ongoing project like a daily comic strip, obviously the whole thing ends up being affected by the desires and needs of your audience. You gotta give ’em what they want! The creators of legacy strips are acutely aware that the “’em” in this case is “old people” and what they want is news they can use, like “Ha ha, there sure are a bunch of crazy ‘social media’ sites these days,” “Hey, did you know that you can make money on playing video games? Maybe that grandson of yours isn’t such a screwup after all,” and “Tired of pissing yourself? Well, here’s some unexpected good news!”

Six Chix, 9/4/24

This blog is itself a work of art in dialogue with its audience (literally, given the comment section), and apparently what you want is my funny, erudite, and occasionally lengthy riffs on the strips, which I’m happy to deliver! But it is my blog, after all, and sometimes what I want out of it is to just post a strip I read today and say “I don’t like this”, so here you go. Today’s Six Chix: I don’t like this!

Dennis the Menace, 9/4/24

Many years ago, an ex of mine had to go to traffic school to get points from a moving violation taken off her license. At the time, there were various kinds of theme schools you could go to, and she signed up for something that billed itself as “comedy driving school.” After her class, I asked her how it went, and she said, absolutely steaming mad, that “Someone needs to tell that guy that there’s a difference between being funny and being in a really good mood,” a formulation I think about all the time. Anyway, someone needs to tell the Dennis the Menace team that there’s a difference between being a menace and wasting everyone’s time because you’re one of the dumbest people alive and have no filter or sense of embarrassment about it!

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Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?