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Mary Worth, 2/16/21

OK, I don’t want to tell anyone how to open up and share their past trauma, but I do think it’s wild that Eve led with a big reveal that her late husband used to trip her, a sinister but relatively mild form of abuse, only to later casually drop into a fun conversation about how great dogs are the fact that, oh yeah, he also tried to murder me with a gun except that my dog saved me by getting shot in the neck. Don’t worry, the dog is fine, though! He’s right there in that strip I linked to above, looking fine! Unless Eve has had … a series of identical dogs named Max? Who she treats as the same dog? Best not to think about it, although now I can’t think of anything else.

Pluggers, 2/16/21

I didn’t think anything could make me more simultaneously angry and confused than “pluggers like to ‘accidentally’ drop their pants in public,” but “non-pluggers get food particles out from between their teeth like this, but pluggers get food particles out from between their teeth like this,” so, uh, congrats to today’s Pluggers, I guess!

Shoe, 2/16/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Shoe, the character, doesn’t know what an escape room is, and possibly Shoe, the comic strip, doesn’t either!

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Mary Worth, 2/11/21

Oh, say, what’s going on in the Mary Worth domestic violence storyline, which will surely get the same nuanced, realistic treatment that the sexual assault storyline received? Well it turns out that Eve’s abusive ex-husband had a comical vaudeville villain mustache, and also he died, and then she left town with the money she inherited from him and bought a nice condo in Santa Royale. But the importan question: is she moving on emotionally with the help of a licensed professional therapist? Turns out that yes, yes she is. Well, problem solved, time for the next storyline, I guess!

Shoe, 2/11/21

Props to Shoe for long ago figuring out that the format of an open-ended question on a school test is a good opportunity to wedge old jokes into their strip, but I really have question the quality of education that Skyler is receiving. Maybe he knows these one-liners are utterly failing to prepare him for the modern workforce, and that’s why he looks so depressed all the time.

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Shoe, 2/3/21

The “punchline” here isn’t a new joke; I’m reasonably sure I said this more than a decade ago about Michael Phelps, who owned the pool where I swam in Baltimore and who I therefore saw in the locker room multiple times, and I certainly didn’t make it up. In fact, I’d argue it’s barely a joke at all, more just a funny turn of phrase, really. But I do appreciate that they’ve given this cliche that special Shoe twist, which is to say they’ve put it in the context of one of the main characters’ devastatingly depressing personal lives. “I’m tellin’ ya, Shoe, he had muscles in places I don’t even have places! No wonder she left me. I hate my body and myself.”

Pluggers, 2/3/21

Pluggers, like all comic strips, must evolve to survive, and it could go in any number of ways. But I think I speak for all of us when I say that I sincerely did not want or expect it to go with [late middle-aged dog-man doing a sexy baby voice] “Hey, it’s a shiny quarter. Oopsie, did my pants fall down again?”