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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?”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/28/21

Rex Morgan’s Kelly, the teen daughter of the Morgans’ receptionist, has been a particularly acute victim of comic-book time in the strip: she’s gone from a midriff-baring, mom-sassing punk-dating rebel to a chunky-sweater-wearing good girl without having gotten appreciably older in the process. Admittedly, getting blackmailed by a toddler who spotted you fooling around with your boyfriend is the sort of thing that might put you on the straight and narrow! Still, it’s sad that Kelly’s total transformation isn’t good enough for her mom, who apparently will be sending her to a nunnery in short order.

Shoe, 1/28/21

I know that one of Shoe’s go-to bits is Shoe or the Perfesser, who eat at Roz’s literally every day, telling some unsuspecting stranger that the food there sucks, actually. Still, I feel like the items on the menu whose names already include a joke about how they’re hazardous to your health should be exempt from this. You’re overloading the concept! Is it dangerously rich and delicious, or prepared in a dangerously slapdash manner that violates various health and safety codes? The hapless bird-man who has unwittingly wandered into the crossfire of the long-running passive-aggressive Shoe-Roz conflict looks baffled, and rightly so.

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Gil Thorp, 1/18/21

As a man born in 1974 and thus smack in the middle of the Gen X cohort, I have been mostly safe during the raging Millennial vs. Boomer wars, and have thus been able to take a sort of detached view of them. One of the conclusions I’ve come to is that we’re way too free and easy with generational essentialism when we should just be engaging in basic agism. To put it another way, a lot of the stereotypes about how “Millennials suck” or “Boomers suck” are actually just ways in which young people and old people suck, respectively, and how they’ve always sucked no matter what year they were born, and in fact many of the ways Boomers suck now are the ways in which Millennials will suck in 30 years or so.

Anyway, a particularly pernicious habit of the agèd is the belief that their fondly remembered youth in particular is not just particularly vivid in their mind because that was when they were young and their life was full of promise, but because it was in fact the most important historical moment during which anyone could ever have been young, and young people today should get into all the pop culture signifiers today’s old people remember so fondly. This is fully universal and mostly harmless: like almost everybody, for instance, I am very convinced that our civilization’s music just happened to hit the peak of its creativity when I was between 18 and 25 years old.

Because most newspaper comics are written by and for Baby Boomers, you get a version of this in which every adult was a hippie as a teenager and went to discos as a young adult and no subsequent cultural trends are worth talking about, really. But if we Gen Xers are going to resist the siren song of pluggerdom, we really need to watch ourselves from falling into this same trap. Like, the last time I really followed basketball was the in the era under discussion here, and though my favs were the lovable, goonish Oakley-Ewing-Starks-Mason-era Knicks, “Joe Duuu-mars” is definitely like one of Proust’s madeleines to me. But, like, I’m given to understand that today’s NBA is a vibrant, beloved league that has its own set of superstars and characters and hangers-on. If I met an actual teen who was fixated on early the early ’90s NBA, I would feel mingled amusement and pity, and if I were writing a teen character and thought “I’m gonna have this kid be obsessed with things from when I was a kid,” I would hope someone would talk me out of it.

Shoe, 1/18/21

Way back when the New York Times first experimented with a paywall, back in the late ’00s, they kept their news coverage free but you had to pay to read their opinion columnists. This struck me as an insane choice, both in terms of what the market valued and how much labor went into each product — even back then it was obvious that investigative journalism took a lot of resources to produce whereas literally any asshole on the internet, yours truly included, is more than willing to offer semi-informed opinions for free — so I have always assumed that the decision actually reflected the internal hierarchy at the paper, in which columnists are better paid and have more prestige despite doing less work because they’re considered “thought leaders” or whatever. Anyway, Shoe may be a longstanding legacy comics about clinically depressed talking birds, but I’ll take my pointed media analysis where I can get it. (The Times eventually figured out what people will really shell out for: recipes and the crossword puzzle.)

Mark Trail, 1/18/21

Since we last checked in with Mark Trail, he stole his dad’s manatee-harming speedboat and got into some fisticuffs with Trail family henchmen (?). But now he has to face an existential dilemma: does he get into a speedboat chase with the police? Seems unlikely, but remember, Mark absolutely punched a cop in the face one time, and sure, that was just to rescue Rusty, who was stuck under a car, but it’s a slippery slope, and I think we can all agree that manatees are much cuter than Rusty.

Daddy Daze, 1/18/21

I think I speak for all of us when I say I want to hear a lot less about the Daddy Daze baby and his secret langage of “ba”s and a lot more about the Daddy Daze daddy’s divorce. I’m gonna bet it was pretty wild!

Dennis the Menace, 1/18/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Mr. Wilson wants to kill Dennis with poison gas!