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Blondie, 4/18/17

You know, whenever I see a strip with a gag like this, I sincerely hope it’s the end product of a long meeting between representatives of the Fitbit marketing department and the Cayman Islands-based LLC that owns the rights to the Blondie characters and trademarks, at the end of which they agreed on a plan to mutually leverage their brands across platforms, using Dagwood’s well-known humorous “ownership” of the sleeping space to promote awareness of Fitbit’s functionality that promotes good sleep health. Because the other option is that Blondie decided to give some other company free advertising space in the comics, and that’s honestly pretty sad.

Mary Worth, 4/18/17

Haha, Toby, defensive much??? It’s pretty telling that her immediate response to any mention of humans who have experienced a normal emotional pair-bond is to blurt out “My marriage to Ian is not a sham!! People look at a more-or-less beautiful, moderately vibrant young-ish woman married to a rotund chin-bearded early-late-middle-aged academic and immediately think ‘Oh, he’s her sugar daddy,’ and that’s hurtful. For one thing, Ian’s not even rich! Have you seen where we live?’”

Marvin, 4/18/17

Oh, whoops, I guess yesterday’s carpool shenanigans were just the launching point for a whole storyline about various members of Marvin’s family who use him as a tiny, warm body to take advantage of traffic laws that are meant to cut traffic by providing incentives to multiple adults to who would otherwise drive their own cars to share a ride instead. Anyway, I particularly enjoy the way Jeff’s expression shifts from “emotionally numb” to “crushing despair” as his hunky co-worker suggests that the he drive to work with a diaper full of Marvin shit in the car to keep away pesky and presumably squeamish law enforcement officers.

Spider-Man, 4/18/17

“Ha ha, yes, Starlord and his pop tunes! Perhaps you remember the smash hit film Guardians of the Galaxy, whose trailer used Starlord’s walkman playing Blue Swede’s version of ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ to great effect? Well, the sequel’s coming out in just a few weeks, and its trailer features [checks YouTube] Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain!’ Sounds enticing, eh? I certainly hope this giant robot hasn’t ripped Spider-Man’s arms out of their sockets yet!” The sad thing is this is literally the best Newspaper Spider-Man has ever been at promoting a Marvel Cinematic Universe property.

Six Chix, 4/18/17

This woman some years ago went on a “fantasy weekend” to Yosemite, because her fantasy was to fuck a bigfoot. And she achieved her goal! Never give up on your dreams, everybody!

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Pluggers, 4/4/17

Sometimes the point of Pluggers just seems to be “pluggers are old,” which, you know, nothing wrong with that, we’re all going to be old someday, if all goes to plan. These gags generally take the form of “Old pluggers have assumptions and cultural references that are now forgotten by younger people.” Today’s panel takes a somewhat different tack: this plugger looks just as baffled at the concept of “5 ¢ Milky Ways” as any indie-rock-addled hipster youth. The difference, I suppose, is that a young person would’ve downloaded their recipe from a fancy website to their iPhone or whatever, whereas the plugger is in touch with the long, unbroken chain of knowledge that goes back generations, preserving and copying these manuscripts dutifully like a medieval monk, even if they don’t fully understand it.

Six Chix, 4/4/17

Who says there’s nothing new under the sun? I would’ve thought sci-fi writers over the past century or so had already rather exhaustively detailed all the problems with time travel: you step on a butterfly and turn America fascist, you go back to meet Jesus and accidentally become Jesus, you have sex with some lady and become your own grandfather, etc. But nope, Six Chix has discovered something new: don’t you hate it when you think you’re going to the Renaissance or to our spacefaring future, but you just end up in some lady’s uterus, leaving her torso grotesquely distorted? We never should’ve meddled in the mysteries of the timestream!

Family Circus, 4/4/17

Look at those impossibly cheery faces! Definitely, definitely this involves murder somehow.

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Hi and Lois, 3/22/17

Shoutout to Hi and Lois for jettisoning a “joke” or “punchline” here and instead choosing to depict one of its main characters going through an unspecified but apparently severe health crisis. Hi, sweating copiously but unable to keep warm no matter how many layers he puts on, mumbles “I can’t find any medicine in the medicine cabinet!”, his blurring vision leaving him incapable of reading the labels on any of the various medications available to him. Tomorrow: Hallucinations and/or death!

Gasoline Alley, 3/22/17

One of the things I like (“like”) about Gasoline Alley is that they introduce these new characters and just act like they’re beloved and that we should care about their weird, inscrutable motivations and emotions. So, Ruth, the besotted (?) office manager of beardy PA Chipper Wallet, has pretty much been a one-note character, that single note being how cheerfully dumb she is, and this has been offered up for our uncomplicated amusement, but now we’re supposed to feel bad because she knows she’s dumb and incapable of running the office by herself, no matter how brief Chipper’s absence. Anyway, if this burst of tears and associate hug ends up with the two of them sexing, I will be very, very disgusted.

Six Chix, 3/22/17

WHY IS THE CHIPMUNK WEARING GLASSES

WHY

WHYYYYYYY