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Six Chix, 2/1/17

I’ve always been fascinated by how cultural images become detached from their origins and eventually become just bits of iconic flotsam in our collective consciousness. Like, skeletons have been associated with death for most of human history, for obvious reasons, but then in the West we started putting a hooded cloak on our skeletal death-figure, and then we started forgetting that our skeletal death-figure had a full body beneath that cloak, as the skull-face faded out of his representation. So that’s how we get cartoons like this, where a dentist is staring into the empty void where a face should be, not seeing flesh or a skull or even the back of a hood, just an infinitely dark emptiness that goes on forever, a yawning portal into the not-life that awaits us after our demise. The dentist seems remarkably unfazed by it, to be honest! Dentists have seen some shit, man.

Pluggers, 2/1/17

There are plenty of Pluggers panels that demonstrate that pluggers feel all the sorts of anxieties the rest of us do, from the financial to the familial to the creeping existential. I have to assume, then, that at some point in this joke’s history, the line was about “plugger performance anxiety.” Get it? Because usually that phrase involves inability to get an erection, but here it’s about peeing in a cup, because pluggers gave up on sex long ago. While usually I endorse complete freedom of expression in the comics, I can’t say I regret an editorial decision that spared innocent newspaper-reading Americans everywhere from thinking about the boners that these downwardly mobile exurban beast-men may or may not have.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/29/17

Haha, yes, coconuts are a source of both nutrition and life-giving water, they’re a balanced part of a healthy diet, this comic has been made possible by the Association of American Coconut Importers (You’ll Go Nuts … For Coconuts™!), blah blah blah, but: let’s not lose sight of the fact that the crew of this cargo ship has abandoned Sly and Max to die. Like, what is even the backstory here? Was Slylock deputized by the understaffed animal government to deal in cases of admiralty law and about to crack some case of nautical crime wide open? Or was the whole thing a ploy to lure him out to sea to kill the vulpine detective in a way that left no fingerprints? Anyway, thanks to Slylock’s knowledge of nutrition, this bunny-bear-wolf gang isn’t going to get away with this!

Family Circus, 1/29/17

After more than half a century of “Billy, Age 7” jokes, it’s becoming pretty clear that the Family Circus is running out of English words to play with. Still, I was vaguely amused when I got to the end of this strip of free-associative sub-puns; no matter what our political beliefs, I think we can all agree that our nation’s laws would be more fair and just if they were written by a tribe of beautiful, magical creatures who combined the wisdom of a human being with the grace and power of a horse.

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Slylock Fox, 1/21/17

These three scenes may look similar, but there’s one crucial difference. In numbers one and three, this snowman is merely a crude simulacrum of a man, the destruction of which is traumatizing not even to the children who fashioned it — even the birds and bunnies can tell this isn’t a real living thing. In number two, however, that’s a magic hat, which bestows the gift of sapience upon the wearer — but, crucially, does not fundamentally alter the snowman’s physical nature. The fully-formed mind called out of nonexistence by that enchanted haberdashery is now trapped, and silently screaming, in this unstable, dissolving shell.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/21/17

Haha, whoops, I had forgotten that Buck was the broker selling those smutty comic books Rex found under the floorboards in his attic. The characters in Judge Parker have experienced nothing but disaster and madness since longtime writer Woody Wilson handed over his strips to his successors, but in Rex Morgan, M.D., the Wilsonian tradition of the main characters occasionally being handed enormous checks due to no particular hard work or virtue on their part remains in full effect.

Gil Thorp, 1/21/17

Guys, have we considered that maybe he just kind of sucks? I think we should!