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Apartment 3-G, 2/26/14

There’s been some suspicious chatter in the comments about the possibility that Tommie’s fiancé might not actually exist. Sure, we’ve seen him, but we also saw the mysterious ghost who forced Lu Ann to make all those crappy fern paintings, and he just turned out to be a byproduct of the carbon monoxide poisoning she developed from working in a poorly ventilated studio. Couldn’t terrible loneliness be an even more powerful spur to hallucinatory lunacy than oxygen deprivation? Tommie’s reckless food overpurchases certainly indicate a kind of panicked mania. “Yep, enough food for seven men! Of which my fiancé is definitely one! Not a figment of my imagination! Not a story that I thought nobody would ever be able to confirm or deny! A real, flesh and blood human man who wants to marry me! Ha ha! Hope you like things that come out of brightly-colored boxes!”

Mary Worth, 2/26/14

Looks like Tommy’s had a political awakening in the joint! No matter how badly he needs a job, he recoils in disgust at the thought of helping some vast megaretailer conglomerate crush the struggling mom-and-pop stores the still cling to life along Santa Royale’s scenic shopping/fish-gutting district down by the pier. Or maybe he’s just worried that his sobriety will be in trouble because the Santaroymart warehouses a den of drug depravity, if I correctly remember that the hilariously botched and laughably named drug bust “Operation H-Town” went down there.

Better Half, 2/26/14

Sure, it’ll probably set her back thousands of dollars, but when you come home and find your husband sticking his dick in your home entertainment system, you can be forgiven for reacting strongly.

Herb and Jamaal, 2/26/14

Like when there’s nobody else in the room, for instance!

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/20/14

So hey, remember that lady from Monday’s Funky Winkerbean, who deflected a sexual advance by announcing with dead eyes that, despite the fact that she was beautiful, she was broken inside and she hated herself? Well, turns out she’s Cindy Summers, former Westview popular girl and current national news anchor and Funky’s ex-wife! The whole marriage took place during the period when I wasn’t reading the strip, but faithful reader/disturbing Twitter user name Bat Les Moore assures me that this cheery moment happened during their divorce:

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY! Anyway, the residual effects of having been married to Funky probably explain Cindy’s self-loathing, but at least she still has her physical beauty and high-powered job to sustain her! Haha, whoops, except her boss is telling her that she’s too old to be beautiful and that they’re going to fire her, which, while this is obviously the thought process behind a lot of TV news personnel decisions, I’m pretty sure that if you just say it out loud explicitly like this you get extremely sued for age discrimination.

Anyway, not to dwell too much on this strip (haha, who am I kidding, dwelling too much on strips like this are the entire reason why this blog exists) but let’s examine today’s punchline! “It’s the digital age, Cindy … and digital shows your age.” It’s typically Winkerbeanean in that it uses low-level wordplay to let a character know that their life is changing for the worse. But does it make sense? Is TV Executive Man saying that young people, who like computers and don’t watch TV news, will watch TV news if someone young is on TV? Is he saying that Cindy has repeatedly tried and failed to operate computers, smartphones, and other digital devices on-air, further alienating the coveted young person demographic? Is he making reference to the fact that high-def broadcasts, blown up on a 60-inch screen, reveal the slight lines and imperfections on Cindy’s fortysomething visage, forcing the network to hunt after ever younger and smoother-faced anchors? Is he just being a dick, in a way that, I can’t emphasize enough, is totally, 100% legally actionable? Yes, it’s probably the last one.

Beetle Bailey, 2/20/14

Plato’s subtle shift in his third word balloon is instructive here. At first, with fanciful metaphors, he implies that Beetle can never satisfy Sarge with his work ethic. But then he shifts to an idea that, while still out of the reach of a lowly private, is at least within the realm of physical possibility. Sarge, he implies, can be bought. Now we must discover his price.

Spider-Man, 2/20/14

Oh, yeah, so: J. Jonah Jameson is inside the old Iron Man suit, has rigged it up somehow so his crazed eyes and Hitler mustache are visible through the mask, has gone mad with power, is determined to kill Spider-Man, blah blah blah. As you can see in the final panel, he’ll use the one weapon against which Spidey has no defense: crumbling masonry.

Mary Worth, 2/20/14

MARY WORTH IS INVITING TOMMY TO EAT IN HER APARTMENT REPEAT MARY WORTH US GIVING TOMMY AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE EITHER THEATRICALLY CONTRITE OR HILARIOUSLY INAPPROPRIATE ON HER TURF, THREAT LEVEL: AMAZING

Better Half, 2/20/14

Oh hey let’s check in with the Better Half, probably it won’t be an Oedipal nigtmarAAAAUUUUGGGHHH

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Beetle Bailey, 2/16/14

Today’s Beetle Bailey is certainly one of the more crushingly realistic commentaries on the nature of work I’ve seen in the comics lately. Sarge, standing in for the cheerleaders of the capitalist order who don’t do much manual labor themselves, urges his underlings to think of work as a intrinsically morally uplifting act. Yet in the final panel we can see that the ordinary soldiers aren’t buying this at all. Killer, most optimistic of the bunch, at least imagines that his window-washing duties might lead to a window-washing career that involves a certain degree of specialized skill and, one would hope, cachet; still, it’s not like he can get excited about it. Plato, ever the philosopher, knows that performing an identical act in a different location isn’t really any kind of change at all. Beetle can only visualize his future life as a reeking expanse of garbage, extending endlessly to every horizon. And Zero has the most harrowing vision: he knows that nobody in the private sector will pay him even minimum wage for the menial tasks that he’s only half-mastered, and that he will certainly starve if he can’t elicit sympathy from cruel-faced strangers.

Panel from the Better Half, 2/16/14

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

ha ha but it can’t have really said that

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

no check again they wouldn’t dare put that in the newspaper

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

but but is he talking about my lips everyone has lips oh my god

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

[ENDLESS ENDLESS SCREAMING]