Blasts from the past and/or eternal present
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Crock, 3/18/25
I kind of admire the thought process that went into constructing the current installment of “The Men Of Outpost 5 Read Letters From One Of The Men’s Hillbilly Hometown.” Obviously, you have this great joke about how the one guy is a dumb hillbilly who may have mastered the mechanical art of tying a shoe but doesn’t understand how the process fits into the larger context, where you generally tie both your shoes at once. But what gets me is how they decided to set that punchline up. What if he’s prompted to reminisce on this subject because his beloved friend and mentor died? What if he’s in mourning? That sure adds a fun little twist to the gag!
Marvin, 3/18/25
Marvin, the comic strip, debuted in 1982, so if time flowed normally for its cursèd inhabitants, then Marvin, the character, would be in his early 40s, and his parents would have long ago forgotten his awful infancy, which only lasted a couple of years, after all, or at least they would have sanded down the edges in constant retelling into a “we can laugh about it now” situation. But time doesn’t flow normally, and Marvin will remain a baby forever, and his parents will neither know the escape of him growing up nor ever truly get used to the horror. Thus the exclamation points in the second panel here: while this is the sort of bad behavior we expect from this terrible child, his parents are forever shocked anew, each psychic wound inflicted never healing into protective scar tissue.
Pluggers, 3/18/25
Pluggers long ago lost the ability to feel sexual arousal. But products? Well, pluggers sure do love a good product — looking at them, assessing them, trying to figure out how much they cost, then either nodding their head at a good price or shaking their heads at how expensive things are these days. They still have those pleasures, at least, even though others have long passed them by.
B.C. and Wizard of Id, 3/18/25
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the courting mores of modern times were mapped onto a previous era — the Stone Age, say, or a vaguely medieval period that also had magic in it? Well, today’s B.C. and Wizard of Id have the answers for you, my friends!
