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Blondie, 6/5/17

Hi there, I’m a guy who reads and writes about the comics every day and yet I’m genuinely baffled about what the “joke” is in today’s Blondie! Is it about how Dagwood’s shoes are large and clownish? (Does the Blondie artistic team even recognize how large and clownish Dagwood’s shoes are anymore?) Or is it just that, ha ha, joining the circus sure is an inappropriately whimsical fantasy for an adult to have! Anyway, joke’s on you, buddy: nobody wants to see the circus anymore, either.

Beetle Bailey, 6/5/17

Wow, Sarge looks genuinely sad in panel two, full of regrets about the vicious beatings his delivers on the daily to his hapless subordinate. Not sad enough to do anything about it, of course — the world doesn’t change so easily. But the thrill is clearly gone.

Pluggers, 6/5/17

Ha ha, pluggers’ cars are just straight-up full of garbage! Just like their kitchen cabinets, and the rest of their homes! I’m starting to worry about pluggers, guys.

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Crankshaft, 6/4/17

Earlier this week we got treated to yet another hint that Crankshaft is trapped in temporal amber, always on the verge of death but never quite getting there. That’s really something for comics obsessives like me and the readers of this blog to contemplate, though. Today’s strip gets back to the simple, core message the Funkyverse has for casual readers turning to the funny pages for a wistful smile and a little escapism: all of us are going to die, and some of us sooner than others.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/4/17

Solution — Count Weirdly still has a pre-animalpocalypse mindset. He clings to the old ways, where there was a hierarchy of species, with his own, of course, on top. “Max?” he thinks, typing various combinations into the password field with no effect. “Is Max his pet?” Sly and Max smile at him with mingled pity and contempt. This is the new age. The standings of various species have been dramatically leveled, and Slylock chose that outdated password hint to remind him of the social order he now serves. His password is “NO GODS NO MASTERS”.

Panel from The Family Circus, 6/4/17

“There, I just summarized the whole long boring sermon for you! Now let’s go to the dog track. Don’t tell your parents.”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/4/17

Well, let’s just see what these adorable bunnies are up to in this whimsical comic strip and AAAUGH AAUGH AAAUGH THEY’VE AMPUTATED THEIR OWN LEGS IN ORDER TO IMPROVE THEIR FORTUNE AND NOW THEY’RE HAVING REGRETS ABOUT IT, WHAT HELL-NIGHTMARE IS THIS

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Spider-Man, 6/3/17

OH MY GOD, NEWSPAPER SPIDER-MAN, WHICH I ALREADY DECLARED MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO COMIC OF ALL TIME, HAS JUST NAME-CHECKED AN OBSCURE FIGURE FROM LATE ANTIQUITY, THE HISTORICAL PERIOD THAT I STUDIED DURING MY ABORTIVE ACADEMIC CAREER! Was today’s strip written specifically for me? Probably! Anyway, let’s go through a quick rundown of all the interesting details and historical inaccuracies they’ve managed to pack into just a few sentences:

• The historical figure in question was actually named Romulus, which (IRONY ALERT) was also the name of the legendary founder and first ruler of Rome. The -ulus ending was a diminutive in Latin, so Romulus means “Little Rome.” Augustus was one of the Roman titles for emperor, and during his reign Romulus was known as Romulus Augustus; Augustulus, meaning “little emperor,” was a nickname given to him by later historian.

• Romulus was, if not little, at least young: he was emperor for only a year, and he was 16 at the time. His father Orestes, who was a Roman general, was the real power behind the throne.

• Tyrannus is the origin of our word tyrant, but in Latin in the 5th century A.D. it didn’t necessarily mean “a cruel ruler,” as it’s come to mean in English; instead, it meant someone who had usurped a throne from a legitimate ruler, without much by way of value judgement beyond that. This is actually an appropriate name for Romulus, then, because he became Emperor when his father overthrew Julius Nepos, the legitimate Romen ruler.

• Romulus’s claim to be “the last Roman emperor” is actually pretty tenuous. In the 5th century A.D. there were usually two Roman emperors, one ruling from Italy and the other from Constantinople; over the course of the century, the western half of the empire fell apart due to external invasion and internal fragmentation, while the eastern pulled through in one piece; by the 470s, the Western Roman government only controlled Italy and the western Balkans. When Orestes put Romulus on the throne, Julius Nepos fled to Dalmatia, where he was from, and continued to rule there. Then, a year later, Odoacer, the German general who was in charge of most of the Western Roman army, killed Orestes, deposed Romulus, and placed himself under the authority of the distant Eastern Emperor, although in practice he ruled Italy as his own kingdom. Julius Nepos, the legitimate Western Emperor, ruled Dalmatia until he was killed in 480, and the emperors in Constantinople kept doing their thing (and called themselves “Roman Emperors,” although the empire was eventually almost entirely Greek) all the way until 1453.

• Because Romulus was only a teenager, Odoacer spared his life, sent him to live with his family in southern Italy, and even gave him a pension. He pretty much vanishes from history at that point, though there’s a preserved letter from a Roman administrator that might indicate that he was still receiving his pension more than 30 years later. So is it possible that he became eternally undead due to forbidden sorcery and now seeks to claim an underground empire to compensate for the realm that was stolen from him when he was a boy? Sure, why not!

Marvin, 6/3/17

Marvin may be an awful-hell infant who’s willing to stew in his own shit-filled diapers forever just to annoy his parents, but even he understands the basic concepts of consent.

Pluggers, 6/3/17

No matter how deep pluggers get into hoarding, they can never fill the hole in their lives left by the family that abandoned them.