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Pluggers, 5/25/17

Here’s a true story: I turned 40 just before I moved to LA, and for like a solid year, I thought, “Wow, this place is so hipper-than-thou that they have low mood lighting in all the restaurants! I can’t read any of these menus!” It wasn’t until the day I took my wedding ring off to read the inscription, only to find it had somehow become a series of illegible blurs, that it occurred to me that maybe it was my eyes that were the problem.

Now I wear bifocals and getting them honestly made me feel like I had been faith-healed, and so when I stumbled on this panel, in which a dog-man is reading his anniversary date off the inside of his wedding ring without any vision correction help, I had to ask myself: who’s the real plugger here? This dog-man, whose eyesight is as keen (and presumably whose sense of smell is as powerful and coat is as shiny) as it was the day he was married? Or me, who looks at his wedding ring inscription through glasses for sentimental reasons only, since my anniversary (and a one-week-in-advance alert) has long ago been synced to all my devices’ calendars via iCloud?

UPDATE: haha, he IS wearing glasses, darkness is closing in all around me, welp

Crankshaft, 5/25/17

Haha, yesterday Lillian proposed to these girls that they do some “research” and I almost made a joke that they were off to do some murders or something! Anyway, obviously this is just classic harmless old lady stuff where you do suspicious things and offer no explanation because how could anyone suspect you of being a bad person, and I’m very much looking forward to Lilian’s trial for attempted murder and child endangerment.

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Blondie, 5/24/17

I gotta respect today’s Blondie: at first I thought it was going to try to go back to the well of “Oh no, the scientific classifications of objects in our solar system have changed since I was a child, and I have not gotten over it despite the fact that it happened literally more than a decade ago.” But then it took a sharp turn into much less explored territory: ever since the turn of the millennium, all of what we perceive as our “existence” is really a vast computationally generated simulacrum that we can dimly understand by thinking about our own crude social networks. What is a planet? What is real? The only ones who know are those who set the rules for our reality — and those rules, and their makers, are utterly inscrutable to us.

Dick Tracy, 5/24/17

Meanwhile, Dick and the Major Crimes Unit are closing in on the Margies, who are not only mid-level cosplay convention grifters but also, apparently, anti-Semitic vandals? Ugh. Anyway, all Dick Tracy trufans are going to be thrilled when Dick cracks this case using one of his most beloved and widely known skills: satchel recognition at a distance.

Judge Parker, 5/24/17

Wow, Abby’s dad shaves and puts on a nice suit when he poses for a photo with his secret family. But when he’s just chillin’ at home, arguing with his real wife about his infidelities, he grows a gross mustache and wears a collared shirt on top of another collared shirt for some reason. Sad!

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/23/17

Crazy Harry is one of those characters who Funky Winkerbean has never really figured out what to do with, post-time jump. His nickname is a callback to his amusing eccentricities during the wacky teen version of the strip, but now mostly is a sad reminder of his pervasive anxiety and depression. Anyway, you may think this is a strip about a man so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t recognize what ordinary household products like shampoo look like, and it is of course about that, but it’s also keeping with the strip’s canon about one of Crazy Harry’s business ideas/hobbies: digitizing VHS tapes. So maybe it’s Crazy Harry’s wife who’s confused here? Anyway, the point is, somebody couldn’t resist the “what if a person thought ‘head cleaner’ was another word for shampoo” joke, even though they literally stopped making VCRs last year.

Gil Thorp, 5/23/17

“I’d say it was news — in another time and another place. Specifically, in a time and place where domestic abuse allegations have long-term consequences for elite athletes. That time and place certainly isn’t here and now, ha ha!”