Post Content

Pluggers, 11/2/17

Ooh, we have another Extremely Depressing Pluggers entry to go toe-to-toe with the all-time Extremely Depressing Pluggers champion, “Rhino-Man Hocks His TV!” Do you think today’s entry is meant to actually depict acute poverty, or just a mindset imposed by constant low-level deprivation on our chicken-lady, so that even though she could probably part with the dollar or so that a new half-pound block of cream cheese costs, she thinks that she isn’t worthy of such extravagance, and that whatever mild-to-not-quite-urgent-care-level digestive distress she experiences is just her lot in life and she deserves no better? Either way, it’s still pretty grim.

Gasoline Alley, 11/2/17

Oh, hey, it’s Rufus and Joel, America’s third- or fourth-favorite fake old-timey comic strip rustics! They’ve been separated ever since Rufus wandered off with a broken heart, and Joel’s quest to find him passed through various other comic strips before arriving at … the circus? Sure, why not. Anyway, while they were apart, Rufus took part in the some of the unspeakably depraved orgies for which circus folk are famous, and he would now like some hard liquor post-haste.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 11/1/17

OH SNAP IT’S THE SHOCKING MID-SEASON GIL THORP TWIST!!! See, we all thought Rick was going to get a concussion like his Uncle Gary was so worried about, but nope, he just got a “classic” sprained ankle, “classic” because that’s the sort of injury football players used to get, back when men were men, you know? Nobody complained about poor widdle babies getting concussions back in the day, probably because people were tougher and hadn’t been pussified by liberals and feminism, or maybe because concussions and brain injuries were harder to diagnose with older medical techniques and thousands suffered for reasons they never fully understood, who can say. Anyway, the good news is, while a traumatic brain injury would probably interfere with Rick’s promising YouTube singing career, a sprained ankle will only serve as a solid gimmick to help him stand out from the pack as “Gimpy Golden-Voiced Rick Soto, Modern-Day Crooner.”

Mary Worth, 11/1/17

In Iris’s cold calculus, a man can be hot, rich, age-appropriate, and/or Wilbur, and he needs to match at least two of those qualities to be her boyfriend. So, good news for Zak! He seems so different now, possibly because they’ve entered some murky parallel dimension where everything is purple and also traditional morals and values are inverted and Mary will advise her to definitely link herself to the sexy game-designing millionaire and convince him to cash in before the stock inevitably tanks.

Mark Trail, 11/1/17

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: When “black box” devices are recovered from crashed aircraft, more 90 percent of the time the final words recorded in the cockpit are “It is getting harder to control the plane!”

Post Content

Pluggers, 10/31/17

Today’s Pluggers is another look into the sad world of the young plugger bear-man. I’m not saying he’s sad so much because he’s eating ice cream out of its container — who amongst us hasn’t done the same? — so much as because of the location where he’s chosen to do so. This is a man(imal) whose car routinely serves as his dining room and who “cuts out the middleman” by just straight-up letting food scraps from his poorly constructed sandwiches accumulate in the sink, so I suppose part of the point is that he’s not held back by society’s rules about where one should feed, but still, something about the way he’s carefully leaned the lid to the ice cream against the … bread box? toaster oven? Whatever, it’s just some random and probably largely unused piece of kitchen equipment that our bear-man hero mostly employs to hold up the disposable packaging of whatever it is he’s consuming whole while standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, alone.

The Phantom, 10/31/17

The current weekly Phantom plot involves a journey to Walker’s Table, a mesa in the American Southwest that at some point came under the control of our Africa-based hero-lineage, where the Ghost-Who-Doesn’t-Check-In-With-His-Far-Flung-Real-Estate-Holdings tried to land a plane last week only to be driven off by gunfire. I’m mostly just amused by this long list of social malcontents who may or may not be lurking up there. If the ideological base of the occupying force really is so diverse, the smart bet would probably just be to leave them holed up there until they turn on each other and see who comes out on top. And don’t count out the Trekkies, man! The whole thing where they have to pay $10 a month for the new CBS streaming app in order to watch Discovery has ’em pissed.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/31/17

Ha ha! It’s funny because this guy has married a number of women, and he wants to give them all a book about a husband who watches his wife die of cancer, as a “gift”!