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Pluggers, 3/2/17

You know, Pluggers has blurred the line between beasts and beast-people before, and they’ve even hinted at the kind of sexual relations that mark a universe where there’s a spectrum of sapience, but this — this is pretty explicit. Too far, Pluggers. Too far! The fact that the credit for this “joke” is given to a name that very well could be given to a dog is extremely not helping.

Gil Thorp, 3/2/17

Ugh, fine, Aaron isn’t actually on drugs, it seems; his mom’s on drugs, like far too many economically downwardly mobile Americans these days. I’m still not sure why he does well at basketball around payday? Shouldn’t that be when his mom can afford her drugs? I kind of want the payday thing to be a total red herring just to prove that the Freezy Bomb Boys were entirely wrong about literally everything.

Mary Worth, 3/2/17

Hey, speaking of America’s out-of-control opioid crisis, what’s going on in Mary Worth? Well, once again, it turns out that Iris has been so caught up in her own frivolous hobbies (before it was pursuing higher education, and this time it was fucking a 25-year-old) that she’s neglected her pill-addict son. Don’t worry, though: Jesus, who has long been Tommy’s hairstyle icon, is now also his not-giving-in-to-the-temptations-of-sweet-sweet-Vicodin icon.

Mark Trail, 3/2/17

Haha, Cherry sure seems anxious in panel two, doesn’t she? “Wasn’t someone out there doing a black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey? A bear isn’t going to help that at all! A bear can really mess up that kind of thing! I don’t remember who it was who was doing the survey exactly, but if they run into a bear, that survey is toast! This is terrible! I’m not going to be able to sleep at night, thinking about all the work what’s-his-name is putting into that black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey, which just is going to be ruined by some dumb bear!” “How’s Johnny doing? We haven’t seen him in years!” says Doc, pointedly ignoring everything his daughter is saying.

Shoe, 3/2/17

“I tried that once. It made me constantly aware of the crushing aesthetic demands that our society places on women, and let me tell you: no thanks.”

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Dick Tracy, 3/1/17

Dick Tracy started running in 1931, and The Spirit in 1940, which means that, at these characters’ origins, the early 20th century era of enthusiastic trust-busting was still within living memory, an era marked by this sort of political iconography:

What I’m trying to say is, in taking on this criminal “Supotoc” corporation, Dick and the Spirit may be rejecting the modern neoliberal Borkian approach to antitrust law and will instead be tackling monopolies the old fashioned way: with firearms.

Gil Thorp, 3/1/17

OK, my prediction is that probably what’s happening here is that Aaron’s mom has a crappy low-paying job with no insurance so they can only intermittently afford the prescription medication he needs to stay 100%. Maybe he has ADHD? That would be charmingly ironic, considering that molly and Adderall are both amphetamines.

Still, the funnier possibility is that Aaron is just straight-up into recreational drugs, despite his previous denial. It would really bear out the old Sherlock Holmes adage, “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, maybe go back and check if you only think something’s ‘impossible’ because you asked a suspect whether he was guilty and he said ‘no’ and then you did no follow-up investigation.”

Shoe, 3/1/17

Hey man, I have to come up with funny material for this website each and every day, and I get that sometimes you’re tapped out. So when your dentist offers up a perfectly serviceable joke mid-cleaning, you don’t sit around fretting about, “Oh, my characters are all anthropomorphic birds, they don’t have teeth, this doesn’t make sense.” You use that shit, man. You use it and you don’t look back.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/28/17

Hmm, it looks like we’re going to be seeing Loweezy and Elviney trade irregularly metered rhyming lines on the subject of Loweezy’s diet over the next few days! I’m looking forward to them becoming increasingly desperate for rhymes the week drags on. “Do you think the diet’ll keep the’ pounds off in the future, Lo?” “I’ll get in trouble with th’ preacher for this, but I’m gonna turn to witchcraft and do some scryin’!”

Hi and Lois, 2/28/17

Meanwhile, Hi and Lois continues with its quest to show us the soul-crushing emptiness of modern white-collar suburban life. Yesterday the strip tackled work; today, it tackles sex, as Hi attempts to weave romance into his overburdened family schedule, much to everyone else’s disgust.

Phantom, 2/28/17

So the current Phantom storyline involves Orson, this beardy dude, who doesn’t think the Phantom is real, trying to convince the Bangallan government to put out a stamp about the Phantom legend, which stamp will probably be bought up by a small group of international collectors and make a tidy sum for the Bangallan treasury and be completely ignored by the world at large. And so the Phantom has … brutalized and kidnapped Orson? And revealed himself as actually existing? To stop the stamp from being produced? I’m pretty sure the Ghost-Who-Walks is also the Ghost-Who-Seriously-Overrates-The-Influence-Of-Stamps and also the Ghost-Who’s-Never-Heard-Of-The-Streisand-Effect.