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NO HYPE NO SETUP JUST COMMENT OF THE WEEK:

“I like to think Gil spent the entire visit to Aaron’s mom just staring wordlessly at her until she confessed. ‘Coach Thorp! Is Aaron in some kind of trouble? Does it have to do with drugs? Or did they discover how he throws games to make our secret payoffs to the mob via an underground Mudlark gambling ring? Is that what this is about?’” –Drew Funk

The runners up? Also hilarious.

“Cherry is really making an effort here. She knows that there’s nothing more romantic to her husband than a dead-eyed recitation of nature facts in monotone.” –AndyL

“Zak: portrait of a man thinking ‘I don’t understand what’s going on here, but I don’t understand a lot of things, so she’s probably right.’” –Horace Broon

“Iris: ‘You belong with your friends. Not me. Because I’m your enemy. Watch your fucking back.’ Zak: ‘You watch it first.’ Iris: [ogles, regrets decision]” –Craig!

“The Halftracks know that they’re almost obligated to have sex with each other after this. Their expressions tell you all you need to know about how they view the prospect.” –TheDiva

“Meanwhile, back in Seattle, an alarm sounds. A terrified flunky slinks into Bezos’ office with a clipping from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. ‘Sir … Alexa’s been featured in a comic.’ ‘That’s great! Trudeau make a joke about us? Maybe Pastis did an Alexa pun, or Bucky Cat got in a fight with her?’ Slowly, the flunky passes over the copy of Pluggers. A distant scream as a senior vice president leaps to his death. ‘Shut it down,’ Bezos says heavily, ‘shut down the entire Alexa line. It’s over.'” –Voshkod

“Slylock thinks Shady Shrew is lying because there’s no way that grotesquely swollen bear paw would fit in the mailbox. Neither would Shady Shrew’s stubby arms, of course, but somebody’s gotta take the fall. ‘Another crime cleverly foisted on someone else,’ thinks Max.” –Spunky The Wonder Squid

“It’s easier to imagine a plugger carrying on a conversation with a much-beloved hockey puck, the one found in the parking lot of the Ice-o-rama in the winter of ’89.” –Dood

“‘Wait, isn’t there an easier way for a conscious and perfectly lucid person to rehydrate, other than going to the hospital and and having glucose solution infused through a needle in my arm?’ ‘No.’” –BigTed

“I’m not sure the DMV has the power to reverse Funky’s excommunication. Only the Pope himself can declare Funky and his constant misery compatible with the existence of a loving god.” –Schroduck

“Karen Moy has succeeded in summarizing the human condition. ‘I just did something random, and now I’m sad. What can I do to fix this? Short of reversing course on my random decision, of course.’ Kudos, Karen.” –John, just John

“I keep a post it note at my desk to remind me that Les isn’t Funky and I encourage all to do the same.” –Trophy Boy, on Twitter

“I always knew that Mary was a harvester of human sorrow, but it seems especially cruel to make Iris collect her own tears in that cup.” –pugfuggly

“Wait, Sophie’s kidnapper took her because she thought the Spencers have too much money and they don’t deserve it? I hope everyone who reads this blog has an alibi!” –A Hero Twice a Month

“Jeffy, if you’re going to do the Little Rascals ‘three kids in an overcoat‘ routine, you’re going to need two frie– [long exhale] Look, ask Billy and Dolly.” –Dan

“According to Wikipedia, Moe Howard broke three ribs while filming Pardon My Scotch (though you may know the scene from Dizzy Detectives, where it was reused): he was standing on a platform, a table, that Curly sawed through with a power saw. The article states that, like a real trouper, ‘[Moe] was able to pull himself up and deliver a double slap to Larry and Curly before fainting.’ The point is, putting a rib girdle on the Sentry shows an amazing dedication to historical accuracy.” –handsome Harry Backstayge, idol of a million other women

“Bosses are the worst. Especially when they twitch awake on the floor behind you, then rise up at a 90 degree angle like a vampire out of the coffin just so they can start making comments about what you’re doing.” –Chareth Cutestory

“Just because pluggers cannot learn modern slang, it does not mean they live in the past! For example, once they thought that cats and dogs living together was a sign of of the apocalypse. Now they know that segregation is NOT cool!” –Ettore Costa

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Blondie, 2/17/17

I feel like the moment when Dagwood stopped being just a generic white collar worker at Dithers Industries and started being referred to as an “office manager” happened within living memory — like, maybe even since I started doing this blog. And while it’s true that specificity is generally a good thing in jokes, nothing about Dagwood’s intermittently depicted job duties ever matches up with that description; he never seems to be, say, budgeting for office supplies or figuring out who should sit where or designing filing systems. Instead, he prepares “reports” about “accounts” and deals with “clients,” all of which seems outward-facing and outside his job duties. Perhaps today’s strip explains all that, though, if “office manager” is just code for “person who services our clients, sexually, then prepares detailed reports that we use for blackmail purposes.”

Slylock Fox, 2/17/17

Obviously that’s supposed to be a fan tail at the bottom of our mysteriously four-limbed lobster’s torso here, but for the life of me it looks like pleated material of a skirt. Basically, that’s what I’m going to imagine it is, shielding the dangling lobster junk from our field of vision.

Pluggers, 2/17/17

Pluggers also realized why many texting conversations didn’t go as expected when informed that “FML” does not stand for “friend: make love?”

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Spider-Man, 2/16/17

One of the arguments for the idea that advanced alien races visited Earth in the distant past is drawn from our own mythologies. Detailed stories of gods and goddesses, and other beings far more powerful than ordinary men and women, aren’t just made up out of whole cloth, the theory goes; they represent garbled cultural memories of the visits of extraterrestrials. These creatures left such a lasting imprint on our preliterate ancestors that we unconsciously not only remember them but reproduce them in our beliefs and art. And I think panel two is indisputable proof that, tens of thousands of years after it was buried beneath a New Mexico volcano, the Kree Sentinel is still well remembered by humanity:

Gil Thorp, 2/16/17

Over in Gil Thorp, Gil is getting in on the Downward Socioeconomic Mobility Sleuthing action, prompted by this extremely respectful student detectives! See, Aaron’s mom used to be in the lucrative actuarial trade, back in sixth grade, so now it makes no sense that Aaron is living in a dumpy apartment complex like a common poor. Gil decided that the best way to get to the bottom of this whole dilemma would be to show up at Aaron’s mom’s office, unannounced, presumably during the workday, when he should be, like, coaching students or whatever, and asking, “Hey, just wondering if Aaron’s OK? There’s not anything happening at home that would upset him? Like the fact that his mother is doing some kind of white collar job in an office with cracked plaster walls, which basically is like a giant sign that says ‘CALL SOCIAL SERVICES IMMEDIATELY’? I’m just asking questions!” And indeed his visit has prompted an extremely productive family conversation at home. Another win for Coach Thorp!

Beetle Bailey, 2/16/17

Oh God, in one strip, we have explained so much of what makes Beetle’s character baffling: his seeming narcolepsy, the physical abuse visited upon him by Sarge without consequences, the way he appears fatally mangled in one strip and then back to normal in the next. “Beetle” is really a series of artificial beings, clones or androids or something, presumably being developed by the military to replace all-too-fallible humans in war and create an unbeatable army. The program is … not going well, with none of the Beetles scattered around Camp Swampy living up to expectations. And despite the fact they look like humans and talk like humans and (let’s consider Miss Buxley’s part in this experiment) love like humans, they are not treated as humans worthy of respect. Sarge is no doubt about to pummel this one into goo, like he has so many others, and then go find one that’s actually up and walking around, just like you might rummage through your desk drawers looking for a functional pen.