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Comment of the Week

Is Dr. Jeff's 'again’ meant to indicate that he's already (willfully?) forgotten what Mary's told him, or does it display his belief that Wilbur's life is a karmic circle of disasters that are superficially varied but basically the same thing happening to him over and over?

—Pozzo
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Unpleasantly sexual Friday

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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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Osh Kosh B’Ancient, Wrathful God

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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.

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Weepy Wednesday

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Mary Worth and Judge Parker, 2/15/17

It’s interesting to me that the stereotypical, cartoonish drawing of tears has them coming out of the outer corners of your eyes, when human anatomy ensures that they’re much more likely to come out by our noses in real life. That’s how we know that Iris, with her messy, confusing motivations and emotions, is fully, gloriously human, and “Sophie” actually died in that car wreck and had her brain implanted into an android duplicate by her mysterious kidnapper. Her mysterious kidnapper who … she is maybe talking about today, for the first time? Her programming is malfunctioning!

Funky Winkerbean, 2/15/17

Haha, so, yesterday I joked about how the DMV was going to murder Funky, but today it’s like … it’s going to happen, and he wants them to do it. He’s egging them on. Last week he made his peace with death and now he wants it over with. This is suicide by cop, except it’s suicide by low-level bureaucrat and awful, awful wordplay.

Family Circus, 2/15/17

OH NO JEFFY KILLED A BUSINESS MAN AND RITUALLY STRIPPED HIM OF HIS SACRED GARMENTS TO GAIN HIS TOTEMIC POWER