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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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/2/17

[looks around anxiously] “Did you hear me? The Morgans are the real heroes here!” [speaking more loudly] “The Morgans! They’re the source of all good in our lives, and in the world! All hail the Morgans! They’re listening right now! [shouting now, really] I WOULD DIE FOR YOU, REX AND JUNE”

Funky Winkerbean, 2/2/17

Remember, kids, you only get to dodge death so many times, and you won’t know the day when your luck runs out until it arrives! Today’s Funky Winkerbean is extremely on brand.

The Phantom, 2/2/17

I may fail to keep you up to date on all the Phantom’s plotlines, but I promise you this: I will never, ever neglect to tell you about a strip that features a lovingly drawn closeup of the Phantom’s ass.

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Six Chix, 2/1/17

I’ve always been fascinated by how cultural images become detached from their origins and eventually become just bits of iconic flotsam in our collective consciousness. Like, skeletons have been associated with death for most of human history, for obvious reasons, but then in the West we started putting a hooded cloak on our skeletal death-figure, and then we started forgetting that our skeletal death-figure had a full body beneath that cloak, as the skull-face faded out of his representation. So that’s how we get cartoons like this, where a dentist is staring into the empty void where a face should be, not seeing flesh or a skull or even the back of a hood, just an infinitely dark emptiness that goes on forever, a yawning portal into the not-life that awaits us after our demise. The dentist seems remarkably unfazed by it, to be honest! Dentists have seen some shit, man.

Pluggers, 2/1/17

There are plenty of Pluggers panels that demonstrate that pluggers feel all the sorts of anxieties the rest of us do, from the financial to the familial to the creeping existential. I have to assume, then, that at some point in this joke’s history, the line was about “plugger performance anxiety.” Get it? Because usually that phrase involves inability to get an erection, but here it’s about peeing in a cup, because pluggers gave up on sex long ago. While usually I endorse complete freedom of expression in the comics, I can’t say I regret an editorial decision that spared innocent newspaper-reading Americans everywhere from thinking about the boners that these downwardly mobile exurban beast-men may or may not have.

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Spider-Man, 1/31/17

Panel three of today’s Spider-Man is most definitely a portrait of a guy who barely understood what was just said to him in panel two. “Carved images, huh? From … ancestral Pueblo peoples, you say? I guess they carve … images … of things they see … that are interesting? Could they carve Ronan? If you say ‘ancestral,’ does that mean they’re not still around? So they couldn’t carve anything? Or maybe they are still around but they don’t carve images anymore? At least I know that there are exactly 24,000 of them. I’m real solid on that.”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/31/17

I’m not sure how I would describe a clinic where a bored medical tech who isn’t even bothering to make eye contact with you says that your scan looks “very good” right before giving you vague information about ways in which it looks extremely not good and then leaving you twisting in the wind until your next doctor’s appointment who knows how many days from now, but “super” isn’t it! Are these the same people who sent Funky bad prostate cancer news via m-mail eight years ago? Back then he greeted the bad news with heavy-lidded ennui; today we’re approaching genuine panic. That jolt of adrenaline lets you know you’re alive, Funky! You know, for now.