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Blondie, 2/8/16

Welp, congratulations, Blondie! It’s only Monday and you’ve succeeded in thoroughly baffling and unsettling me. What could the nickname “Ol’ Stork Baby” possibly represent? Obviously it was foisted on this poor individual against their will, since Elmo’s use of it got him sent to detention. “Stork” might be meant to refer to someone as tall and gangly, and might be what a 75-year-old would think a child would say, but it’s the addition of “baby” that really throws me off. Did this unfortunate teacher not learn the basics of biological reproduction until later than socially acceptable? Did he or she proudly announce that they’d been delivered as an infant by the stork in their adolescent years, resulting in permanent derision? Is this some telling commentary on society’s treatment of sexuality: we’re too embarrassed to speak of it forthrightly, but will also shame and humiliate those who don’t understand it?

Pluggers, 2/8/16

Piece by piece, pluggers are being rebuilt. Better than before. They’re more machine than man-animal now. Soon they’ll be unstoppable.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/7/16

Congratulations to Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for deftly handling this reveal, this sudden shift in perspective revealing that those we see as bestial have their own way of looking at the world, and that our actions through their eyes are truly monstrous. It’s right out of the classic sci-fi horror novel I Am Legend, and it’s sad that this century-old comic strip created to make fun of hillbilly stereotypes manages to pull off this nuanced narrative twist better than, say, any of the movies the novel was turned into.

Shoe, 2/7/16

OK.

Your comic strip characters are all bird-people and they live in trees and sometimes they fly but they never, ever acknowledge “Oh, we’re genetic freak shows that look like birds but wear clothes and talk and have jobs.”

Fine.

I get it.

But if you’re going to go down this road

don’t

birds

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Mary Worth, 2/6/16

Uh oh, looks like Olive fell down and hurt herself! And now she looks … angry. You know, we’ve been having plenty of fun here watching Mary sexually reject dudes, but we shouldn’t lose sight of what this Olive story is really about, namely a little girl who talks to angels and can see the future. If there’s one thing movies have taught us about creepy children with mind powers, it’s this: they seem cheerful enough until they encounter a difficulty or obstacle that a normal person would take in stride, and then they get very angry indeed, generally with terrible consequences. The population of Midtown Manhattan seems to have dodged a bullet this time, though. Dude with the mustache is panel one in lucky his head didn’t explode, splattering goo everywhere, as a side effect of Olive’s rage.

The Phantom, 2/6/16

The Phantom is in the middle of a fairly dull story about teenage royal love that’s a sequel to one from six years ago, but I mostly want to point out that among the amenities of the Skull Cave is a Skull Hot Tub. I wonder if this is an ancient natural hot spring that’s formed a crater deep in this cavern over the centuries, or if the Ghost Who Walks just ordered a regular hot tub from Home Depot and had his interior designer “cave it up a bit.”

Pluggers, 2/6/16

Pluggers know that, no matter what you say about the Nazis and the regimes that collaborated with them, they sure knew how to maintain law and order.

Mark Trail, 2/6/16

Meanwhile, over in Mark Trail, a thing exploded pretty dramatically. HAPPY WEEKEND EVERYBODY