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Pluggers, 2/7/14

Writing a blog post about the daily comics pretty much every day for more than nine years has honestly given me quite a bit of sympathy for cartoonists who have to come up with a fresh variation on their basic gags daily, so I’m willing to forgive the bizarrely convoluted caption to this cartoon (would you be a non-plugger if you said “no” but then your granddaughter didn’t follow-up with this question? why does your granddaughter get to determine your plugger status?). I’m not willing to let the extremely and unjustifiably smug expression on the plugger-grandpa’s face slide, though. What exactly is going through that man-dog’s noggin? “Heh heh, look at this little girl, her life on earth so brief to this point that she doesn’t really understand the concepts of social and technological change over time. Why, all of existence is just one continuous present moment to her! It takes years of experience as a plugger to understand that life is a slow transformation of the world and your place in it, until one day you wake up and the things young people take for granted are baffling and scary, and everything makes you angry and confused. She’ll learn some day! Oh, she’ll learn!”

Six Chix, 2/7/14

It’s hard to tell because it’s so crudely drawn, but I’m thinking that bear is looking a little miffed. “You know, I have lots of opinions on ways we and our clients can work together to add value to both companies’ offerings. But, yeah, sure, just call me in when you need someone mauled. HEY, I’M STANDING RIGHT HERE, I CAN HEAR YOU TALKING ABOUT ME.”

Hi and Lois, 2/7/14

Hey, Ditto, at least your sister has a normal name she can use! At least she isn’t named after a primitive means of reproducing printed material that went out of vogue in the 1980s! You’re playing with fire here, Ditto.

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Heathcliff, 2/6/14

One of the keys to the Heathcliff mythos is the title cat’s extreme sangfroid: despite the madness going on all around him, even when it’s madness he’s implemented, he keeps his cool. Whether he’s meeting the Garbage Ape’s new sidekick or being worshipped as a god, he tends not to get really worked up about anything. Thus today’s panel, which I assume to be some kind of drug-induced hallucination, makes total sense to me. Not only is Heathcliff himself largely unimpressed to discover that a hitherto inanimate ball of yarn has somehow sprouted a face and is speaking to him, but the yarn-face itself — which, I must emphasize for my own sanity, I believe to be a mere projection of Heathcliff’s chemically-altered subconscious — appears pretty blasé about its unexpected and horrifying existence. “Yeah, you should probably bat me around or whatever,” it mumbles affectlessly. “Hey, if I unravelled, would the individual components of my face become separated from one another, and each have its own eerie detached existence somewhere on the long string of yarn spread haphazardly across the room? Boy, that’d be a thing, huh.”

Better Half, 2/6/14

This seems like exactly the sort of dumb tchotchke financial services firms would give out to their lowest-profit clients, so I’m not exactly sure what the joke is supposed to be here, unless it’s that Stanley has taken the ham-handed metaphor seriously. And, honestly, wouldn’t some kind of time-travel device be the best investment aide you can imagine? Only the top customers get the backwards-pointing chrono-compass, which allows you to get in on the ground floor of surprisingly high-performing stocks; but by jumping ahead decades into the future, Stanley and Harriet can let compound interest create the sort of retirement cushion that they could never have otherwise hoped for.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/6/14

“Your precious Lisa dies at the end, right? You’d better believe I want some popcorn for this.”

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Blondie, 2/5/14

Today’s Blondie is mostly standard-issue Mismatched Marital Hijinx, but I have to say I’m pretty in love with the weird and delightful second panel. It’s as if the sudden disruption of their comfortably distant routine has sent Blondie into a vertiginous spiral; even the low-level boost in emotional intimacy that comes from just making eye contact with her husband has sent her reeling. This is a couple that deliberately arranged their living room furniture so they don’t have to see each other even when they’re in the same room, remember. After only a moment of looking at her husband, she takes the opportunity afforded by his sipping his coffee to put her head most of the way down, maybe to overwhelm her senses by taking a big whiff of whatever’s on her plate, or maybe to just calm her nerves so she doesn’t vomit. In short order, she needs the barrier between her and Dagwood again. This experiment in spousal interaction is now over.

Apartment 3-G, 2/5/14

I find it deeply hilarious that Tommie answers what I assume is either Apartment 3-G’s landline or the phone connected to the building’s intercom system by saying “This is Ms. Thompson.” I guess she wants to put her most formal foot forward because she’s been eagerly awaiting a phone call — not from her fiance, with whom I assume that not even Tommie would be on a last-name basis, but from the producers of the hit reality TV show I Can’t Stop Hoarding Baby Animals! “This is it! I’m going to be famous!” she thinks. “Just let me finish dusting up all this deer urine!”

It should of course come as a surprise to nobody that Tommie’s fiance is a Identical-Looking Apartment 3-G Male Type (Dark-Haired Model), but it is a little weird that he appears to be calling from downstairs but also sitting in an office somewhere. Maybe he got a job as the building’s doorman, to be closer to her?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/5/14

Oh no

Oh NO

The devil’s rock ‘n’ roll has finally reached Hootin’ Holler