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Out of the past

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Zits, 12/13/10

CHAD! For those of you who haven’t, say, read Zits for the strip’s entire 13-year run, or who don’t walk around with trivia about newspaper comic strips in your heads, “Chad” is Jeremy’s college-attending older brother, who hasn’t been mentioned in this strip since, uh, pretty much the entire time I’ve been doing the blog, so, you know, six-plus years. Apparently he stopped writing to or calling his parents and they sort of forgot about him,. I’m sure the strip’s dozens of uberfans are thrilled at Chad’s un-Chuck Cunninghamization, and its millions of casual readers are spending a few seconds blinking in confusion (“Chad? Isn’t his name Jeremy? Isn’t Jeremy in high school?”) before moving on to Marmaduke.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/13/10

A much more unsettling seemingly vanished character makes contact in today’s Funky Winkerbean. So, what do we have here? Is Les having a psychotic break and believes his dead wife is airport-paging him from beyond the grave? Has one of the overeager fans we’ve been seeing on his book tour incomprehensibly fallen in love with him/otherwise gone crazy and decided to assume his dead wife’s identity? Is someone that he’s screwed over on his rise to the top (for certain very limited definitions of “top”) playing a cruel mind game? Is this just some person who happens to be named Lisa who needs to get a hold of him quickly for some reason? The answer, of course, will be determined by which of these scenarios can be made most cruel.

Apartment 3-G, 12/13/10

“Damn it, I could have gotten some money, and all I got was a kiss from a dumb girl! Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

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Sunday soap quickies

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Mark Trail, 12/12/10

In today’s educational Sunday strip, we learn some crap about Santa and Druids but mostly get to see with our own eyes how uncomfortable Mark gets when his wife is kissing him. “When the last berry is picked, the kissing should end — it must end. Please, please, let it end. Good luck in enduring a lady’s mouth parts touching all of your mouth parts!”

Mary Worth, 12/12/10

Mary’s intrigued by Jill’s M.O. “Instead of bottling her emotions up deep inside, she just lets loose with stream of invective! What compels her to be so open about her negative thoughts? Could this technique be learned? Must … find out …”

Spider-Man, 12/12/10

If I’m ever involved in some kind of superhero team-up, I hope at some point I get to say “I figured you could handle him — while I looked after the ladies.” That’s because I’m a ladies man! And also a coward.

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Pluggers + death = hilarious good times

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Pluggers, 12/11/10

One of the running jokes with which I routinely irritate my friends and family comes up every time anyone discusses their plans for their mortal remains after their death. I always claim that I intend to have my corpse taxidermied and arranged in a heroic pose — possibly holding a sword, definitely naked — and that whoever wants to inherit my vast fortune will be required to place me somewhere prominent in their home. Now, this is all good fun (or at least it will be until my will is unsealed), but it did make my mind go someplace particularly grim upon seeing a typical Pluggers man-animal in a storefront taxidermist. At least pluggers don’t simply feast on the rotting flesh of their dead fellows, as the bird-inhabitants of their sister strip Shoe do. I for one would like to see a “plugger cemetery” (glassed-in display case) if only in the hopes that the taxidermist’s art provides the various schlubby, ill-dressed dead pluggers with a modicum of dignity and dynamism that was wholly lacking from their lives.

Gasoline Alley, 12/11/10

You don’t have to be following the current typically dull Gasoline Alley plot to appreciate today’s strip, in which the loathsome Slim’s mother-in-law does her best to pretend that he simply doesn’t exist.

Gil Thorp, 12/11/10

Oh, also, in Gil Thorp Jamaar died for our sins.