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Pardon My Planet, 6/17/23

Look, I am not a vegetarian (anyone who’s met me IRL will have a good chortle at me having to preface anything with this), but if you’re doing a comic set up where a guy dies and appears in the afterlife festooned with beef-eating paraphernalia only to discover that the gates to paradise are guarded by one of the very creatures he so loved to eat, you’d better follow through with it. This guy has just arrived in his personal hell, is how this strip would go if a coward hadn’t written it, whereas a divine bovine letting bygones be bygones is a truly limp “punchline.” On the other hand, I guess the implication may be that the guy died in agony in some sort of grilling accident, which I may be willing to accept.

Daddy Daze, 6/17/23

The thing about Marvin is that it just fills me with contempt and disgust, whereas Daddy Daze is still novel and weird enough to me that it instead inspires a kind of existential dread and honest fear. What was the first thing that was like changing diapers that we miss because we enter in media res? What was it? It will haunt my dreams tonight.

Gil Thorp, 6/17/23

Despite losing some key players to the juvenile justice system, the boys’ baseball team has finally figured out the secret to playdown success: just ignoring Gil’s attempts at coaching altogether, and to actively tell him to knock it off if he gets insistent with it.

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If it’s the end of the week, it must be time for the comment … of the week.

“Hey Slylock: did you know that reptiles also don’t sweat? Or have opposable thumbs? Or attend jewelry trade shows at hotels, generally? So maybe take it easy on the zoology-based evidence.” –pugfuggly

And time for the hilarious runners up!

“Picturing an arc of electricity instantly killing the kids right where they stand as Billy slices through a buried utility cable.” –Godless Communist Orc, on Twitter

“We live in a nation divided on the controversial subject of whether or not oculosexual couples should be allowed to marry, but it’s important to remember they suffer from the same major problem in bed as facinormative couples: premature ejaculation.” –jroggs

“The Keene kids obviously believe that dinosaurs bones and Egyptian sarcophagi would be found together in American soil because they’ve been taught they existed in the same time frame.” –But What Do I Know?

“Let me break it to you gently, Saul. You see this dog food dish labeled ‘Greta’? Well, that’s ironic, because…” –seismic-2

“Oh no, Gil wants us to go phone shopping with him. He says he hasn’t seen a rotary landline in 30 years and needs our help.” –Colonial

“Listen, I’m not here to judge. If that croc wants to look beautiful for just a few minutes, far from the prying eyes of their typical basking site, well, it’s internalized mammalist body standards, but what is that to you and me?” –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“Hello? Front desk? A crocodile is about to leave with no pants on. He’s a reptile pervert! Intercept him before he gets to the lobby! Also, he’s a jewelry thief, I guess.” –Chance

“If I had to guess which comic strip character would be signing up for EST in order to transform their ability to experience living so that the situations they had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself, Mr. Wilson would be far down on my list.” –Weaselboy

“I’m getting a real Game of Thrones vibe from this situation. It’s what happens when you see a character being menaced by violence, but you realize the greater danger is from the gross diseases that occur when someone doesn’t change their clothes or bathe for eight months at a time.” –BigTed

“I don’t think a city in southern California is an unlikely place for evil to infiltrate at all, actually. Really, it’d be stranger if it didn’t.” –Noel

“‘A little juvie never killed anyone’ — meanwhile, in the next panel, the other player appears to have gotten a tear drop tattoo from her time in the slammer.” –Philip

“One proscribed form of heresy was to depict Noah’s Ark as smaller than that its biblical proportions — the idea being that a small ark leads to a lot of ‘How did all the animals fit?’ scepticism. Given that this ark is so small that the camel has apparently died of overcrowding, I imagine the Hagar team will be getting their excommunication letters from the Vatican any day now.” –Schroduck

“The theological implications that Noah was just some doorknob who put animals on a boat while everyone else got about their lives after maybe their basements flooded after a particularly heavy rain are pretty heavy for a joke-a-day comic strip.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Finally some good news about pluggers: ‘If it bleeds, we can kill it!’” –Ettorre

“Pluggers worry when they nick themselves shaving because any open wound might mean wearing a neck cone for two weeks.”–nescio

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Dick Tracy, 6/16/23

Dick Tracy is, indeed, a rich tapestry: one of its supporting characters, Diet Smith, is a wealthy scientist whose inventions have conquered both space and time, which led to sci-fi adventures on the Moon (whose people are now hiding in Antarctica), but the strip’s world also has room for comical rustics like the Plenty family with their old-timey phones and in-home poultry. These two storylines have collided both in Dick’s family, because his son married Moon Maid, the Moon Governor’s daughter, who later got blown up by car bomb, and then he married Sparkle Plenty, Gertie and B.O.’s daughter, but then Moon Maid came back and everyone got uncomfortable for a while until it turned out she was just a gangster’s girlfriend modified with moon DNA and forbidden science. Whew! That’s quite enough Dick Tracy backstory for the moment, so we’ll have to leave for another time the questions of whether the Moon Governor is aware that he’s named a new space coup after his dead daughter’s widower’s second wife, or why he uses “M.G.” as his initials. (Is “Moon Governor” his name?)

Pluggers, 6/16/23

All of us, pluggers and cosmopolitans a like, define ourselves and our tribes in part in terms of the qualities and habits in the Other that we lack. I am surely guilty of this in my many comments on the Pluggers syndicated newspaper panel, but I feel confident the panels themselves engage in the same practice, and I cannot look at this one without assuming that your typical plugger thinks my razor blades, my face, and indeed my entire coastal elite bathroom are simply awash in blood.

Judge Parker, 6/16/23

[extremely “LET’S GET READY TO RUMMMMMMBLE” voice] LET’S GET READY FOR THE SUMMER 2023 JUDGE PARKER POLYCUUUUUUUULE