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Comment of the Week

I'm really uncomfortable with the way Truck is breaking the fourth wall here. 'Are you this guy's father? You, the reader? Well, if I remember my Roland Barthes then, yes, indeed, you could be described as a metaphorical parent to both of us...’

—Spunky The Wonder Squid
237

OK, to be fair, that’s not really good art

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Gearhead Gertie, 7/17/25

Oh, man, the domestic drama in the Gearhead household just gets more fraught! Gertie’s husband Harold, in a desperate attempt to introduce a new topic of conversation into his life, has dragged his wife to an art show, and you have to imagine that there was a brief moment where he really believed he had pulled it off, believed that he had managed to awaken something in Gertie’s soul when he brought her face to face with the greatest examples of human creativity. Sadly, what she actually took away from the experience was “What if we got more NASCAR shit, for people to look at, in our house?” Gertie may not know much about art, but she knows what she likes, and what she likes is having Dale Earnhardt’s death car, acquired and restored at great expense, hanging on the wall of her living room.

Pardon My Planet, 7/17/25

Man, what the hell, do you think vampires would ever in a million years wear cross necklaces? Of course not! They would burn their skin upon touching it! These are just goths! Goths with deep respect for Madonna’s iconic cone bra!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/17/25

I gotta say, we’re all pretty used to nothing really exciting happening in Rex Morgan these days, and so when this plot about Truck’s maybe-son started out, I don’t think any of us would’ve pegged “Truck finds out he got cucked by his own drummer” as the dramatic conclusion. I’m trying to parse out what his facial expression in the first panel is conveying … excitement? Respect? I hope we dive ever more deeply into his psychosexual landscape over the rest of the week.

195

Wednesday quickies

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Hi and Lois, 7/16/25

Hmm, if you have to apply, it isn’t really Trixie’s pre-school yet, is it, Hi? Really makes you think (about how modern child-rearing is an agonizing treadmill of chasing status that starts at birth and has no end in sight).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/16/25

“Whoever he is, tell him to meet me at the crossroads and I’ll beat him in a guitar-pickin’ contest! Then I’ll be your dad!”

Pluggers, 7/16/25

Ha ha, you can’t fool me, Pluggers! “Go home” implies that pluggers are going someplace else in the first place and you know I don’t buy that.

195

Interpersonal relations and their discontents

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Pardon My Planet, 7/15/25

My least favorite Pardon My Planets (which is really saying something) are the “Ha ha, gender relations, amiright folks?” ones, but I gotta say I kind of enjoy the face on the diamond salesman here. He’s like “Ah shit ah fuck this is going south fast, I gotta … I gotta not be here. How can I get out of here without them noticing. Think, man, think.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/15/25

Oh no! Truck’s maybe-son is, like his maybe-dad, a journeyman session musician who hasn’t even gotten the financial benefits of a viral TikTok hit, so he had to shell out for the discount DNA service where you just get back the raw data and have to do the analysis and comparison yourself. Excited for a week of sweaty Googling and increasingly puzzling interactions with ChatGPT!

Mary Worth, 7/15/25

“Now, I, a sixtysomething man, don’t experience emotions at all, of course. Like remember the time you cruised a guy at his own mother’s funeral and then made up a pretext to temporarily dump me so you could date him? Or all the times you rejected my marriage proposals? Or the time you banished me from your condo by taking in a cat? I didn’t feel anything about any of that stuff when it happened, and I definitely don’t feel anything about it now! Ha ha!”