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Baby Blues, 8/4/21

You ever see a tiny, almost invisible piece of writing that just ruins your whole day? That happened to me today, and that piece of writing was the “®” after Barbie’s name in panel one here. Why did they feel a need to do this? Why does Barbie (registration number 0810106) get a ® and not Spider-Man (registration number 3553440)? At first I thought this might be because Barbie was in origin a doll, which is a physical product, whereas Spider-Man was in origin a literary character, but then I checked a recent Spider-Man movie poster and:

which, fine, that’s a ™ and not a ®, but the comic didn’t use ™ either, so what the heck? What the heck, man? Are Mattel’s lawyers somehow even scarier and more litigious than Disney’s? And how is Zoe pronouncing this legal glyph, huh? How is she pronouncing it?

Pluggers, 8/4/21

At least today’s Pluggers is straightforward enough. Pluggers hoard napkins, because they’re thrifty! But wait. Wait. Weren’t we just assured, a mere two weeks ago, that pluggers don’t use napkins to keep themselves clean while eating? So what are they hoarding them for, exactly? This makes the “someday” in today’s dialogue all the more poignant. The dog-plugger has thousands of napkins loosely piled up in the guest room, and every time the chicken-lady begs him to let her throw them out because they’re an “eyesore” and also a “fire hazard,” the dog-man gets real anxious and just keeps saying “No, they might come in handy! Someday!”

Crankshaft, 8/4/21

Just to end on a positive note, I enjoy the crosshatching at the right end of the panel here tipping you off to the fact that this is happening at night. Just Crankshaft going door to door at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, who even knows, disturbing people’s peaceful evenings by thrusting a wheelbarrow chock-full of zucchini at them. Good stuff!

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Gasoline Alley, 8/3/21

Folks, let me confide something in you. I was relishing the prospect of just tearing in to today’s Gasoline Alley for using a “joke” that, I was very sure, had been passed around by old people via Facebook and emails with “Fw: FWD: Fw: Re: Fw: Its good to laugh” in the subject line for years if not decades. I even went through the trouble of confirming that Rufus and Joel’s mule was indeed named “Betsy” so I could joke that Betsy looked absolutely furious about this shameful reuse of mediocre folk humor in a professional syndicated comic strip. All that remained was for me to do a little advanced Google searching, narrowed by date, to figure out exactly how old this joke was. But at the very beginning of my quest, I was confronted by something that truly shook me to my core:

There it is, everybody: proof that somehow, this goofy line about GPS standing for “getting places sooner” (and yes, I also checked “gettin’”, same results) was apparently invented by the Gasoline Alley creative team, and yet it has the feel of the sort of thing down-home salt-of-the-earth folks have been saying to each other since GPS was widely commercialized in the early ’00s. I hereby retract anything cruel I may have said about this strip’s cornpone vibes. Gasoline Alley is in fact frighteningly efficient and accurate about its mission in ways I never could’ve dreamed of.

Pluggers, 8/3/21

Meanwhile, over in Pluggers, I think we’re finally ready for Pluggers to just settle in with a series of increasingly baroque versions of “pluggers are old, meaning that they were born in years that are earlier than most other people’s birth years.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/2/21

“Hey,” you almost certainly are not thinking, “Wasn’t Mason trying to make a Lisa’s Story movie the right way, and they had gotten into filming but then there was a fire that burned huge swaths of Los Angeles to the ground? Whatever happened with that? Did they cancel the production because it’s so obviously cursed?” Sadly, they apparently continued to spit in the face of the gods and are determined to see this thing out to the end, and now they’re having a big-time Hollywood “wrap party”! Cayla has once again proved herself an unworthy partner to Les because the prospect of going to a fun, elite event is filling her with excitement, instead of the crushing ennui that is the only acceptable emotion to experience about anything in the Funkyverse.

Dick Tracy, 8/2/21

Look, actually making comics might not be very lucrative, but making them into games or collecting them is another story. I’m beginning to think this Dick Tracy storyline is a plea to comics creators to grasp the importance of ancillary revenue streams before it’s too late.

Mary Worth, 8/2/21

I know we’re supposed to think that Drew is thinking of his ex while trying and failing to concentrate on some poor doomed patient’s chart, but I for one very much hope that he’s walking around with a clipboard holding an 8 1/2 by 11 headshot of Ashlee — exactly the image in his thought balloon — and nothing else.