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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/5/21

It is truly amazing the way this strip has retconned its Sarah storyline from 2014, in which she made a lucrative book deal with the art museum, in the course of which she did a public event at which another kid was briefly mean to her but mere seconds later she rallied an army of the oppressed to turn the tables on her attackers, and also in an unrelated turn of events befriended a mob boss and acquired a brutal gangland enforcer as her babysitter’s chauffeur. At the time, Sarah seemed to be having a blast, but apparently the syndicate got an angry letter about the impact all this might have on a real child, because now it’s something that Rex and June talk about in hushed tones as the worst thing that ever happened to their daughter, worse than the time she got hit by a car, which erased year of her memory. Anyway, thank goodness we’re recapitulating this now and learning how a child can become a big creative success “the right way”: anonymously, after sending unsolicited fan fiction to their favorite author.

Shoe, 8/5/21

Not sure why, but for the many years I’ve been reading Shoe I’ve always assumed Roz’s was primarily a lunch spot? But the characters seem to be hanging out there more and more after hours, and this is clearly an end-of-the-day gripe session the Perfesser is having. Say, what do you think Skyler, the Perfesser’s nephew and ward, is doing at home while the Perfesser eats dinner after work by himself? What is he, like … ten, eleven? Does he know how to cook, do you think?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/5/21

Snuffy Smith is the only comic in which I will accept a joke about how someone swapped two different kinds of bells as a prank and then everyone has a good hearty chuckle over it. Bells are Hootin’ Holler’s only source of artificial noise of any kind, so of course the inhabitants are going to be able to distinguish the subtle differences between the various types!

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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.”