Comment of the Week

Is Dr. Jeff's 'again’ meant to indicate that he's already (willfully?) forgotten what Mary's told him, or does it display his belief that Wilbur's life is a karmic circle of disasters that are superficially varied but basically the same thing happening to him over and over?

Pozzo

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Beetle Bailey, 1/11/21

I refuse to believe that Beetle and Sarge are watching PBS or that Camp Swampy shells out for premium cable, so I’m left to assume that nobody at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC knows that you can pause streaming video.

Blondie, 1/11/21

“Did I think you looked goofy? Well, the two of us are, what, 40? 45? Not much older than that, surely, which means that when I saw you wearing bell-bottomed jeans it was the mid ’90s at the absolute earliest. So yes, I absolutely thought you looked goofy. Or wait, are you referring to JNCOs? Because those were exceptionally goofy.”

Pluggers, 1/11/21

Speaking of the shift of cultural signifiers over time, I feel like either Pluggers or I have absolutely lost the thread. Wearing shorts when there’s snow on the ground, usually on a day where it’s unseasonably pleasant but still “cold” by any objective standard, is something I associate strongly with my college days and therefore Gen X generally, which means that [checks Wikipedia for generally accepted dates for beginning of Generation X, subtracts from 2020] oh my GOD no, no, please, absolutely not

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Family Circus, 1/10/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because kids instinctively know that adults long ago lost their capacity for make believe and are trapped in the dull, grey prison of everyday life!

Crankshaft, 1/10/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Crankshaft desperately needs to hold onto some small specific joy in life or else he gets terribly depressed!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/21

Well, that got … too grim, probably! Anyway, let’s talk about horses. You wouldn’t know it now, but back before Snuffy Smith was ever dreamed up, Barney Google was a wildly popular media property, and that popularity was almost entirely driven by Spark Plug, Barney’s universally beloved horse, to the extent that for a while the strip was called Barney Google and Spark Plug. And yeah, it’s been a while — like, literally 99 years — but surely King Features Syndicate and Hearst Communications, the current owners of the Spark Plug intellectual property, can capture lightning in a bottle here again, right? Spark Plug may have had his day, but Li’l Sparky will be the character whose ancillary marketing products every child will be asking for this summer, probably! Kids like horses still, right? Horses and wordplay? Horses and … newspaper comic strips?

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Gil Thorp, 1/9/21

So what’s going in with Gil Thorp, literally several of you are wondering? Well, it turns out that Vic Doucette is killing it at P.A. announcing during the basketball games, thanks to his wordplay that dazzles the Mudlark players, whose prowess lies in the physical rather than the verbal realm. Also, it turns out that, like Vic, Doug Guthrie is a nerd, and in fact is the one kind of nerd that jocks truly respect: a car nerd, who may drive a sweet classic Pontiac but is fascinated by automobiles in all their forms, even utilitarian GM vans from the ’00s. It also came up that Vic has cerebral palsy, not that you can really tell from the art, and Chevy Astros are apparently commonly converted for wheelchair use, but Vic doesn’t use a wheelchair so this may or may not be relevant? Maybe Doug is a car monomaniac and literally has to ask about the make and model of every single vehicle he sees. He’s just another brightly colored piece of glass in the rich mosaic of Milford High.

Family Circus, 1/9/21

Jeffy is a simple child, and looks smug because he thinks he’s about to get a cookie. But Billy? Billy, for all his faults (and there are many), plays a longer game, and has realized that even the guy who graduates bottom of his class from the easiest medical school to get into has access to a prescription pad, which will open up a lot of opportunities for a guy with frankly not much of a moral compass.

Pluggers, 1/9/21

Hey, Pluggers, a more succinct and better caption here would’ve been “Plugger CSI,” you’re welcome