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Pluggers, 12/7/20

So before this year, I was never really a coffee guy, and my wife had her coffee when she got to the office. But I decided as a New Year’s resolution to find out if it would be better for me, anxiety-wise and not-consuming-massive-amounts-of-artificial-sweetener-wise, to have one cup of coffee in the morning rather than chain-drinking cans of Coke Zero all day, and a couple months later due to COVID my wife’s office moved from an office building in Koreatown to our dining room table, so now we both make coffee here in the morning, and we have different tastes in coffee (I like a lighter roast!) so we actually have a little one-cup coffee maker and we each make our own. I bring this up because I’m fascinated by the fact that all of us in this world have our own way of doing little things like this, and that makes me look at this plugger’s situation with some curiosity. Do some people just make a big multi-cup pot of coffee in their house and everyone drinks it continuously until it runs out? How many coffee drinkers are in the average plugger household, anyway? How long does coffee last in a pot, really? How many times can you reheat coffee and have it still be drinkable? I guess my real question is: my first impression looking at this comic was that this plugger stumbled downstairs in his underwear, hungover, he has no idea what time it is, maybe it’s the middle of the afternoon, who even knows, and he’s like, “did I make this coffee yesterday? last night, when I was drunk? did my wife make it this morning? did my wife leave me yet? I’m gonna need some coffee to figure this out”, and I really want to believe that that’s a passably realistic interpretation, you know?

Hagar the Horrible, 12/7/20

You guys, I went to grad school with hopes of being an actual history professor because I used to have deep curiosity about historical questions. But today I read this and thought, “Huh, I wonder if Vikings actually had a taboo against cousin marriage” and I did a little Googling — like, very little Googling — like, just enough to find this explainer about Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins’s wife and this Tumblr post from 2014 from someone claiming to be an archaeologist who said that Viking cousin marriage wouldn’t have necessarily been the norm but wouldn’t have been frowned upon by anyone either, and you know what? I decided that was good enough for me! Either my brain is atrophying or I’m maturing, or maybe those are the same thing.

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/6/20

“What if we had a character make a bad joke and then other characters point out that it’s a bad joke? That makes a good joke, right?” is of course a classic Funky Winkerbean bit, but I have to admit I don’t fully understand how it’s playing out here. Is the non-Mindy portion of the gang divided into rival “Mopey Pete is funny” and “Mopey Pete is not funny” factions? Is the simultaneous “HA! HA! HA!” meant to be read as sarcastic, mocking barks? Or is Darrin the only one here willing to speak truth to power? (Or, since everyone here works at a failing comics company, I guess that should be “speak truth to utter powerlessness.”)

Mary Worth, 12/6/20

Sure, the resolution of this plot seems to indicate that Brandy and Tommy’s love is strong, but that Billie Holiday quote sure undermines that, doesn’t it? I guess Brandy can just turn her love on and off like a faucet, based on what her therapist tells her! You better tread carefully, Tommy.

Dick Tracy, 12/6/20

Welp, I guess the spider plot is over, folks! I’m now very excited at the prospect of seeing Dick Tracy shoot some hippies, though probably not as excited as Dick is at the prospect of shooting some hippies.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/6/20

GOSH, YEAH, IMAGINE IF YOU DIDN’T LIKE BUCK BUT STILL HAD TO SEE HIS DUMB FACE IN, SAY, THE NEWSPAPER ALL THE TIME

JUST IMAGINE IT

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Gil Thorp, 12/5/20

You know, normally I’d complain about absolutely bonkers sports action being told about, not shown, in the visual medium of the comics. But honestly, it’s worth it that the person describing the off-panel action is Marty Moon, and his eyes are the size of dinner plates, like he’s overjoyed and honestly grateful that he picked the absolute best game of the year to do a ton of drugs right before it started.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/5/20

Big news, everyone! It turns out the Jehovah’s Witnesses have the one true faith. Grimm tried messing with them, and now his soul is condemned to eternal torture, in hell!