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Gil Thorp, 12/10/20

Well, it looked like Gil’s little stunt — benching his feuding #1 and #2 QBs and putting his #3 QB in at the helm of a wacky offense — worked! It didn’t work in the sense that it brought the team a championship (they’re playing for conference runner up here in their last game) but it worked in the sense that it taught his fractious starters a lesson, a lesson they learned so well that neither of them has much interest in playing football at all anymore. I assume in panel three we’re meant to understand that they’re doing “No, after you” pantomime gestures down on the sideline that are so exaggerated that they can easily be interpreted by their wide-eyed classmates sitting up in the stands.

Pluggers, 12/10/20

Reed Hoover may have passed away more than a year ago, but his utter dominance of Pluggers will never end. Like longtime and recently retired artist Gary Brookins before him, new guy Rich McKee isn’t afraid to turn a cold eye on the pathetic, eager suggestions clogging the pluggermail@aol.com inbox and say sneeringly “Sorry, folks, none of you can hold a candle to Reed.” Then he selects one of Reed’s banked Pluggers pitches at random, which I assume he keeps in an ornate wooden box.

Crock, 12/10/20

I never think the jokes in Crock are any good, so it’s kind of a relief to see a strip where they didn’t bother to include one! Just a little vignette about an incompetent military officer and his men, who are about to murder him.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/9/20

Say what you will about Snuffy Smith, but this is a strip that respects its own world-building. It has been long established that, while Hootin’ Holler’s denizens may engage in a certain amount of chicken-based barter with one another, and occasionally pay for potions from unlicensed apothecary Granny Creeps, Silas’s general store is the only place in town where money is exchanged for legitimate goods and services in the manner in which we flatlanders are accustomed. Does it seem weird to order pizzas from such an establishment? Maybe, but any Snuffy trufan knows it would be even weirder if we pretended that Hootin’ Holler had a local Domino’s or some such.

Family Circus, 12/9/20

The question of “If our religion is the only way to salvation, what happened to everyone who never heard about our religion because they died before it started or reached their part of the world?” is old and widespread enough that it has a fancy theological name, “The Fate of the Unlearned.” Still, part of the fun of the Family Circus is seeing kids say the darnedest things as they begin the encounter the problems of the adult world, and indeed I did actually chuckle to myself at seeing Billy look at that picture and think “Gee, it’s sad these cavemen never got a visit from Santa! Also, they’re probably in hell now.”

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Dick Tracy, 12/8/20

As you may or may not know, there were two different Dragnet series: a black-and-white one that ran for most of the 1950s, and a new one, in color, that ran from 1967 to 1970. Both starred the extremely square Jack Webb as the extremely square Joe Friday, but in the latter show, as you might imagine, he spent a lot of energy cracking down on hippies. I have seen one (1) episode of this, as a child, and it made a huge impression on me, as it’s about two hippie parents who tragically let their daughter drown in a bathtub because they were high out of their minds on marijuana, and a hippie who had been helping Joe Friday with his investigation shows up at the police station at the end having shaved and put on a suit and tie, announcing he still wants to change things for the better, but now he’s going to work within the system, as a journalist. Anyway, the only episode with a detailed plot description on Wikipedia is called “The LSD Story,” and it’s not dissimilar, so I assume they’re all like this, and, look, I laugh but I can kind of forgive it in 1967, on TV show that square adults were making. But in 2020? When the hippies are the old people now? And when, in Dick Tracy, a drug dealer named “Dollar Bill” (his shtick is the dollar bill sticking out of his headband, and you can tell he’s a hippie because he’s wearing sandals in the snow) is arguing with a guy named “Aquarius” about “candy” for his girlfriend “Cheesecake”? You have to ask, how many layers of nostalgia-irony are we working on? Like, is this what you think hippies are (were?) like, or are you trying to emulate the notoriously square Dick Tracy of the era in which hippies were actually a thing? This strip has since its reboot been a heady brew of neo-nostalgia, and it’s reached a point where it’s messing with my sense of time, space, and self more than any drug “Dollar Bill” could sell me.

Gasoline Alley, 12/8/20

EXTREMELY QUICK GASOLINE ALLEY PLOT RECAP: Slim was going to pretend to be a ghost to scare his terrible family out of his home instead of just asking them firmly to leave like a person with dignity and self-respect, but then some real ghosts scared them off instead. Today we learn that in Gasoline Alley’s cosmology, there’s no real distinction between “ghosts” and “angels,” and damned souls wander our plane as wraiths, demanding our approbation so that they can move on to the next stage of existence.

Mary Worth, 12/8/20

“Plus everyone knows the middle of the night on the boardwalk is the best time and place to buy drugs! Wait, did I say that part out loud?”