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Pluggers, 10/18/19

The point of Pluggers, it seems to me, is that it’s meant to draw a distinction between pluggers and … the rest of the world, defined however you want (liberal elitists? big city folk? the young and the hip?). We might disagree on what exactly those distinctions are, on what communities the plugger community defines itself as not being, but I think we can all agree that today’s panel — “A plugger uses an extremely common slang term in an everyday situation” — is terrible, just terrible, carrying almost no semantic content to speak of. The good news: this means we’ve run out of meaningful things to say about pluggers, and can shut down this strip forever.

Dennis the Menace, 10/18/19

Wow, this is the Dennis the Menace that’s going to be haunting my nightmares! “What if he was your son, George?” asks Martha — his wife with whom, of course, he has no children — while George looks down at Dennis with a sort of detached contemplation. I have so many questions about this! Is this some weird little game they’re playing? Is Dennis already a participant in this fantasy, or do they hope he’ll catch on and play along? Why does she say “your” son instead of “our” son??? I guess the “punchline” is supposed to be turning that back on her — he’s not my son, I just married into him when I married you — but it’s such a weird way of doing it! What the hell, man? Seriously, what the hell?

The Lockhorns, 10/18/19

Honest to God, the first time I read this, I thought Leroy was talking to Loretta, and that he really had missed his trial and was going to jail soon. Which would be good, honestly! He should go to jail, for his crimes!

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/17/19

Oh hey you guys, do you remember, how, way back in 2013, Lisa’s Story, Les’s sad-ass misery porn book about his dead wife, Lisa, got optioned for a movie deal? And Les got a huge check for it? But then he had a hard time writing the script, and then he did manage to write the script, but it sucked? And then he went to LA and the people who paid him enormous amounts of money to write the movie wanted to make it entertaining, and Les moped around the fancy hotel they put him up in, and Mason Jarre, the dumb idiot they cast to play Les who at that point was supposed to represent the worst of empty-headed Hollywood, didn’t even realize who Les was, and then Les was weird and condescending and gross to the actress cast as Lisa, and then Les exercised his right to get his “kill fee,” which in the Funkyverse is apparently the payment you get when you bail on the people who hired you and were counting on you, and finally the the whole production collapsed, and Les was thrilled about it? Well, it’s 2019 now, and it seems Mason Jarre, who is now one of the “good” characters in the strip, finally read Les’s terrible book, the one that was supposed to be adapted into the movie where he was going to play the main character! And now he wants to make a movie out of it! But this time he’s going to make it right, by which we mean it’s gonna be depressing as hell and suck ass. I’m very excited about this!

Crankshaft, 10/17/19

Meanwhile in Crankshaft, by which we mean ten years earlier, Pam and Jeff’s son and daughter-in-law have thrown a surprise birthday party for Pam, which has also doubled as an announcement that they’re having a baby, which has led Pam and Jeff to remember that birthday party back in college where the two of them had sex, a process which, under the right conditions, is ultimately what produces babies. Do you think they just went at it in front of everyone else at the party, or was Jeff the only one who showed up?

Six Chix, 10/17/19

This is it, guys. It’s the perfect comic strip. Start with the phrase “The pioneers of television,” the common saying we all know and love, and then draw some pioneers next to a sign that says “Television.” BOOM. PERFECTION. SHUT DOWN THE INDUSTRY, IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE

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Hi and Lois, 10/16/19

Because I’m both a comics obsessive and a transit obsessive, I’m reasonably sure that the only time we’ve ever seen Hi on the subway was during this non-canon crossover event. That tells me that Hi is not on his typical commute, which I assume usually takes him along the auxiliary interstate highway that connects his pedestrian-hostile suburban subdivision to the pedestrian-hostile office park where Foofram Industries has its regional HQ. But not today. Today, Hi has abandoned his car in the parking lot of the outermost stop on the regional transit system and is heading into the city to vanish forever into his new life. This phone call will just serve to postpone by a few precious hours the moment when Lois realizes he’s not coming back and starts calling the cops.

Mary Worth, 10/16/19

Wow, remember back in the ’00s, when downtown Santa Royale was a bleak slum full of thugs and fallen women where Mary was terrified to venture? Well, as in many cities, it became an outpost of Santa Royale’s boho arts community, who were attracted by cheap rents and embraced the aesthetic of the grit they helped displace, leading normies to conclude that the neighborhood was “getting better,” with in turn brought us here, to the final stage of gentrification: tech millionaires living in huge townhomes that take up almost an entire lot, which they presumably demolished the Downtown Women’s Shelter to build.

Judge Parker, 10/16/19

“Then I remembered that we’re, like, bonkers rich! Remember that time we bought an RV on whim that we didn’t need or even really want? So yeah, go ahead and build like three more commercial structures on our vast compound if you want, whatever.”

Funky Winkerbean, 10/16/19

“That’s why I had Bull murdered and made it look like a suicide! Wait, did I say that part out loud?”