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Pluggers, 4/6/20

A rule of classic horror, which has somewhat fallen by the wayside in this era of all-too-perfect CGI effects, is to never quite let the audience get a good look at the awful thing you’ve been hinting at all movie, because their imagination will inevitably fill in something far more terrifying than anything you could depict in practice. That’s why I respect what Pluggers has done today, allowing us to dream up our own image of what that greasy slice of pizza, which just landed cheese-side-down on this plugger’s nasty-ass floorboard and is now covered by a thick layer of matted fur speckled with gravel, will look like right before he shoves it into his greedy maw.

Gil Thorp, 4/6/20

It’s finally baseball season and we can move on from the utter snooze-fest that was the basketball plot, though we’re still in the early stages of this storyline, which is to say that Gil is just rattling off the names of various players to his compliant, favored media outlet. Still there are hints of fun to come: the outfield will feature unapologetic fraud artist Tiki Jansen and violent scissors criminal Chance Macy, so I assume that by “a lot of speed” Gil means they’ll be running a amphetamine-dealing ring from the dugout.

Dennis the Menace, 4/6/20

“He’s still sittin’ there watching it, though! Dad says old age has really turned his brain to pudding.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/5/20

Ever since the coronavirus pandemic cast the world into crisis, everyone’s been asking themselves one question: “How will Rex Morgan, M.D., the number one medical-themed newspaper comic strip, grapple with the one of the most rapidly spreading and economically devastating plagues of the past century?” And no doubt it’s a little soon when it comes to this strip’s publication lead time, but if we’re about to start a plot about a beloved old rockabilly roots country performer who became a “super-spreader,” shedding coronaviruses as he toured and personally sold merch to fans for days while asymptomatic, then I for one will be impressed. And if this plot happens to kill off Buck, one of the strip’s least appealing recurring characters, in the process? Truly a bonus!

Dustin, 4/5/20

Dustin is of course about the seemingly eternal battle between Millennials and Baby Boomers. But every once in a while, it reminds us that there is another, younger group out there, called variously “Gen Z” or “Zoomers,” and they are pissed at all of us and biding their time, and their wrath will be terrible.

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Mary Worth, 4/4/20

“But if you don’t know? Well, in that case, you definitely still need to keep that person around — after all, you don’t want to be alone, heaven forbid! Just be sure to fend off any marriage proposals, so you’ll be free to entertain the offers from other gentlemen, at funerals or while you’re on vacation and such. It’s an arrangement that will work great for everyone, except for the guy you’re stringing along, but if he was worthy of better treatment I guess you wouldn’t be stringing him along, would you?”

Mark Trail, 4/4/20

For more than 15 years now, comic strip artists have been stuck in an awkward place where they have to draw daily strips knowing that they’ll appear in almost all newspapers in black and white but will be colorized by other hands for the web. This can be a real problem when you’re trying to, say, depict people walking through a dark, shadowy forest, where the inky black of the shadows cast onto them contrasts with the colors chosen for their flesh and clothes, which make them appear fully lit. Still, I’m glad to see this all happen in today’s strip, as it transforms Kevin’s pathetic mewling into something sounds like a supervillain’s origin story:

“I know I’m just an orphan nobody wants to adopt … but when I have my revenge, I will make orphans of every man, woman, and child on earth!”

Dennis the Menace, 4/4/20

I admit I spend time on this blog making fun of comics that reuse old art, but here’s the thing: for some go-to- gags, they should do it. Honestly, what possible value is there to drawing yet another random visitor to the Mitchells’ living room for one of the “Dennis repeats something embarrassing his parents said” panels? Surely there’s literally dozens of them in the archives, so why not just dig one out and slap a new caption on it? I sincerely hope that’s what happened today, because it delights me to think of someone going through a bunch of old Dennis the Menace strips until they got to this drawing, and then they said to themselves, “Oh yeah, this is the one. This guy? This guy fucks.”