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Mary Worth, 10/20/18

Most medical practitioners are, or should be, trained to understand the interpersonal dynamics of patients under their care, and recognize when someone may be there against their will, possibly as part of scenario of domestic violence. Usually people don’t just come out and say “It’s not my decision to be here!” but that’d be a pretty strong signal, in my opinion! Fortunately for Mary, our hapless shelter worker hasn’t been trained to notice these telltale signs. “What a nice old man,” she thinks about a person loudly proclaiming he’s been kidnapped. “I wonder how many puppies he’s going to leave with?”

Hagar the Horrible, 10/20/18

The central gimmick of Hagar the Horrible, of course, is that it reproduces the tropes of mid-20th century American middle-class life (which have been largely ossified into place in newspaper comics even though they don’t always reflect the reality of 2018) in a 9th or 10th-century Scandinavian setting, and one of those tropes is of men retreating to a bar to escape their wives. Anyway, today’s Hagar acknowledges that these bars are depressing places that monetize misery, which just sort of takes what I’ve always taken as the subtext and makes it explicit.

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This week’s top comment? YOU KNOW IT:

“Little Billy wanted to give Daddy the day off, so he took this sweet-natured family cartoon and turned it into a vehicle for his obsession with murder.” –BigTed

This week’s runners up? HELL YEAH BABY:

“What’s the meaning of this? Well, thank you to the Family Circus for asking a question that will haunt me the rest of my otherwise leisurely weekend.” –TimP

“I’m impressed at Spider-Man actually using some real spider biology to save the day. Less impressed he didn’t get to the bit in the Wikipedia article that reads ‘Mortality is high.’” –Schroduck

“That’s quite a steamer trunk Daddy’s packed there for ‘a business trip to New York.’ So long, suckers!” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, idol of a million other women

“I know quite a few women who have complained about how women’s clothes are famously devoid of pockets. The fact that Patty Opossum is heading into that bathroom without her purse to commit petty toothpaste larceny suggests that she’s got someplace else to stash the goods. That skirt she’s wearing presumably has deep pockets which won’t reveal the contours of the tube. Basically, today’s Slylock Fox is a celebration of feminine agency.” –Larry McAwful

“Here we have an unintentionally clever allegory for the technological generation gap. Elder Vampire, who grew up in an era when both mirrors and photography used silver, warns her younger companion that the pure metal will have nothing to do with their unholy existence. Millennial Vampire, who knows such concerns are obsolete in the digital age, happily ignores her while tweeting to the #undeadlife hashtag.” –TheDiva

“For a change, Henry Mitchell actually listened to the words tumbling out of his idiot son’s mouth, and realized that there was a weird and deep truth buried in there. The dog’s collar protected him, but it also meant he was owned, registered, inoculated, neutered. What did his tie mean? All the same things, that he was just another cog in the production machine, one that didn’t get its hands dirty, one owned by the corporation, registered to the state, inoculated against whimsy and imagination, and neutered by this idiot child, and it didn’t offer him any protection at all. He tore off the tie and cast it to the ground. ‘You’re right, Dennis, by god.’ He picked up the phone and told his boss everything he’d wanted to tell him through all the long years of abuse, an ode of invective and profanity. ‘I’m going to do something that makes me happy!’ Henry Mitchell shouted, as Alice and Dennis looked on in shock. Two months later they were living in the car, but by God, Henry was happy. So happy.” –Voshkod

“Women can now make hacky comic strips about golf. Who says women’s lib hasn’t accomplished anything?” –Andrew

“So few officers opt for the chrome-plated hatchet as a sidearm. I’m glad we’re moving away from American gun culture.” –Dennis Jimenez

“My thinking has become so warped that my first guess upon seeing the ANIMAL SHELTER sign was that Mary had given up on trying to help Saul and was simply going to have him put to sleep. ‘Where well-intended advice has failed, a little Tributame will succeed.’” –Joe Blevins

“Shoe’s references are stuck in the past. The pick-up line ‘I’m a writer‘ dates back to when writing fiction for a living was exciting and remunerative, while journalists were lesser wordsmiths. Nowadays you could impress someone by saying ‘I am a journalist, by which I mean a mainstream publication pays me a regular salary for my work.’ ‘I’m a writer’ will usually be understood as ‘Will you please subscribe to my Patreon? I write fanfic erotica of 1980s cartoons.'” –Ettorre

“[Dick ejects the empty clips and reloads for the third time] Other guy: ‘He’s down, Tracy.‘ Dick: ‘Huh? Oh. Ok. Let’s find out what this creep knows.’” –Foodar

“You might be a plugger if you derive pleasure from flooding your local environment with noise and carbon pollution, after you spend your car-fixin’ money on snacks.” –Rusty

“‘A Classic thanks‘? Does this mean this is a reprint? Maybe with a different caption? I’d do the research, but my anti-depressants have kicked in and they only work if you don’t do Pluggers research. Given that Dog Man is quoting a Verizon ad campaign that started in 2002, and if Pluggers were to use that to make what they’d consider a timely reference for their joke, I’m guessing the original strip appeared sometime last year.” –The Mighty Untrained FOOZLE

“[body decaying at a cellular level due to years of neglect] A plugger’s cellular network.” –Dan

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Six Chix, 10/19/18

Without any aid or context, what do you think is happening in this cartoon, in which a devil and angel argue over whether an email (?) should be sent, with the “pro” argument being that the potential sender is bad and the “con” argument being that the recipient is good? Would you guess it’s about … cyberbullying? It is, because “Unity Day” is the signature event of National Bullying Prevention Month, and you can sort of work your way backwards to see what’s going on, but I think the whole to-do relies on the idea that bullies do their thing because of some innate sense of worthlessness, and while that may be true at some base level, I don’t think it’s the immediate motivation for individual acts of social cyber-aggression. Anyway, I guess this strip did its job in the sense that it was baffling enough to get me to look up what the hell “Unity Day” is, but that also led me to the sad discovery that nobody updated the Unity Day Wikipedia article with 2017’s events. Is it even happening this year? I’d do more work to find out, but I’m afraid someone might make fun of me.

Pluggers, 10/19/18

This failing car is doing its best to protect this plugger’s failing body. But the heart wants what it wants (specifically in this case, it wants to get clogged up with grease until it stops beating, forever).