Archive: Phantom

Post Content

Hagar the Horrible, 3/16/24

That’s Hagar’s mother-in-law as the presiding judge up there, by the way, and really the only way this strip would make sense or be funny to you at all is if you knew that, and also knew that she hated him, and that represents … well, I guess I don’t know how many “casual” comics readers are left, but I’m going to go ahead and say it represents a relatively small portion of potential readers. But whatever! I got the reference! I am for better or worse the intended audience of this strip and I have to make peace with that. Anyway, look how happy Hagar’s wife and children are about his impending legal dilemma? He must have done something truly monstrous, this time.

Dennis the Menace, 3/16/24

What makes this one actually, genuinely creepy is that Dennis is not just using a hammer to blindly smash; no, he recognizes that a tool can be used in many ways, to probe for weakness, to find the seams, to wreak destruction in a dozen ways, both subtle and blatant. Seems menacing! Seems real menacing if you ask me!

The Phantom, 3/16/24

The Death Of The Phantom lasted seven years, and the Phantom Had A Weird Dream Last Night lasted about a month; I can’t imagine we’re going to be able to get more than week out of This Guy Just Wants Dick Around On His Phone And Drink A Little, Why Won’t The Phantom Just Leave Him Alone.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 3/4/24

Oh, so, uh, it seems like the Keith-Kitty-Sonia family fraud reunion plot has … ended? With Keith’s tiny mind unburdened by his terrible deception? No opportunity for follow-up, though, because it’s time for Mary and Jeff’s one-a-quarter date! Yes, nothing will get Mary’s mind off the Crazy World that she learns about entirely through The News better than a desultory sexual encounter on a reasonably successful doctor’s boat.

Pluggers, 3/4/24

Shoutout to Pluggers, whose whole vibe over the decades has carefully created the strategic ambiguity that leaves me, a liberal big-city elitist, unsure whether today’s panel is about some “Hints from Heloise” type technique for keeping your shirts fresh/unwrinkled before a big event, or if it’s just a “Ha ha, pluggers are old and increasingly plagued by dementia” joke.

The Phantom, 3/4/24

The thing about the Phantom is that he’s a tough, gun-toting, fists-flying superhero vigilante but also the product of a 21-generation long eugenics program, and I feel like being raised to know this is true about yourself must have some pretty weird effects on your psyche. Like, check out how aroused Kit Jr. looks in the second panel here! “Seems that mom’s finally figured out the perfect breeding partner for me? And she’s planning to ambush me with her, sexually? Hot stuff!”

Shoe, 3/4/24

It honestly never occurred to me before this strip, but among his many other terrible qualities, Shoe is definitely a serial workplace sexual harasser.

Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 2/19/24

Let me tell you, as a guy who writes jokes for a living, that no matter how bad you think the jokes on this website are, there many more that I’ve thought up that are much worse. It’s OK, your brain should be constantly generating jokes more or less involuntarily if you’re in this biz, but it is important that you be able to filter through them. Like, if you looked at a grandfather clock, and thought to yourself “Ho, ho, this thing is the grandfather of TikTok,” that’s fine, it’s perfectly normal, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. But should you tell that joke to somebody else and expect them to enjoy it? No. Should you put that joke in the mouth of a very young child, someone who would never come up with it or enjoy it if they heard it, in a syndicated newspaper comic strip? Also no.

The Phantom, 2/19/24

So, it turns out that the current Phantom storyline really has been mostly the big purple guy forcing his family to listen to him go on and on about this weird dream he had, which is about one of his ancestors who was taking his bride back from Europe (?) to his African lair, but they got captured by a bad guy for a while and he was chained up but figured out a way to break free, after … well, it’s not clear how long, but weeks or possibly months, and then he took the chains home with him, as a reminder. Anyway, it was mostly boring but today’s strip is very funny because apparently they’re having a big fight about this on their wedding day. Ha ha, I guess you shouldn’t have agreed to an arranged marriage (?) to the heir to a line of African-based superhero vigilantes if you aren’t up for this sort of symbolism-laden bullshit, random Victorian-era European lady! Now you’re trapped in “the Skull Cave” with no way back home! I myself would not have agreed to anything that would end with me living someplace called “the Skull Cave,” personally.

Blondie, 2/19/24

This one is a real missed opportunity, in my opinion. If Dagwood had simply said “Not really” in the first panel and then the next two panels consisted of his barber cutting his hair in awkward silence, it would have been the funniest Blondie strip created in the last 50 years.