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Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy, 7/28/10
I have to admit that I enjoy Dick’s second panel dialogue: “His movies can be viewed in 3-D without glasses — thus his riches.” Part of it is that I of course wish that someone would use “thus his riches” to end a sentence outlining one of my achievements (“He created the #1 Mary Worth fan site on the Internet — thus his riches”). But I also just like the rhythm of it. I’d call it poetry, but poetry and the decadent so-called “artists” who produce it are loathed by Dick with a righteous passion.
I am a little disappointed by panel three, though; traditionally the strip never misses a chance to translate police jargon like “lifted” for the civilians in the audience.
Judge Parker, 7/28/10
At last we learn why Sam is so fond of Jules, despite his previous outrage over the young man having the sex relations with his adult daughter: he recognizes in him a kindred spirit, an artiste crushed by parental disapproval! The fact that Sam was forced into law when his true passion lay elsewhere might explains his overall emotional numbness and inability to love. He pushed his musical past down so deeply into his soul that this is apparently the first his own wife has heard about it, and he’s apparently required two beers just to work up the nerve to broach the subject.
Luann, 7/28/10
Oh, look, Brad and Toni are going to a restaurant called Something Stone, or perhaps the Stone Somethingry, so named because the building that houses it is of stone construction. See, these are the things you focus on, to avoid thinking about the sex banter. Maybe all the food on the menu is made of stones! Ha ha! Then they’ll eat them and die, and the banter will stop.
Wizard of Id, 7/24/10
If you need an enormous interpanel onomatopoeia representing an action that is essentially silent in order to make your joke clear, perhaps you should just start over from scratch.
Crock, 7/24/10
The new edgier Crock is also experimenting with narrative forms: today we see the waiter who is enraging Grossie by flirting with her friend instead of taking their order, while behind him we can already see the the blood that will soon festoon the walls when Grossie acts on her anger.
Dick Tracy, 7/24/10
Dick Tracy is tired of his little bon mots going unappreciated by his wife, and so is just going to thought-balloon his gnomic tough-guyisms from now on.
Marmaduke, 7/24/10
Do you really want to draw attention to what’s going on here, Mr. Lifeguard? “Four local children eaten by shark” would be an awful headline, but at least it falls into a realm that people can understand. “Four local children eaten by nightmarish demon-hound pretending to be shark” would be so incomprehensibly terrifying that it would be certain to set off a total panic.
Ziggy, 7/24/10
Ziggy’s dog has been aggressively stalking Jim Davis, for some reason.
Mary Worth, 7/22/10
In a desperate attempt to stave off Mary’s meddling, Dr. Mike is going to try to fake narcolepsy. It won’t work.
Herb and Jamaal, 7/22/10
Ha ha ha, your hearing is fine, Eula; it’s your mind that’s going! You’re finally going crazy, just like you always feared!
Dick Tracy, 7/22/10
“Now let’s head out and do some good old-fashioned police work. I hear there are hobos that need roughing up!”
Dick Tracy, 7/21/10
Never let it be said that Dick Tracy phones it in. You could have been excused for thinking that Saturday’s strip was a the finale of the latest rambling, baffling plot that couldn’t be forced into some sort of coherent shape no matter how hard you tried; however, we’re clearly going to spend all of this week with the characters doing a half-assed attempt to explain it further, to no avail. Plus, that callous disregard for human life or dignity is the strip’s trademarked value-add. Yeah, Anja Nu, what a loser! Winners don’t get die in terror as they get cut in half by an airplane, am I right, people?
Dennis the Menace, 7/21/10
Well, if we can have Eli Roth-style torture porn in Crock, I suppose David Cronenberg-style biological anxiety in Dennis the Menace is fine. Watch in queasy fascination as Dennis crawls down an unwilling Mr. Wilson’s esophagus, discovering all manner of slimy, pulsating horrors within.
Gil Thorp, 7/21/10
Whoops, it turns out that Torrey Pines and Kemper Lakes are real-life golf courses, not made-up gated communities. It looks like my family was right and my aggressive refusal to learn anything about golf has come back to haunt me after all!
Meanwhile, this mustachioed golf impresario’s angry reaction to a “hronk” intrigues me. I’m not sure what a hronk is, but since to my knowledge “hr” sounds are generally restricted to Slavic languages, I think we’re all going to learn a valuable lesson about how wrong-headed it is to discriminate against Eastern Europeans. Will newspapers print racially charged but dramatically necessary dialog like “Get off of my golf course, you filthy bohunks”?
Beetle Bailey, 7/21/10
Ha ha, General Halftrack can’t smoke his cigars if he’s dead!
Dick Tracy, 7/17/10
Dick, it’s obvious that anyone who would pay good money to see a play starring you would do so in the anticipation of carnage. Your appearing before the audience bruised and bandaged is a good start, but they probably will quickly grow bored with your jawing, and will start shouting angry demands that you show them the corpses.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/17/10
Kudos to Res Morgan for having a storyline about prostate cancer that will be non-sensationalist and not suffused with Funky Winkerbean-style gloom; still, there seems to be a disconnect between Rex’s soothing words and the mayor’s dramatically gobsmacked expression in panel three. “Grandkids? But … but I don’t have any grandkids!” “Oh, yeah, about that, your 16-year-old daughter was here the other day, and…”
Apartment 3-G, 7/17/10
Angry Margo + emotionally vulnerable Lu Ann + tiny bottles of booze = inevitable sexy hilarity.
Apartment 3-G, 7/12/10
Our terribly dressed makeover artists can insult our girls all month, as far as I’m concerned, but I think their barbs might be missing their mark to a certain extent. Sure, Margo looks like an old-fashioned schoolmarm — the sort of old-fashioned schoolmarm with sex appeal smoldering just beneath the surface, not least because she’s teaching in an old-fashioned schoolhouse, where corporal punishment is still permitted. Lu Ann may be a blonde, but she has far less depth and intelligence than the average Barbie doll. And, of course, nothing about Tommie could possibly be described as a “hot mess,” as that phrase is generally reserved for spectacular failures in aesthetics and personal habits, not sad, desperate attempts to fade into the background so that nobody can see you. “Hot mess” will presumably be what all three of these girls will look like once Kat and Kitty are done with them.
Dick Tracy, 7/12/10
Man, is Dick Tracy actively trying to get kicked out of the paper now? Apparently showing mangled corpses at an oblique angle wasn’t enough, so now we’re being treated to a woman more or less cut in half by a falling airplane, her face frozen in the look of terror that came over her when she realized her death was imminent, her hands raised up in a feeble attempt to stave off the inevitable. Delightful!
Gil Thorp, 7/12/10
With the Mudlark spring teams finally, in the second week of July, eliminated from contention, at last we can launch into Milford Summertime Wackiness™. This year’s zany summer story looks like it will revolve around the Thorps’ divorce. “Thanks, but what are you still doing here? You know what the judge said, and my lover Carlos will kick your ass if he catches you. I’m sorry you don’t have any containers at your sad apartment; just take the pitcher and get out.”