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Dick Tracy, 3/18/22

Coffyhead claimed that the coffee over at Bean Howz was “stale,” but I think the truth is that, like any addict, his need for coffee stimulation is only getting more intense over time. The stuff for normies that coffee shops sell has to meet the standards of the local health department, and that won’t cut it for him anymore. He’s got to go meet his street-corner “connection,” a guy who’s got a black-market espresso machine set up at Fletcher and Main that does things to a coffee bean that science cannot fully explain and definitely can’t recommend.

Crock, 3/18/22

For a long time, the go-to irritating but correct move when discussing the Cinematic Wollstonecraft-Shelleyverse has been to huffily reply “Actually Frankenstein was the doctor, you’re referring to Frankenstein’s monster” when anyone calls a shambling assembly of corpse parts reanimated by forbidden science “a Frankenstein.” But we’ve been doing this so long that it’s thoroughly played out. I’m urging my fellow pedants to move on to a new focus of correction: pointing out that the Bride, as iconically performed by Elsa Lanchester, was costumed and made up to be strange looking, but was not intended to be seen as “ugly” the way Boris Karloff was as the Monster, and was in fact quite striking and attractive. Therefore, jokes like the one in today’s Crock are based on a false premise. Please join me in this new movement!

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Mary Worth, 3/13/22

I haven’t discussed Mary Worth all week because it has entirely consisted of Cal ham-handedly flirting at Toby and asking her out to lunch and Toby serenely pretending she doesn’t notice, or perhaps actually not noticing, while this lady looks on menacingly. Today is noteworthy mostly because Helen unleashes a deadly wave of cringe by announcing “I’ll say it again for the people in the people in the back”; I assume her point is that this is a young person phrase, and that when it’s used by old people like Helen, it’s extremely embarrassing, just like it’s embarrassing when an old person like Toby flirts with a college student like Cal. Anyway, today’s Sunday Mary Worth Epigraph™ is from former CIA head Michael Hayden, so I certainly hope somebody’s going to get waterboarded by the end of this storyline.

Dennis the Menace, 3/13/22

Mostly I’m posting this for the final panel in the middle row, in which Mr. Wilson looks appropriately jazzed to tell Dennis exactly how his favorite charismatic megafauna went extinct. With that clenched fist you can tell he’s really getting worked up about how many of Dennis’s beloved monsters died in a frenzy of flames, and then the rest starved to death over the ensuing months as dust blocked out the sun and the food chain collapsed. I’m excited for Mr. Wilson to overhear the lad wondering what happened to his other grandparents that we never see some day!

Crock, 3/13/22

Say what you will about the negative effects of climate change, but it at least it will wipe out all the characters in Crock in a huge, cleansing flood! (We realize that this is cold comfort to the 44 million or so people of Algeria and mean no disrespect to them.)

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Crock, 2/19/22

Giant zipper running down the middle of the desert, revealing the Crock-world to be a baffling simulacrum that defies all attempts to make sense of it? Actually good — no, actually great. Best Crock ever, no notes.

Hi and Lois, 2/19/22

This is a middling joke on its own, but what makes it actually good is that you have to imagine the days and weeks of spiraling into drunken, dysfunctional madness that led up to this point.

Beetle Bailey, 2/19/22

Killer is about to get too horny and then die of a massive heart attack. To be clear, that’s actually a good thing.