Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/23/15
Oh hey were you wondering what was going with the story of Kelly the teen, who’s being gifted with a free car and a zero-tolerance contract in order to ferry around Sarah Morgan and fulfill the nebulous art-education whims of a lovable old gangster moll? (Haha, I love trying to construct the most implausibly absurd sentences that are nevertheless 100% accurate descriptions of soap opera plots.) Anyway, Bugsy the driver, who is totally reformed and absolutely no longer a brutal mob enforcer, probably, is taking Kelly to get her free car, and it’s a hearse! It’s also free to Bugsy and Mrs. P., because of some ill-defined relationship between garishly suited hearse salesman “Tony” and Mrs. P.’s criminal syndicate. When Bugsy says Mrs. P. “sends her best to you and your family,” does that mean that Tony’s family has now been released from captivity? When Tony thanks Bugsy for “what she did for us,” is that a reference to her mob’s long reign of violent terror really boosting the market for hearses?
Pluggers, 1/23/15
You know you’re a plugger when you’ve never cooked anything even remotely healthy in your entire life.
Heathcliff, 1/22/15
Comics are an incredibly conservative art form — not necessarily in a political or ideological sense, but in that they preserve visual tropes from the comics that current artists grew up with, thus sometimes presenting a world that vanished long ago. Thus, just as Dagwood’s suburban neighborhood is lousy with semi-feral dogs, so does Heathcliff view going to the bathroom as a primarily outside activity. This was the the norm for pet cats for most of their millennia-long period of domestication, but with the invention of clay kitty litter nearly 70 years ago, the idea of a cat doing its business inside the house became … well, significantly less worthy of a joke in a cat-themed comic, let’s just say that.
Funky Winkerbean and Dick Tracy, 1/22/15
The intrusion of Dick Tracy into the Funkyverse is having interesting effects on the Funky-space-time continuum. This reality has already been able to accommodate multiple discontinuous time-tracks, as seen by the apparent coexistence of the Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft timelines 10 years apart, with the one only occasionally bleeding into the other. But now with Dick and Sam in town, the timeline seems to have rapidly bifurcated into two closely linked parallel streams: in one, they crack vaguely wise at one another about comic books; in the other, they growl menacingly about how they totally have the right to just shoot this guy in the gut for “resisting arrest.”
Dick Tracy, 1/21/15
Sure, Westview is haunted by death, but death of the quiet, drawn-out, hospice-based variety. Dick and Sam are about to bring a new kind of death to town: loud, abrupt, and very, very bloody.
Mark Trail, 1/21/15
Gotta be impressed with Mark’s hair, which has gone through a boat explosion and some quality time surrounded by flaming oil slicks and has barely moved at all.
Sally Forth, 1/21/15
Little did I know, when I wished for a new Apartment 3-G artist last week, that Sally Forth already had in the works a flash-forward that’s doubling as a backdoor pilot for an Apartment 3-G reboot!
Spider-Man, 1/21/15
Peter Parker has been forced to rescue Mary Jane from an out-of-control movie marketing robot out of costume. Presumably he’s unharmed because he has, uh, spider-durability (the relative ribcage strength of a … spider?), but if he pretends to be hurt and sues the movie studio, this will turn out to be his most effective and lucrative act of heroism to date.
Wizard of Id, 1/21/15
“Boy, I sure have noticed and/or been sexually aroused by a lot of young women lately! Fortunately, I have a nationally syndicated newspaper comic strip, so I’ll be able to talk about this fact in a way that won’t come across as creepy at all.”
