Comment of the Week

OK but BARNEY in that first panel. The eldritch horror of Barney. Contorted Barney. Barney. is. contorted. The eyes in his head pop and flash! Be he owl or be he man? Be he bedeviled, or bedeviler be he?

it is an ancient mariner

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Dick Tracy, 10/17/24

One of the subtler conundrums created by the “comic-book time” phenomenon is the question of how the characters themselves experience it. Like, is Dick Tracy a guy in his late 40s or early 50s who’s been battling weird deformed gangsters for a couple decades? Or did he, like the comic that bears his name, come into existence in 1938, meaning that he’s been at this longer than most of us have been alive, and he’s tired, so tired, of these weirdos’ whole deal? His attitude in today’s strip really suggests the latter. “Oh, what’s that, is there a new hitman in town? A real freak with a mirror for a face who calls himself Mr. Mirror? Should I get excited? Scared? Should I even bother pulling my gun out of my pocket? No, go ahead and answer that call, I can wait.”

Dennis the Menace, 10/17/24

There’s a lot that bugs me about the characterization of Margaret in Dennis the Menace, but a big one is that they need to decide which misogynist stereotype she is exactly. Is she a prissy, humorless, controlling know-it-all and shrew? Or is she empty-headed, vapid, and vain? I feel she veers wildly from lane to lane and they need to pick one.

Hi and Lois, 10/17/24

Ha ha, yes, the teens! The teens are the ones with the phone problem! Definitely not me, a 50-year-old man, or adults younger than me, or adults older than me! None of us have unhealthy relationships with our devices, and definitely social gatherings of mature adults feature exactly as much staring at small screens with varying degrees of surreptitiousness as they did 15 years ago! It’s the teens, I tell ya, the teens!

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The Phantom, 10/16/24

The Avarice AI’s suicide attempt was actually a murder-suicide attempt, but it failed in both respects ignominiously, so now the poor robot has to sit there and listen to further lecturing from the Ghost Who Lectures, this time about how its declaration yesterday that it was “the unified sovereign of this planetary body” was wrong, since it thinks it’s on the moon, since the moon isn’t a planet. Far be it for me to chastise a guy for pausing his violent battle against a novel machine intelligence in order to smugly establish that he’s technically correct, the best kind of correct, but if you do that, you have to actually be technically correct, and I regret to report that the big purple guy is, in this case, not. In astronomy, a “planetary body” is an alternate term for a planetary mass object, which is defined as any body large enough to achieve achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (to hold together as a sphere or something close to it, in other words), but not large enough to sustain fusion like a star would. Plenty of objects in our solar system meet this definition, including a whole suite of natural satellites, of which our moon is one. So the score is now Avarice 1, The Phantom … well, several higher than 1, and we know he’s going to win eventually, but we gotta give this robot this one, it deserves it.

Gasoline Alley, 10/16/24

Ida Noe the evil magic doll has already tried to kill these children once, by taking them back in time to the horrors of the Civil War, but has now realized that it would be much more efficient to simply transport them beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will quickly asphyxiate.

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Gasoline Alley, 10/15/24

Wow, I guess I see why Sophie has a different teacher than the other two girls! I’ve been trying pretty hard to avoid learning any specific details about these nightmare children, but now we know specifically which two are the “smart ones” (hint: not Sophie).

Dennis the Menace, 10/15/24

Just showing us Dennis and Mrs. Wilson reacting to a picture we can’t see? What a tease! WE DEMAND THE HOT MR. WILSON PIC, SHOW IT TO US AT ONCE

Shoe, 10/15/24

“I wonder if a tiger ate him?”