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Dick Tracy, 11/26/19

Oh, wow, a couple of beloved comics characters from a cancelled strip are being revived, in … Dick Tracy, what an extremely surprising development! I won’t deny you the pleasure of taking your own journey through Steve Roper and Mike Nomad’s Wikipedia page, in the course of which you’ll learn that it was originally a wacky Native American minstrelsy strip called Big Chief Wahoo that morphed into a hard-hitting adventure strip starring two white guys, written for decades by Allen and John Saunders, the father-son team who also wrote Mary Worth for most of that stretch. I’ll only note that we seem to be out of the strip’s original continuity — its run ended with Roper and Nomad in their 60s and Roper standing over the grave of his dead wife, who divorced him from an insane asylum and gave birth to a daughter she never told him about — and that Proof Magazine (which does investigative reporting and not, like, articles about geometry, I think) must have a rental insurance premium as high as Woods and Wildlife’s if Steve’s extremely chill reaction to his car getting blown up is any indication.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 11/26/19

I always find it funny when repeated tropes/running gags with some basis in reality just drift further and further from their original germ of truth until they veer into truly nightmarish territory. Like, dogs are territorial animals and sometimes distrust strangers coming onto their turf, which is why they can be aggressive towards postal workers, meter readers, and other outsiders who have reasons to visit hundreds of homes a day; but the form this conflict has taken in the world of Mother Goose and Grimm is that Grimm, a sapient dog who can think in English sentences, hungers for mailman flesh.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/26/19

“They’re all exceptional — in the sense that we had to make exceptions to our policies to hire them, because most of them did very poorly in medical school. Ha! I’m kidding, of course. Fully two-thirds of our patients survive surgeries here, probably you’ll be fine.”

Six Chix, 11/26/19

Oh, this is nice! This lady’s friend is a ballerina and got a high-profile role, so she’s coming out to support her and watch the big performance! If anyone knows what the “joke” in this strip is, I’d love it if you could shoot me an email explaining it to me.