Simplicity is the key to brilliance, I always say
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Alice, 5/6/26
Remember how at one point Alice thought that new cars were too expensive because of all the crazy new features they had, but then just a few weeks later decided that she could get spoiled by all those new features? Well, good news: she’s still holding the line. Her old car is perfect! No technology!! And it gets her where she wants to go.
Dick Tracy, 5/6/26
“It’s because he’s a notorious criminal who someone recently broke out of prison for no doubt nefarious purposes! We’re all cops and he’s been one of our nemeses for years, so I’m not sure why I have to say that out loud, honestly. Are we on a Netflix show now, where studio execs have mandated that we need to keep repeating key plot points back and forth to one another because everyone’s on their phones and only half paying attention?”
Gil Thorp, 5/6/26
Hey, kids, do you think golf is a game that old people play and other old people watch on television? Well, Gil Thorp, the comic strip about and for (?) teens, is here to prove that wrong! It’s a sport that young people play and other young people stream on the YouTube app on their phones! Probably! Would a comic strip lie to me?
Mary Worth, 5/6/26
“It’s your mom! Which means our relationship is an abomination and I’m leaving you. Smell ya later!”
86 replies to “Simplicity is the key to brilliance, I always say”
The fact that Tommy’s remembered version of himself is about 30 years older than he really is and so cross-eyed that he can’t focus on a phone screen being held in front of him tells you a lot about his self image, and it’s not good.
FG: So that’s how Ming got into power, stolen Kiran magic and technology. Before he was merciless he was Ming the Cultural Appropriator.
MW: It sounds like Brandy used the same DNA testing company as Truck’s not-a-son — the one that in addition to the usual “some of your ancestors were from Europe” results also sends you the names, addresses, and (probably) Social Security numbers of anyone else that’s taken the test and might be related to you.
Alice’s old car gets her where she wants to go, which seems to be… traffic court… for giants?
MW: Tommy looks so baked in Panel 2, I’d be surprised if his “recall” is even accurate. Brandy has probably just run out for a latte or something.
RMMD: She’s seriously never heard that phrase?
DtM: So, I’m assuming Dad is sitting cuffed on the curb?
MW (I was just going to go with aunt!) “Why did she have to leave? I *told* her, it’s California, get away from the ol’ fuddies condo and they’re *very* accepting – I’ll move for us!”
We forget that Tommy has the intellectual and emotional faculties of a small dog. Look at that glassy-eyed gaze in the second panel — that’s the look of a man who has yet to develop object permanence. Brandy’s coming right back, boy! Who’s a good boy? WHO’S a good boy?
If you had warned me that one of today’s strips has a dog that is clearly yearning to be put to sleep, I wouldn’t have guessed Alice. Yet I’m not surprised.
Fortunately, the car CAN travel from one monochromatic void to another! Tough to find!
Luann – The Evanses are keeping the Hays code going strong in the comics world as this strip manages to reassure its elderly readers that not only is this apartment for just *the guy* so Luann can’t ‘shack up’, there isn’t even any room for ‘hanky-panky’ when she visits!
The YouTube channel is “Adventures Of The Lantern-Jawed.”
I have been sitting here laughing at Tommy’s facial expression in panel 2 for the last [[checks watch]] nine and a half minutes. Brigman, my guy, you… you didn’t want to take another pass at that? I mean, I also thought that that was Tommy’s hand holding the phone, so it looks like he’s just done a huge rip of nitrous while being gently entertained by a video called Fifty moments from Bluey that didn’t have to go that hard or something, thus answering his own question from panel 1.
Mary Worth Mashups: Are any of the three linked Modified Final Panels more interesting than the original?
“She just needs me to send $200,000, isn’t that great?! Also, Tommy, ARE you Layne Staley?”
“Babe, why did you have to leave me?” Ok, how much time do you have, Tommy?
Alice is the typical ignoramus. She classifies what is new and scary as technology, while her old car, with which she’s familiar with because it is old, it’s somehow not technology, but a natural feature of the world. Give her a op-ed to write!
This numbers means… something. But I don’t know the rules of golf, so I don’t know whether they are good or bad and I am not that invested in the narrative to care about who these secondary characters are. I saw today’s strip, but I paid little attention to it and went on with my life. This is the perfect representation of watching golf!
DT: Actually Dick Tracy is being written by the same people who write middle-brow “politics explainer” email newsletters cribbed from CNN reporting and Wikipedia. “Armed supervillains broke out of prison with machine guns. Here’s why that’s trouble – and what it means for the midterms.”
“Tommy! I got the DNA test results”. As soon as Tommy heard these words, his blood froze and he started to panic. But then he remembered he was too much of a loser to have ever fucked, so he relaxed
“Tommy misses Brandy” but what Tommy really misses is Oxycodone and Meth, not booze
Alice: Some strips find the humor in everyday life, others find the everyday life in everyday life.
DT: “..and here’s why that’s trouble: it’s boring. I mean, ‘Mumbles’? That’s the super criminal we’re supposed to be taking down? Were ‘Sleepy ‘ and Dopey” unavailable?
MW:
XTC wrote its hit “Mayor of Simpleton” after reading about Tommy.
Alice: “My old car is great! It gets me from Point A to Point B, and it lacks a rear-view camera for when I decide to cash in on that life insurance policy I took out on you!”
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: “Keep it simple, use the car to make it look like an accident,” as the criminal defense attorney once advised us on marital spats.
Gil Thorp:
“Lucas Martin shooting a 36. But that third hole can be kind of pesky.”
Mary Worth:
Tommy could really use some Prell or other shampoo ot conditioner which would give his hair “bounce.”
Gil Thorpe: This is giving less YouTube vibes than Flannelgraph, for Sunday School at the Church of Golf.
@Baja Gaijin: Without even looking, I’m going to say “yes”. A solid black panel would be more interesting than the original.
YouTube should have a version of their play button plaques for 100 subscribers, but limited to channels that are “Really? For this?!?”
MW panel 3: “His name is Trixie and he needs money to escape a foreign nations. I sent him our savings!”
For real though, there is a well-respected member of the Magic the Gathering community who has had a YouTube channel for over a decade that had a bit over 50,000 subscribers. About five years ago or so he started a wristwatch repair channel that now has over a million subscribers. You never know what’s going to hit on YouTube, and I may joke about a high school golf channel but I would never discount anything as being too niche.
Also, good for Alice. With car manufacturers now trying to charge people subscriptions for things that are already in their vehicles but not mandatory for their operation, like heated seats, older used cars are increasingly the way to go.
Mary Worth: Holy crow! Tommy’s eyes in panel 2! He didn’t fall off the wagon, he plummeted!
DT: “….Because I can’t travel to some exotic location to hunt them down on the department’s dime.”
MW: I’m guessing she left him because Tommy was busy reliving “Sabrina Carpenter x Reader” fanfiction in his head rather than listening to her.
“Yes, Aunty, but you drive a Ford Pinto, and you drive it really badly! Don’t you listen to Ralph Nader.”
“Oh, sweetie, I yearn for the warmth of a fiery death. You will too after a few appearances in this comic.”
Dick Tracy: Is that “clearly” Mumbles on the security camera, DT? Because it looks like a generic black-and-white sketch to me. What’s the point of having huge cast of grotesque supervillain-adjacent criminals if you’re not going to draw them?
Alongside the Gil Thorp does-Marty-Moon-have-any-YouTube-subscribers, Between Friends reruns have the writer saying that her 200 daily blogviews is solid audience progress (or would be if they weren’t mostly her refreshes…) which would be nothing to brag about – showing that cartoonists being out of touch with newfangled technology outreach is constant over the years.
Wary Morth:
So Whisky was enticed away by a fake DNA result, and was abducted by the pig butchering scam centre as a replacement for Trixie, is that it?
No, of course not, that has the possibility of being interesting.
Wary Morth:
“Her name is Trixie!”
MW – “I found my father’s half sister! It seems she worked in a sawmill! Terrible accident, but somehow she survived.”
Murky Tail:
Dreama must be dreaming if she imagines Mark Trail Sr has any fortune for her to scam him out of.
He doesn’t wear an ascot, does he?
Alice: If I were a child trying to make sense of the world and found myself confronting Alice, I would have lots of questions. Is this what adults are? Is this what I’ll be someday? Stuff like that. We wouldn’t get around to her car until at least Hour 2.
DT: “Clearly Mumbles.” I love that.
GT: Today’s young people know better than to make direct eye contact with anyone. That’s why the eyelines in this strip are all over the place.
MW: “I remember it like it was yesterday. Brandy had just gotten some life-changing news about her family, but I was too distracted by the Great Gazoo to notice.”
Dustin: I’d suggest Dustdad seek help for his binge-eating disorder, if I didn’t want him to gorge himself into an early grave. I assume his co-worker feels the same.
Luann: So, when does Phil figure out that he’s touring a 55-and-older community?
MT: “Dreama” is an even more obvious fake alias than “Trixie.” These AI scammers need to learn to stop giving the game away like that–or they would, if their marks weren’t so blindingly stupid.
Pluggers have no social life.
RMMD: “Oh, that’s so cute! Being a fabulously wealthy actress, I’ve never had to concern myself with the economic struggles of normal people. Anyway, off to roleplay being one of the commoners!”
@cheech wizard:
That is the first time I laughed out loud today. Thanks.
@cheech wizard: COTW.
GT- out here on the big island, local radio tells me that UH-Hilo has won the league championship in golf for four years running. So kids are playing golf. The fact that the radio station is telling us that means No one is watching it.
Wrecks Moregone:
“Crunching numbers? That reminds me, I heard a crunching noise coming from my bed when Mud and I were….uh, play-wrestling…..on it. I think you have dry rot.”
@Baja Gaijin: Wow, Tommy looks *so* relieved to know he’s not going to face a paternity suit.
Josh, two days ago: “Will he turn to weed? Pills? Crack cocaine? Our lord and savior Jesus Christ?”
Tommy, in today’s flashback panel: “How about all four?”
You could make an argument about the amount of unnecessary features or omissions of features in new cars, but what’s not arguable is that Alice appears to have omitted the most important part of a comic strip: some sort of humorous or dramatic moment.
@Ken: Brandy certainly used the same plotline (and that of Sonia’s as well)…or at least tried to and ended up botching the landing, because who cares finding a long lost aunt (of a father you have an extremely strained relationship with by the way)? Realizing that she can’t do better then tired recycled plot points, Moy sent the Brandy character packing.
MW-Poor Tommy. His girlfriend left him for half a woman instead of staying with the half man that he is.
FC-Ah yes. The lesser known Egyptian Plague, the Plague of Worms.
RMMD-Ya know moving money from one set of books to another. Trying to stay one step ahead of the IRS.
MW-It wasn’t Brandy’s fault that the plane crashed killing her.
MW-“Tommy, can you hear me? Tommy, are you on drugs again.”
I think it’s fine if the Alice’s writer uses her comics as platform for her internal debate on whether to buy a new car. It’s not like writing the comics pays enough to take such an important financial decision without due consideration
“Uh-huh-huh-huh. But-tered toooooast.”
-Flashback Tommy, probably
Dick Tracy’s villains used to be shot on film in a prestigious Hollywood movie directed by Warren Beaty and interpreted by first-class stars such as Dustin Hoffman. But these days, the only camera that will shoot them is a store camera. How the mighty have fallen! At this point I would rather be shot by Dick Tracy himself!
So the Tommy storyline is literally “Record scratch. Yup, that’s me. I bet you’re wondering how I got myself into that situation. Well, it all started a month ago…” Mary Worth is innovating if Moy is starting to use tropes from the 1980s!
@Liam: Tommy, can you hear me? [Can you feel me near you?] Tommy, are you on drugs again? [Do you see the bugs again?]
“Babe, why did you have to leave me?”–the deservedly lesser-known sequel to the Anne Bredon/Led Zeppelin classic Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.
Blondie: how did someone as lazy and useless as Dagwood become an office manager?
MW: That is the face of a man who’s inner monologue is just radio static
MW: Not sure why Moy bothered to start in medias res only to immediately transition into a flashback. To paraphrase Ebert, I guess she’s “learned from better stories that writers sometimes relay plots nonlinearly, but she has not learned why.”
LUANN: “Gee if only you can live in the dorms! But you have to be smart enough to go to real college for that, so my only hope is to experience it vicariously through you, pseudo-boyfriend of mine!”
Alice : “But auntie, isn’t having a cd player in your car ‘technology’ ?”
“OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T COUNT AS ‘TECHNOLOGY’! ”
************
Crankshaft : doesn’t have any short-sleeved shirts/short-legged pants outside of beachware…. we’re lucky. He could be in a Wilbur-esque Speedo.
….Too far…?************
Luann : so, all the tiny sheds in parents’ backyards, and the dorm room, are these vast spacious, luxurious dwellings, but the luxury condo is smaller than a broom closet (smaller than the broom closet they converted into Shannon’s room, even!)?
I mean, I get it if it’s intentional, but it’s still kinda weird?
************
Mary Worth : by “why did you have to leave me?”, Tommy doesn’t mean that Brandy broke up with him or anything, she just went on an adventure to find her long-lost half-aunt, and hasn’t come back yet or called him or anything. And it’s probably not been that long, like a couple of weeks tops!
Alice: Alice’s “25-year-old car” is presumably a 2001 model, which means it for sure has electronic fuel injection, at least two airbags, power windows and locks (my 2000 car had them), maybe keyless entry, cruise control, air conditioning, anti-lock brakes…quite a lot of “technology,” actually.
@Comically Challenged: I read that and immedately thought of this: https://youtu.be/7zkFsLrWgto?si=yyvC5kE38Wrlrh5N
Go to 0:57 for the specific moment, but I’ve found the whole thing hilarious ever since I was a kid.
@Bob Tice: Willie Nelson owned a golf course. He told a reporter the best thing about that was he got to set par at each hole. “See that hole? It’s a Par 12. I birdied that sucker yesterday”.
@Ettorre, @Lauralot: It’s not like we need the backstory of why Brandy left Tommy. The surprising thing would be if she was still with him.
So today’s comics are an “I prefer my old stuff” story, an uncritical police vs. criminals story, a golf story, and Mary Worth just got out of a “young adults should take back parents they had good reason to go no contact with” story. Josh was right when he said “newspaper comics are fundamentally an art form by and for old people.”
MARY WORTH: Tommy, judging by your goofy, spacy, cross-eyed stare there in panel #2, I’m guessing that your girl left you because you were high as a kite.
Alice-The cops can’t track Alice if there is no GPS in the car.
@Anonymous: #63: re-Luann: I believe Shannon’s room was a converted laundry room. Still small. The one in my house is no bigger than a walk-in closet.
Frazz – Caulfield is egotistical yet not self aware, so he thinks Mrs. Olsen is referring to Amos Van Hoesen.
Rex Morgan – After he crunches these numbers, he’ll crunch the second set of books.
What happened to all the roots country fans who were visiting because Truck made the Glenwood Motel famous?
9CL – Now the dog is worshipping their legs. The only positive character just went into the toilet.
Speed Bump – This is good, but the bird should be a goose.
Alice – It’s amazing that a comic strip could be completely vacant of anything remotely approaching humor. That punchline is all line and no punch.
@TheDiva: re: Luann: “So, when does Phil figure out that he’s touring a 55-and-older community?”
What, with no bingo night? No shuffleboard? Looks to me like a 20-something fuck community for losers (“morning mingle” — is that desperate or what?). It might just be the perfect home for Phil.
@Baja Gaijin: Mashups – The first one is definitely what happened.
Does anyone have Ted Turner in a dead pool?
Does anybody really understand what Alice is supposed to be about? Is it supposed to be amusing? Is it some kind of experiment to prove that human beings can produce a product that is less relatable to other humans than something produced by generative AI? What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
Alice: The 25-year-old car is a 75-year-old Model T Alice bought used in 2001. After she breaks an arm cranking it she’ll WISH she had one of those newfangled electrical ignitions.
9CL: Mark yesterday, May 5, 2026, as a landmark in McEldowney history. He went one day without drawing or referring to comely girl legs.
I totally misread panel two in Mary Worth and thought Tommy was holding the phone, just recording his girlfriend for no reason at all. Maybe she left him because she didn’t respect his new career as a vlogger.
GT: Has Marty Moon been pointing his smartphone and creating the images of the last strips?
Crankshaft: Ed looks as in place at the gym as at an airport.
Beetle Bailey: On her way over? Can’t the US Army imagine some crazed pointless emergency to keep rando civilians off a misery base?
BG&SS: A sneaky Jughaid brings both President Franklin and President Hamilton to show and tell. He gets an A.
Alice – “Aunty, how is it possible to have a car with no technology?” “It’s imaginary, dear. Just like you. And my dog. And that mysterious big wooden thing. When are they going to bring my meds?”
DT – Sam: “Sorry, could you repeat that, Tracy? I was checking my phone.”
Don Abundio, translated:
“I hope I’ll never need to remember flag semaphore”
“Well, it’s not as if anyone would be goofy enough to use it for normal conversation”
“Oh, no?”
ALICE: “No technology”? What does she call an internal combustion engine? What does she call the wheel? Yes, I know…People think “technology” only refers to phones, cyberspace, etc. But it doesn’t. One of the greatest technological advancements ever devised by humanity is the toilet. I will die on that hill.
Mary Worth: “I got the DNA test results” is something Captain Olivia Benson would say while sweating a perp in the box, not a phrase a civilian would use when they received their family history from Ancestry or 23andMe. Did Brandy discover she’s secretly related to a powerful underworld clan, and therefore doesn’t need to spend her life attached to a guy who (probably) still stacks cans at the local grocery store? Of course, it’s possible that she left him for his own protection, because now she’s expected to marry the son of a rival syndicate to consolidate power, and he would be seen as expendable. Either way, it’s sad times for Tommy. Could a heartbreak haircut be in the offing? Honestly, a 40-year-old shouldn’t look like that even in a beach town, if he expects to get any respect from the criminal underworld and/or local yentas.
MW – Oh, friend, we were all led to believe that the question you asked in Panel 1 was rhetorical, and that’s the way we’d like to keep it. I mean, we all assume it was some boneheaded move of yours, so why shatter our fragile web of belief? Also, we just don’t care that much.
“….and here’s why that’s trouble. MMR vaccination rates are way down across the Neo-Chicago region.”
“Tracey, you’re thinking of Mumples, the guy with the really swollen neck.”