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Spider-Man, 4/27/16

Oh, man, there’s a lot I haven’t been keeping you up to date on with Spider-Man! Like the wicked Xandu, after imprisoning our heroes, kidnapped Mary Jane (whom he assumed was Dr. Strange’s wife), and claimed her as her own! And then flew her over Manhattan! But the she almost got airsick and puked! So he landed in Washington Square Park! And Spidey and Doctor Strange tracked her down because she’s wearing a homing device that allows her husband to locate her at all times, which is a little unsettling, honestly! But then Xandu whisked her off to some magical other dimension! Anyway, none of that is anywhere near as interesting or funny to me as Dr. Strange using his invisibility powers to make Spider-Man look dumb in front of a gawking, jeering crowd of New Yorkers.

Family Circus, 4/27/16

It can be awkward having “the talk” with your kids about where babies come from. Fortunately for Ma and Big Daddy Keane, the post-sex future, in which humans are vat-grown in automated cloning facilities and flown to their assigned dwelling-pod by robot helicopters, is almost upon us.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/27/16

Lucky Eddie used to jerk off into a sock puppet, but then he lost it.

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So ends the Comics Curmudgeon Spring 2016 fundraiser. Thank you, generous readers! If you missed your chance to contribute, there’s still time — use the “Donate” button on this page, or this page for the full-on fundraiser experience.

Curtis, 5/6/16

So Heart-Throb’s video clears Curtis and Chutney and all is well. Say, I can’t tell whether Principal Washington is sporting a turban or dreadlocks there. If I were Derrick or “Onion” I’d be concerned: will this be settled at the point of his kirpan, or amicably over a gigantic spliff?

Gil Thorp, 5/6/16

And a nickname is born — two days too late for May the Forth be with you. Shucks.

Phantom, 5/6/16

The Captain learns Phantom is on his own side
And he’s happy to have him along for the ride.
The intel will help him do damage control
And he owes every byte to the Jungle Patrol!

Patrolmen are hayseeds and yokels and hicks
But they know one or two de-encryptioning tricks —
If you don’t mind manure on the drives that they stole
You can outsource IT to the Jungle Patrol!

Mary Worth, 5/6/16

Conflict, AT LAST!

“Not to study”? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Spider-Man, 5/6/16

Xandu wants a queen, but he needs a decorator.

Just a reminder not to wait up in anticipation of Comments of the Week from me – enjoy Dagger’s genitalic hooks for another week!

– Uncle Lumpy

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Archie, 5/10/16

Today’s Archie is neat little package justifying the economic stratification of society. You may believe that the 1% do less to earn their vast wealth than, say, factory workers or service personnel, but look! A single, dignified bead of sweat drips from Mr. Lodge’s brow, indicating that he too, in planning LodgeCo’s next strategic moves, is performing labor for which he deserves renumeration. Archie, in the background, demonstrates the real fecklessness of the parasitical taker classes, perspiring with anxiety over the destruction he’s caused, not thanks to good honest work. The message is clear: sweat smarter, not harder.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/10/16

The producers of the new Starbuck Jones movie have decided to shoot in blighted Northern Ohio, because of generous tax credits offered by the state it would be convenient for the lead actor and writers. This has caused a lot of rejoicing, but as we all know, the Funkyverse has a very powerful Law of Conservation of Misery, so clearly this has to be a serious problem for somebody, sooner or later. How long will that bus stay wedged in that alley before the kids have to turn to cannibalism?

Spider-Man, 5/10/16

Remember, the comics pages’ most mediocre superhero deserves an extremely middling rogues gallery! I honestly can’t get enough of any of these people being insulted to their face.

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Spider-Man, 6/10/16

Haha, has it really been a month since I updated you on Spidey’s dumb adventures? Well, here’s what happened: Xandu used the Wand of Watoomb to defeat Nightmare and bring his scary nightmare-dimension to New York’s Washington Square Park, and then used the Wand of Watoomb to take over innocent New Yorkers’ minds and have them beat up Spider-Man. But then Spider-Man started winning. How could this be? Could Spidey actually be using his super-powers to defeat an enemy??? No, don’t be ridiculous: he was merely a puppet being used by Doctor Strange, a much more powerful and talented superhero. This has got to be his most relaxing victory to date! He didn’t even have to do any of the work! The only way it could’ve been better if he had been able to watch TV during the process, somehow!

Gasoline Alley, 6/10/16

I don’t know what’s funnier here: that there was concern that this plot-advancing untruth might cast improper aspersions on Gertie’s pie-baking skills, or that we’re expected to believe that anybody edits Gasoline Alley.

Mary Worth, 6/10/16

I sincerely hope that this is the first Mary Worth comic that at least one person in the world has seen, and that that person assumes the strip is about an unusually cheerful woman who works in a prison library.

Pluggers, 6/10/16

You’re a plugger if you take decent care of your car but you’re dying of heart disease.

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Spider-Man, 6/29/16

This Spider-Man Doctor Strange storyline has been going on for, what, four months now, Jesus Christ, and it’s been super boring for like the last six weeks at least, and not even boring in, like, a fun way. Anyway, let’s hope that today’s dramatic moment, in which Spider-Man picks a thing up off the ground and gives it to some other dude who actually knows how to use it, represents the climax to this storyline and we’ll move on to something else! Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll drag this thing out until the Doctor Strange movie comes out in [checks date on Google] November? Are you kidding me?

Mary Worth, 6/29/16

Mary Worth, meanwhile, turns boredom into a delicate, mesmerizing art form. Mary’s spent three days typing a banal response to a letter to Wilbur’s advice column! Three days! Typing! Yet I can’t take my eyes away, as her fingers dance delicately across the least ergonomic keyboard ever made. This is how it’s done, Spider-Man. This is how it’s done.

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Gasoline Alley, 6/30/16

Hey, remember when Gasoline Alley went on and on and on about scrapbooking, for no discernable reason? Well, you’ll beg for scrapbooking hijinx once we get five weeks deep into … NUMISMATICS FOLLIES!!!!!!

Spider-Man, 6/30/16

Spider-Man’s spider-sense (the relative sense of a spider) is generally interpreted as offering a vague premonition of danger, so you think it’d be useless for helping him figure out magic spells. But this plotline was in real danger of becoming the most boring thing in Spider-Man history, so his powers were spot-on in bringing it to a close as quickly as possible.

Mary Worth, 6/30/16

Good news! Mary Worth is here to help, by asking the groundskeeper to carry some heavy objects! Please do not ask Mary for further help or make eye contact again with her in the future. Thank you for your time.

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Mary Worth, 7/13/16

The Sad Story Of Tommy’s Back Problems could’ve gotten into some interesting socioeconomic territory, examining how someone who works as a janitor at a small business, almost certainly without employer-provided health insurance or sick days, deals with an injury that, while not permanently debilitating, would keep him from working for a period of time. Instead, we’re real concerned about how this will affect Tommy’s relationship with his coworker/girlfriend, who apparently only sees him at work, and who will quickly forget he even exists if he doesn’t show up, so I guess we’re going to get some comical scenes of Tommy trying to operate a mop while doped to the gills on Vicodin. “I don’t want my girl to forget what I look like!” he says, while staring into the mirror, determined that he won’t forget what he looks like either. Poor Tommy seems to think he has a very forgettable face.

Marvin, 7/13/16

One of Prague’s biggest tourist attractions is the New Synagogue, so called because when it was built in the 1270s it took over the position as the city’s main synagogue from other, even older houses of worship. Now I’ve encountered (and even perpetrated) some ugly-American-abroad-isms in my time, but I’m willing to bet that exactly zero American visitors see the place and say “Whoa whoa whoa, this place is super old. I want to see something new, like the name implies. Gimme some poured concrete, an injection-molded facade over over plywood frame, the whole nine yards. I didn’t come all the way to Europe to see something historic.” And yet we are meant to believe that Marvin’s family is reacting exactly thus! Each strip seems intent on making sure we understand that Marvin isn’t uniquely terrible, but instead comes from a deep and ancient lineage of badness.

Spider-Man, 7/13/16

Despite the fact that he’s being played by known Briton Benedict Cumberbatch in the upcoming film, good ol’ Steve Strange is in fact 100% American, as he seems to be going out of his way to make clear here. “Yep, those Yankees, they sure play in the World Series a lot! The World Series is the championship of Major League Baseball, a sport that I, like most ordinary Americans, enjoy following. Please do not hunt me down and burn me at the stake due to my practice of sinister witchcraft, the techniques of which I mastered in the mysterious Orient.”

Curtis, 7/13/16

At first I assumed “demon” was just another cute pet name Greg uses for his eldest son, but no, check out the devil horns Curtis is flashing in that last panel. I think we need to make our peace with the fact that Curtis created a flash mob using the demonic powers granted to him thanks to his allegiance to the Lord of Lies, the King of Hell, whose affection for millennials is well known.

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Spider-Man, 7/17/16

Oh, thank goodness all that super-powered combat is over and done with so we can move on to … drama in the contracting media business! You know, when I started writing that sentence I was being sarcastic, but by the time I got to the end of it I was 100% sincere. Please, please show me J. Jonah Jameson arguing with angry BugleCo shareholders, and eventually changing the company to “buonc” and making Peter Parker run the Snapchat channel for no extra pay. This would be roughly a million times better than a couple of dumb wizards fighting over the Wand of fucking Watoomb.

Mark Trail, 7/17/16

Hey, kids! Are you interested in visiting mass graves full of the herpes-ridden corpses of enormous, grotesque fish? Visit the Murray-Darling river basin in 2018! (This message brought to you by Tourism Australia. Australia! The Island-Continent of Waking Nightmares™!)

Blondie, 7/17/16

Hmm, let me tell you about another guy who had one of those “best of times, worst of times” days, Dagwood. His name was Sydney Carton and he got beheaded, so maybe you shouldn’t be so concerned about a little cash, OK?

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Mary Worth, 7/25/16

Oh man, it looks like the “June Brigman and Roy Richardson do Mary Worth art on Sundays but Joe Giella still does the dailies” era was shorter than we thought! Farewell, Joe, who got an excellent sendoff from Uncle Lumpy back when the new team made their first appearance, and here’s a lovely blog post from strip writer Karen Moy. I actually missed the tiny “bye” in Giella’s signature box in Friday’s strip. It heartens me that his last Mary Worth panel was Tommy’s sweaty Vicodin bliss-out, which I’m reproducing here in larger format, for posterity:

Anyway, I think we should all remember Giella the way he’d want to be remembered: as the man who drew Mary Worth as Wonder Woman. Enjoy retirement, Joe!

Meanwhile, the important thing about today’s strip is that it takes a village to create a pill addict. “Gee, I hope Tommy doesn’t bother me while I try to study for my big tests! I figure the more Vicodin he takes, the quieter he’ll be.”

Crankshaft, 7/25/16

Oh, hey, remember this guy, who we all sort of thought might be Crankshaft’s future vegetative husk? Well, last week we learned that he was actually “Beanball” Bushka, Crankshaft’s arch-rival back when they played on the Toledo Mud Hens literally before World War II (don’t try to make the chronology work, you’ll hurt yourself), and who exploited Crankshaft’s illiteracy to bump him from a game where scouts were in attendance, thus ruining his big league dreams forever, but then he wrote a letter to the Mud Hens confessing and now they’re … going to retire his number? This is not just happening in the funny pages, but in actual real life on July 29th, and thanks to faithful reader Aphthakid for pointing this out to me and no thanks to faithful reader Bill Peschel for linking to the picture of the officially licensed Crankshaft bobblehead that will be handed out to thousands of baffled minor league baseball attendees. Seriously, literally nobody there is going to have a clue what’s going on. Crankshaft’s own granddaughter does her best to forget who he is.

Spider-Man, 7/25/16

Ahhhh, it looks like the new Bugle owner is Jonah’s cousin-in-law, Egghead! As someone who writes about newspaper comics for a living but consistently refuses to read or learn about superhero comics, I immediately jumped to Wikipedia for a quick primer on who this guy is. Here are some sentences taken at random from his extensive bio:

• “Ant-Man tricked him into thinking the ants had betrayed him before revealing that the ants were his friends and would never turn against him.”
• “Arnim Zola later created a proto-husk of Egghead as part of his Corpse Corp.”
• “Although his original programming was ‘to respect all human life,’ a female neo-Nazi named Big Zero (who seems to have a relationship with this Egghead) has reprogrammed him to hate several minorities.”

Guys, I know they’re basically the foundation of all modern cultural production now, but … I think superhero comics are kind of silly?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/25/16

It’s been long established that Montoni’s is Westview’s only viable business, so this labor-saving innovation is going to double the local unemployment rate. But Montoni doesn’t care! He’s lived in Florida for years. See ya, sad sacks!

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Slylock Fox, 8/1/16

There’s a huge missed opportunity here in that the strip doesn’t provide us with the name of this completely adorable pig band! Some suggestions:

• Pig Floyd
• The Piggles
• Pig Direction
• Radioham
• One Pigrection
• Taylor Ham Swift
• Carlos Pigtana ft. Pig Thomas

Anyway, Sly and Max’s facial expressions here are 100% great. They thought they were down with that hip new music that the kids like, but it turns out that they very much are not.

Dick Tracy, 8/1/16

Speaking of the stuff the kids like, our crime-fighting squares in Dick Tracy are taking a casual video call with Dethany, an adorable goth, and seem to be having an OK time with it! Rikki Mortis is named “Rikki Mortis” and is in a relationship with “Abner Kadaver,” a guy who sleeps in a coffin and looks like a skeleton and has done a bunch of murders, so I don’t know where Dethany gets off on her gother-than-thou attitude here.

Spider-Man, 8/1/16

“Like bugs on a bagel” sounds like a phrase that someone would come up with if they had to make up a New York City catchphrase on very short notice and had never actually visited New York City. “Uh, what do they have in New York, uh, uh … bagels! They love bagels over there. And everything’s infested with vermin, right?”

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Spider-Man, 8/4/16

Ah, yes, the A+ way to convey through dialogue that a newly introduced character is a huge nerdlinger: hilariously stilted phrases like “I’m cognizant,” “I require an equivalent quantity,” etc.! It’s also always fun to be reminded that while Peter whines endlessly about his mistreatment at the hands of J. Jonah Jameson, he is in fact a not particularly good photographer and his only value is his ability to deliver photos of himself. I’m assuming that Ant-Man, like all other superheroes, holds Spider-Man in the appropriate level of disdain, and so Peter’s job just got a lot harder.

Mark Trail, 8/4/16

Hey, remember the last Mark Trail storyline, where Mark spent roughly 17 weeks stuck inside a cave? Well, brace yourself, because he’s about to spend the next who knows how many months stuck inside a whale.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/8/16

Aw jeez, where to start? First thing, you can’t take your wacky bandmaster character, recast him as a tragic victim of advancing deafness, recast him again as a Wise Elder, and then expect him to sell your wacky “midnight practice” punchline in panel three there.

Second, that “punchline”? It’s what comedy folk call a “setup.” It goes in the first panel, not the last. That way you can actually show the midnight practice, maybe in sepia with those cute little photo corners the way you like so much. Then Becky can say, “Well, we don’t have midnight practice anymore — (ominously) but we’re still dealing with hazing!” — and maybe in the third panel we could actually see some hazing? A wedgie, “kick me” sign, towel snap or something? There’s a list! Sure, it’s still not funny, like fog still isn’t haze, but at least it would meet the formal requirements of a joke.

What a mess. None of it matters, though – somebody decided this is hazing sermon week, and jokes be damned. Don’t bully, kids. Adopt a damn animal or something. Stay off drugs.

Curtis, 8/8/16

Back in the 1980’s pranksters would order pizzas for delivery to their mark’s house. Hawaiian, with the ham and pineapple, was the canonical “funny” menu selection. The practice ended quickly when pizzerias started confirming orders by phone, and of course won’t work with prepaid online orders.

So Greg’s not out any cash – what’s his beef here? He seems pretty steamed! That somebody bought him pizzas? Interrupted his dinner? He doesn’t like pineapple? His son is a wretched little jerk? Ooh, I think we have a winner.

Mary Worth, 8/8/16

Tommy “the Tweaker” Beedie first appeared on this blog almost twelve years ago, in a post lovingly titled “Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, what in the name of God is THAT?”. But say what you will about his unfortunate grooming and fashion choices, our Tommy is a go-getter: whether selling tainted meth, proselytizing his mom in prison, or just mopping up the joint, he puts heart and soul into everything he does.

Here, he throws himself into doc-shopping for Schedule III narcotics, blissfully unaware of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program that will soon set him up for his third strike. So long, Tommy! We’ll be looking for you in 2028, if you’re lucky and if newspaper comics are still even a thing anymore by then!

Spider-Man, 8/8/16

“Peter? What if somebody saw you coming in here? They might think we’re a couple, and my reputation would be ruined.”

Pity poor Mary Jane Parker — she tries to be a loyal wife but honestly just can’t hold it in anymore about this ridiculous insect-based superhero crap. And if Peter gives her that “Spiders aren’t insects” B.S. again she’s gonna smack him with a rolled-up newspaper. Probably the Bugle, just to make it extra hurty.

Hey, I’m sitting in while Josh takes a week’s vacation. Email me at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net if you have problems with the site. And if you use the comments section, please see comment #1 with information about the spam filter and moderation policy. Enjoy!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Blondie, 8/11/16

Uh-oh, look at that graph. Dithers Construction Company’s profitability is tanking despite robust top-line growth. That indicates significant diseconomies of scale, probably because tightwad Dithers underinvested in staff and equipment for so long. Now every new project increases the company’s reliance on outside contractors, who take advantage of tight supply and exact their revenge for Julius’ endless chiseling by driving their prices relentlessly upward. The staff is right to be alarmed — Dithers’ panicky plan to “grow his way out of trouble” only advances the day when savage job cuts will fall without warning. But yeah, how about those Olympics?

Dick Tracy, 8/11/16

Whew! Team Tracy finally slowed its march through the character archives long enough to give us a week-long standoff between Dick and aspirational nemesis Abner Kadaver at Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, scene of Sherlock Holmes’ (temporary) death at the hands of Professor Moriarty.

Kadaver is a high-end hit man whose body is actually decomposing from some ill-advised makeup experiments during his former career as a horror-show host. His mouth is strangely unaffected, maybe because he runs it nonstop.

Gasoline Alley, 8/11/16

There are two humanoid species in Gasoline Alley. The Round-Eyes include patriarch Walt Wallet, daughter-in-law Nina, granddaughter Clovia, the annoying Frank Nelson character, and various animals, children, and cops. The Coal-Eyes include sons Skeezix and Corky, Clovia’s husband Slim, and the Bump family here, Rover, Hoogy, and Boog.

Now of course a Coal-Eye mother may deliver a Round-Eye baby, that’s only natural and God’s plan and why would you ever ask such a thing. But I always thought they developed in the usual, uterine, fashion. Now we see that a Round-Eyeling actually inhabits its Coal-Eye mother as an insatiable parasite, consuming the body of its host from within until its eyes glare out from her hollowed-out sockets, silently shrieking “How long ’til I am born, to shed this skin-prison and feed free?”

Wow, the comics teach you something new every day, don’t they?

Sally Forth, 8/11/16

Hilary Forth has the exact same schtick as her father Ted. In any confrontation that makes her confront her future — here, confronting her literal future self — she panics and spews any nonsense she can think of to change the subject. And it works! Present Hilary can take comfort from the fact that Future Hilary apparently didn’t think it was a problem worth solving.

Spider-Man, 8/11/16

Maybe its just the thought-bubble and the scowl, but I think Egghead and Ant-Man are the same guy! I mean, ants lay eggs, right? — it totally makes sense. Egghead probably hatches twice the number of evil schemes he really needs and blames Ant-Man for the 50% that fail because of stupidity or bad luck. Then he writes a tiny, tiny note saying “I quit! Signed, Ant-Man” and leaves it where Spider-Man will find it and blab his “scoop” to the Bugle. Investors will then flock to Egghead’s schemes, figuring that with Ant-Man out of the picture they’ll be 100% successful!

I’m beginning to respect the evil genius of this Elihas Starr, even though he talks down to people with those big impressive $100 words like “equivalent” and “commence.”

–Uncle Lumpy

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Pluggers, 8/12/16

“Our media choices are better than your media choices.”

You know, I had assumed that the Bear-Roos and the Houndstooth-Beaks, pluggers all, would just naturally know one another and sit in the same row at the movies — to chat, take too many bathroom breaks, let their phones ring over to voicemail, chew their food with their mouths open, and generally annoy the hell out of me. But in an archive dive of the last three years, I can’t find a single panel that shows Andy and/or Henrietta with Earl and/or Shiela. That’s some pretty admirable consistency, Mr. Chief Plugger! But now my discredited assumption makes me feel like one of those people who says “But you must know him – you’re in the same Army.” You know the people I mean: pluggers.

Spider-Man, 8/12/16

There’s no way she’s not trolling him right now: “Does he show up uninvited at picnics? Can he sit quietly without fidgeting? Does he work in venture capital? Have Mommy Issues?”

Beetle Bailey, 8/12/16

Killer’s appetite for sexual risk only grew until the day they found him in the woods, naked and blue, with a taut chain from his neck to the axle of a stalled Jeep.

Gil Thorp, 8/12/16

“Hmm, there’s a rift between Barry Bader and the rest of the team. Can I get True to take care of it for me? Nope. Can I fob it off on Kaz? Nope. Oh, well — guess I just gotta make the kid figure it out himself. Hope Mimi put that wine in the fridge — this is shaping up to be one tough day!”

There’s a reason his cup says “GIL” and his nameplate says “THORP.” The word “COACH” belongs nowhere near this guy.

Just a reminder that there’s no Comments of the Week this week — BigTed’s contribution gets an extended ride!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Marvin, 8/21/16

Marvin, you made me laugh. Not with your actual punchline, or the long, belabored lead-up to it. No, what made me laugh was Marvin, apropos of nothing and clearly as bored with his parents as we are, thinking “I want a hot dog!” How often do I have that same thought? Several times a day, to be honest! Shoutout to the Marvin comic of Sunday, August 21, 2016, for creating a moment in which I found its title character actually relatable.

Spider-Man, 8/21/16

I’m an on-the-record fan of the Sunday Spider-Man NEXT! box, but this … this is not its best work. Hey, it’s OK, NEXT! box, I of all people know the pressure of coming up with something funny to say week after week. Sometimes you just have to say “Fuck, so, he’s … going to the ant?” and move on with your life.

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Mark Trail, 8/22/16

Is it sad, Mark? Is it really? Sad for the bats, maybe. Not sad for Woods and Wildlife Magazine’s clickthrough rate. Your article, given the snappy title “It Can’t Be Stopped. It Can’t Be Cured. And It’s Killing Every Bat On Earth” by W&W’s Associate Engagement Editor, saw a huge uptick on social sharing sites, with over 40% of readers scrolling far enough into it to register ad impressions in two different sponsorship zones. Bill’s looking for more Facebook-friendly click-harvesting hits from you — in fact, he’s hoping to get at least two of them out of your trip, tentatively titled “How Invasive Fire Ants Made Our Vacation A Tropical Hell” and “Boatsplosion! [VIDEO]”

Spider-Man, 8/22/16

“Oh, my! You’re looking for me? Hank Pym? The former Ant-Man? However did you track me down to the prominently labelled Pym Annex? Was it by following my nondescript car, which was assigned the ANTPYM license plate wholly by coincidence? I do value my privacy, but of course I’ll sign a glossy photo of myself for you. Oh, you don’t have one? Don’t worry, I have a whole drawer full of them, here at the Pym Annex.”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/22/16

Traditionally, Funky Winkerbean deaths have been agonizingly drawn out, which is why I’m really looking forward to Bull abruptly dropping dead from a rage-stroke by Thursday.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/25/16

Here’s a charming true story of married life: my wife and I each insist that the other snores, and once, to prove who was right, we downloaded an app to our phones that turn on and record only when there’s sound, so we didn’t have to listen through eight hours of mostly silence to prove anything. The one time we used it, it recorded exactly zero snoring but an awful lot of farting, which we both found extremely hilarious. Anyway, long story short, I think we have a pretty strong marriage, but when you start seeing even the slightest echoes of your lives in the Halftrack’s hell-relationship, you start to worry a little bit.

Spider-Man, 8/25/16

I honestly have never understood what the deal is with the eyeholes on the front of Spidey’s mask. I mean, I generally think I understand them, in the sense that I assume they’re just patches of lighter material that allow him to see and also make his face look more facelike and not like a creepy, featureless head-front, but then things happen like panel two, where one of them winks, and I really don’t know what the hell I’m looking at. Anyway, this has ruined for me what should be the high point of my week, which is to say Spider-Man just getting straight-up punched in the face.

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Crankshaft, 8/27/16

I’ve been reading Crankshaft on and off for most of my adult life, and so I of course was well familiar with the eternal struggle between the title character and George Keesterman, whose mailbox Crankshaft routinely destroys with his bus, because he’s dangerously incompetent at his job. For most of this time, I assumed that “Keesterman” was an always off-screen presence à la Maris from Frasier, and it was only a few years ago that I realized he was the guy in Crankshaft’s sad little social circle who wasn’t what’s-his-face, the short guy with the glasses and mustache who owned the old movie theater and ran for mayor. Ralph! That’s it, Ralph. Anyway, this was hard for me to reconcile, because I had always imagined Keesterman to while away his days animated by a white-hot rage against Crankshaft, so why was he spending time with him socially? The answer, I guess, is the typical Funkyversian one, which is that all life is suffering and unhappiness, but today he’s finally decided to have his revenge by dragging one of his only two friends into court in order to ruin him financially. Should make those long breakfasts where they sit around and drink coffee and tip poorly extra awkward! Especially for Ralph.

Dennis the Menace, 8/27/16

Haha, look at Alice’s face in panel one. She knows what’s coming. “Don’t you say it. Don’t you God-damned say it.” But no, he said it, while resting a finger on his chin and looking up with big, innocent eyes. This the most calculating menacing I’ve seen in this strip in months.

Spider-Man, 8/27/16

It’s day three of Spider-Man getting punched repeatedly in the face and I’m here to report: watching Spider-Man getting punched repeatedly in the face is in fact p-r-e-t-t-y great.

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Spider-Man, 8/31/16

I love the idea of an Ant-Man who is 100% fed up with any kind of mystifying legends or penumbra around superheroes and villains. “Look, my name’s Scott, Egghead’s name is Elihas, yours is … well, you didn’t tell me, even though I teed up a perfect opportunity for you to do that, and I think that’s kind of rude, but let’s not dwell on it. Anyway, we’re just … we’re just people, OK? People with regular people names. I’m just an ordinary guy, who happens to be able to shrink down to ant size and is wearing a helmet with … God, I don’t even know. I guess those things coming out from my ears are supposed to represent an ant’s mandibles? Except what’s in between them? Like, an olive or something? The whole thing’s absurd. Please, call me Scott, it’s the only thing that tethers me to reality at this point.”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/31/16

I guess, if you’re reading Funky Winkerbean and care enough to squint to see the small text at the bottom of the first panel, you probably already have enough information to properly interpret it: In a couple of weeks, a Rotary Club in Mentor (a suburb in the Cleveland area, which is the home of Tom Batuik and the setting of the Funkyverse strips) is having a “Lisa’s Legacy” run, a real-life version of the in-strip fundraiser/tribute to a character who died of breast cancer, nine years ago. But imagine that you’re trying to parse this without any of that background. It would read like the stuff on some numbers station. “Mentor? Rotary? 9/11? Sir, I believe we’ve intercepted a warning of an impending catastrophic attack.”

Pluggers, 8/31/16

I’m gonna spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that in this panel Elvis is depicted as fully human and not a half-animal beast-man like everyone else in this strip. Is it any wonder they worship his image as their God?

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Gil Thorp, 9/5/16

The calendar most of the world uses today is a direct descendent of the one developed by the ancient Romans, but there have been a lot of modifications along the way. For instance, in the days of the Roman Republic, the calendar year was only 355 days long; the Romans knew this was too short, but weren’t exactly sure how long the year was. Twenty-two extra days were supposed to be added into February when necessary, but there was a catch: the Pontifex Maximus, who held Rome’s highest priesthood, decided if the calendar had become misaligned enough from the seasons to make the extra days necessary, and the Pontifex Maximus was always a member of Rome’s political elite. Since a politician’s term of office was the same as the calendar year, a Pontifex Maximus might be prone to add the extra days if he or his allies were in power, or not add them if that would shorten the terms of his enemies. This caused the calendar to become wildly divergent from the natural rhythm of the seasons. Eventually Julius Caesar, who was Pontifex Maximus himself, managed to become absolute dictator of the state, and, based on Greek and Egyptian science, established the 365-day-plus-one-leap-day-every-four-years calendar that we mostly follow today; the situation had gotten so bad that, in order to realign everything, the year of the reboot was preceded by a year that was 445 days long!

This is a long way of saying that, sure, maybe you think that today’s Labor Day, traditionally marking the end of the summer, and that thus we should be moving into Milford’s school year and football season. But nope, that baseball-season plot that we all were pretty sure dragged out over the summer? That was just a really long spring, according to our politco-religious elite (i.e., the creators and distributors of Gil Thorp). Now summer’s here! A summer of beach-centric hijinks! Previous summers gave us Kaz-punching wackiness and Marty Moon getting grifted and senile pro wrestling hijinx, so I’m very much looking forward to whatever we get in the summer of 2016, which, just to make clear, is not over at all, but actually just getting started.

Spider-Man, 9/5/16

Good to see that Ant-Man Scott is still determined to reject the tired superhero tradition of “secret identities”, and plans to blow Spider-Man’s cover, right here on the subway! Anyway, today we learn that Scott is either such a thorough reader of TMZ that he can recognize the nobody husbands of C-level stage and film actresses, or he’s one of the eighteen followers of the sad, abandoned Instagram JJ Jameson made Peter set up during a manic episode that ensued when he learned what Instagram was.

Family Circus, 9/5/16

“Think about it, Mommy, it makes sense. For one thing, Daddy has friends.”

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Spider-Man, 9/10/16

Spider-Man barely seems to care about the supervillains he battles with half the time, and he certainly isn’t emotionally invested in his job as a freelance photographer. So what’s his real motivation, then? Maybe it’s to find a true friend, someone who he can open up to, and take some of the pressure of emotional labor off of his wife, who barely tolerates him most of the time. For a tantalizing moment, it seemed like Scott could be that friend: after all, his insistence on stripping away the artifice of the superhero lifestyle seemed to lead to today’s first panel, in which he asks our hero about something real in his life. But, haha, nope, turns out that was just to distract Spidey so that he could get to the top of the building faster. Looks like yet another would-be pal is going to be paralyzed by spider-venom and left a hollowed-out husk after the delicious nutrients in his interior have been sucked out!

Six Chix, 9/10/16

I understand the motivation behind this, lady, but I’m not sure how comfortable you’re going to be in thirty years showing your own children lovingly hand-inked drawings of their father’s dick.

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Spider-Man, 9/12/16

Ugh, you guys, I know this isn’t a fun thing to hear me whine about first thing in the week, but Spidey’s use of “tariff” bothers me so much here. A tariff is a tax on imports or exports, and I’m pretty sure J. Jonah Jameson doesn’t pay every month to import his sweet penthouse in from whatever low-labor-cost country penthouses are made in now, devastating Ohio’s traditional penthouse-manufacturing industry. I guess he pays either rent or a mortgage and Spidey didn’t know Jonah’s real-estate situation so decided to come up with … another word that means paying for things?

I’m not bothered at all by JJJ’s choice to sleep with a shotgun leaning up against the side of his bed, as this seems like a particularly hilarious and ineffective method of self-defense. I certainly hope that he wakes up in surprise and just starts firing every which way at an extremely tiny target that he can’t possibly hit, sending shotgun shell after shotgun shell into what appear to be the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse.

Slylock Fox, 9/12/16

I’m not saying it’s OK to just go around stomping on other creature’s carefully tended flower beds — far from it! But I do think this is a good opportunity for all the herbivorous inhabitants of post-animalpocalypse Earth to acknowledge that they have it pretty good compared to their ancestors. Imagine a world where the biggest complaint a rabbit would have about a wolf is that the wolf crushed her flowers (instead of, say, eating her) and then her reaction is to call in a fox who proceeds to use ratiocination to solve the crime (instead of, say, eating her).

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/16/16

Wait whoops it looks like I personally haven’t talked about Rex Morgan, M.D., on this site since July? Maybe it’s because it’s honestly been kind of dull; artist Terry Beatty, having taken over the writing duties, seems to be quickly wrapping up some storylines (as covered by Uncle Lumpy) while the new ones haven’t quite gotten into gear and/or been ludicrous enough for me to feature here. That changes today though, as Rex is gravely concerned by some extremely mild flirting between Nurse Carter and Jordan The Avery Family’s Manservant, for obvious reasons. (The reasons are that Rex finds genuine human emotional connection repugnant and doesn’t like it when other people “ram it down his throat.”)

Spider-Man, 9/16/16

Be careful, Jonah! Sure, it may seem like helping Ant-Man is your shortcut to seizing back control of your beloved Daily Bugle, but just think: if you do this, you’ll help set a precedent that it’s somehow “wrong” for the publisher of a major daily newspaper to kidnap or otherwise harm a superhero! This would be a grievous blow against our nation’s sacred First Amendment, as well as several of your active vendettas.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/16/16

We make fun of the gloom of the Funkyverse around here, but I think it’s worth pointing out that the actual conflicts in the strip tend to be not amongst the actual main cast, but against unstoppable, impersonal forces like “cancer” or “the war,” or strawman outsiders or designated villainous recurring characters like Becky’s mom; our heroes generally have a sort of we’re-all-in-it-together solidarity. But now, Comic Book John, a long-standing “good” character, has pieced together the plot of Starbuck Jones from publicity stills and posted it to the internet, which interferes with the publicity plans of the creators of the movie, some of whom are also long-standing “good” characters. I am very excited for the new, Hobbsean phase of Funky Winkerbean, the war of all against all, in which the misery will be flying fast and furious from all sides, dished out and suffered in equal measure.

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Beetle Bailey, 9/25/16

“Beetle and/or Sarge and/or sometimes one of the other characters dangle helplessly from a tree branch protruding from a cliff” is a common trope in Beetle Bailey, but to my knowledge we’ve never seen what happens before those hilarious hijinks … until now! Apparently they trip over a rock. Or “the rock.” There’s just the one, so well known that it can be used as a landmark. You’d think they’d be better about not tripping over it, to be honest.

Mark Trail, 9/25/16

Look, Woods and Wildlife Magazine has to boost circulation, and they’re going to do it the only way they know how: by upping their Swimsuit Issue to three times a year. If you know a better way to get people to renew than to have Mark and Cherry pose sexily while keeping you up to date on important nature facts about, uh, sand or whatever, let’s hear it.

Spider-Man, 9/25/16

Peter’s married now and long out of the dating game, but it’s great to see he hasn’t forgotten classics like the old “Ooops, I ‘forgot’ my wallet” maneuver!

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Spider-Man, 9/27/16

Using Spider-Man as a lens through which to satirize the contemporary media landscape is one of my running jokes that I am reasonably sure is primarily for my own enjoyment, though, you know, if I’m wrong, please contact me about doing a J. Jonah Jameson-centered Marvel Cinematic Universe Netflix series called Bugle! Anyway, one strand of said show would involve Spider-Man’s awkward position in being both a superhero and someone who profits from the public’s hunger for superhero-themed content. And just as news outlets’ coverage decisions are more and more influenced by web traffic and Facebook sharing behavior, what’s to say Spider-Man won’t start engaging in clickbait superheroics? If he determines that, say, photos of Spidey battling Doc Ock get more pageviews than photos of him sparring with the Shocker, will he allows the latter to commit crimes unmolested? Will his dignity allow him to follow through on the implications of the viral success of Buzzfeed’s “Top 10 Spider-Fail GIFs We Can’t Stop Laughing At”? The thing that, in the long run, will save him from falling into this trap is probably his total incompetence as a journalist; he can’t even figure out that hiding a tiny point-and-shoot camera in a tree forty feet away from the house where he’s about to confront a not terribly photogenic opponent is a bad idea, so presumably he’s completely incapable of getting useful data out of the Daily Bugle’s Chartbeat analytics dashboard.

Blondie, 9/27/16

Elmo is, in his quiet way, the most unsettling character in Blondie: an elementary-school-age child who seems to have few friends and no family and just hangs out a lot at the home of an adult non-relative. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but for me today’s revelation that Elmo also apparently spends time with Dagwood’s next door neighbor and best friend definitely makes things substantially weirder.

Dick Tracy, 9/27/16

Let’s give a big shoutout to the Colvard Institute, D.C.’s #1 think-tank for providing anti-extraterrestrial talking points to elected officials on both sides of the aisle! I certainly hope that, after they had their summer intern multiply two times three and get six and then multiply six by three thirteen times, they decided that was the equivalent at least ten billable hours.

Beetle Bailey, 9/27/16

I gotta say, if you had asked me what Beetle Bailey character was running an underground pharmaceutical ring, I would’ve guess Cosmo, or maybe Killer. Plato wouldn’t have even been on my list of suspects!

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Mary Worth, 9/29/16

I’m not shy about my longtime affection for Joe Giella’s decade-plus at Mary Worth, I’ve been fans of June Brigman and Roy Richardson so far as well. Like Giella, they too come from the superhero world; as a result, despite the big shift in style they’ve brought to the strip, they carry on the tradition of the art feeling a little too jazzy for the banality of life in Charterstone. Anyway, one of my favorite little details of the Giella era was the weird food blobs. The Brigman/Richardson era may have opened with some lovingly detailed sandwiches, but they’re clearly aware of strip traditions, so shoutout to the meal of weird brownish chunks of Chinese food Iris and Tommy are sharing off of a single plate, washed down with chocolate milk.

Spider-Man, 9/29/16

“At last! I, Egghead, have captured Ant-Man — and Spider-Man to boot! And now all I have to do is scoop them up and — what’s this? Blast! I knew this shag carpeting was a terrible mistake! ‘It’ll be so comfy on your bare feet,’ they said! My plans are ruined!”

Blondie, 9/29/16

“Plus, you’re definitely going to be killing people — only this time without any lame-o ‘Geneva Conventions’ to cramp your style!”

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Mary Worth, 10/6/16

Ever since Mary implied to Iris that maybe her adult son spiraled down into unemployment and pill addiction because she was going to school and not mothering him 24/7, Iris has been very involved in Tommy’s life! Some might say … too involved, like that time she sat through a whole therapy session with him. Anyway, Iris, you should not be going to Narcotics Anonymous with him, because that pretty much breaks all the rules. Why not check out Nar-Anon instead, if you’re so keen on going to a meeting? That organization is specifically for the families and friends of those dealing with drug addiction. That name again is Nar-Anon. Not Narconon. Under no circumstances should you go to Narconon. No, wait, actually, it would be pretty hilarious if you went to Narconon. “Tommy, I know you’ve gotten a lot out of the Bible, so here are some more books with even more helpful tips!” [Hands him Dianetics, Battlefield Earth, and all ten volumes of the Misson Earth dekology]

Dick Tracy, 10/6/16

Probably “bare the marks of an addict” is just a garden-variety typo, but I’m hoping it’s a look into Dick’s attitude towards the public he ostensibly serves: whenever he encounters someone he suspects might be polluting his mind and body with illicit substances, he uses his will to power to force them to bare the marks that reveal their crimes against society and themselves, so he can arrest them with maximum contempt.

Spider-Man, 10/6/16

Like many 42-year-olds, my eyesight has been in decline in a couple different ways for at least three years, and last month I finally bit the bullet and got bifocals, with lenses for both reading and computer use, and it literally felt like I had gone to Lourdes and gotten faith-healed. What I’m saying is, as a guy who can suddenly read laundry care labels with ease and sits a normal distance away from his monitor again, I understand Egghead’s urge to talk about his “magnifying goggles” as if he’s dealing with some piece of high-tech supervillainry equipment, but, Egghead, my man: those are clearly just glasses.

Mark Trail, 10/6/16

You know, if Mark freakin’ Trail interrupts you and redirects the conversation when in you’re the middle of spouting a bunch of nature facts, maybe you should think long and hard about how to work those nature facts into conversations more organically.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/7/16

Haha, wait, so Frankie, Darrin’s terrible bio-dad who raped Lisa when they were teens and returned to Westview to peddle some reality show only to be driven away by everyone’s righteous indignation, now works for DMZ, a gossip website so non-notorious that its employees have to keep reminding each other what it is? And now he’s going to ruin Cindy and Mason’s relationship by posting out-of-context photos of Mason and his comely young co-star? Sure, why not! There are only a limited number of truly bad people in the Funkyverse, so they have to work hard at doing all the bad things needed to keep everyone unhappy.

Spider-Man, 10/7/16

“Here he is. Tied up and immobile, right in front of you. I didn’t move him there in the middle of that sentence or anything. I wasn’t even standing in front of him. It’s … pretty weird you didn’t notice him before I pointed him out to you?”

Blondie, 10/7/16

The only thing Dagwood likes more than micromanaging his daughter’s sexuality is getting a sweet deal on an awesome high-end car.

Dennis the Menace, 10/7/16

Dennis recognizes that school’s real purpose is not to educate citizens, but to serve as a model of the regulated social order in which they’ll be embedded their whole lives. He’s truly menacing … to the established power structure!

Lockhorns, 10/7/16

Suddenly aware of capitalism’s enervating effects on wage slaves like her husband, Loretta will now take her place as the sarcastic, heavy-lidded Marianne of the new revolution.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/7/16

♬ It’s a montage ♬ a document-signing montage ♬ you gotta love a montage ♬ this process would’ve taken six to eight weeks worth of comics if we didn’t do a montage ♬

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Spider-Man, 10/13/16

Superhero comic trufans (of which I am not one, but I hear things) know that each iteration of a long-running beloved character, in different continuities across various media platforms, has slight variations when it comes to the nature of their powers. What, then, can we say about Newspaper Spider-Man when it comes to his famous spider-sense? We know it can’t warn him about some pretty important things he might like to know about, like that he’s about to be hit in the back of the head with a club or a brick. So what is it good for? Well, keep in mind that Newspaper Spider-Man is both a risible dolt and keenly sensitive to anything he might perceive as humiliation (earning less than his wife, a famous actress, for instance). And so, today, it’s finally coming out that Spidey and Ant-Man have been captured because Peter knew Egghead was out to catch Scott, and then went and tracked him down anyway. He knows that everyone’s gonna start yelling at him soon, and he deserves it, and his spider-sense is going nuts.

Gil Thorp, 10/13/16

Traditionally, soap opera strips end on a cliff-hanger every day to keep readers hooked. Unfortunately, it’s harder and harder to work this magic on young people, what with their Snapchats and so forth, so now Gil Thorp is experimenting by ending strips dramatically in mid-sentence.

Pluggers, 10/13/16

Pluggers have so many emotions and nobody they feel safe expressing them to :(

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Crock, 10/16/16

Buns of Steel — you remember: Alaska fitness entrepreneur Greg Smithey, VCR tape, 1987? Thirty years ago? Inherently funny. I mean, “buns,” heh, that’s comedy gold amirite. So, are we done here? Draw it up and publish — just be sure to put a big butt in there somewhere.

Judge Parker, 10/16/16

THINK, NEDDY, THINK!

THAT NEWS LADY WILL TRY TO PIN THIS ALL ON YOU.

CHEATING THE OLDS. LOCKING THEM IN STEEL BOXES. BRIBING THE BUILDING INSPECTOR.

SO UNFAIR.

WAIT, HERE’S HANK.

♫ “Hi, Hank!” ♪

THIS WAS ALL HANK’S IDEA. WASN’T IT? YES IT WAS. HE USED ME. THE BRUTE.

SO UNFAIR.

♫ “Thanks, Hank — ‘Bye!” ♪

SAY, I WONDER IF MARK STILL WANTS TO GET MARRIED? HONG KONG SOUNDS PRETTY SWEET RIGHT NOW.

Spider-Man, 10/16/16

Next to their endless faux-clever dialogue while they “battle,” the thing that annoys me most about superheros is the ham-handed logic used to get them out of jams. The conceit here is that the reformulated shrink-gas that took away Ant-Man’s “powers of a man” affected only Spider-Man’s man-strength, leaving his spider-strength untouched so the joke’s on you Egghead a.k.a. Elihas Starr, nemesis of the first Ant-Man Hank Pym and the second Ant-Man Scott Lang. But hey waitaminute – if that long-ago bite gave Peter a spider’s proportionate strength, shouldn’t shrinking leave him with the actual strength of — a spider? So splot, right?

Algebra is hard. I think Egghead’s chosen the right approach here.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Spider-Man, 10/25/16

Let’s be real, guys: the “relative strength of a spider” aspect of Spider-Man’s origin story has always been kinda dopey, right? I mean, there’s a whole bunch of inverse-square-law problems with this, which equally apply to Ant-Man, who was launched by Marvel Comics in 1962, just like Spider-Man. I guess it was a banner year for bug-men in the comics? Bug-men with bug-strength? Anyhoo, it’s nice to imagine that these costumed morons themselves have only the vaguest understanding of what their abilities really entail and how they work, so it’s very exciting to me to see Spider-Man declare that he can defeat a spider with his spider-strength, only for him to be immediately pinned by its monstrous spider-jaws (the relative jaws of a spider) and then killed by the actual spider’s deadly spider-venom (the relative venom of a spider, which you think would come in handy for a superhero, but no, just keep working that “strength” angle, guys).

Six Chix, 10/25/16

One of the more unsettling visual tropes that has been fully absorbed into the collective comics unconsciousness is “trees and fire hydrants are the equivalent of bathrooms to talking comic-strip dogs!” I feel like people love to play with the implications of this joke but lose touch with its origins which lie in the fact that dogs like to pee on said objects. This, I think, is the case here: probably the tire swing is just supposed to represent “what would a really tricked out tree look like,” but now I can’t stop thinking about how dogs maybe like to pee on tires? Or, like, through the hole in the middle of tires? Because they like the challenge, or something?

Dennis the Menace, 10/25/16

A year after the Great Agricultural Collapse, Alice and Henry are still gamely pushing forward, sculpting their daily ration of Nutrient Slurry into a cake-shaped pile in an attempt to remember what it used to be like in the Time of Plenty. Dennis is having none of it. Dennis’s refusal to keep a stiff upper lip in the endless dystopia is a genuine menace to humanity’s ability to cope.

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The Phantom, 11/1/16

Hey, so remember how Kit, the Phantom’s son, journeyed to a Tibetan monastery to receive his Phantom training, which the Phantoms go back to Tibet to get every few generations? Remember how Kit had to study a bunch of old-timey bullshit history facts so that he could hoodwink the Tibetan monks into believing that he was the reincarnated soul of the man they had taught centuries ago? Well, turns out that last part was a bunch of hooey. Turns out the monks know what’s up and are happy to play along so long as the Ghost-Who-Pays-The-Bills deposits hard currency in their tax-sheltered savings account. What are we going to learn next? That the word in the Bandar tongue we’ve been translating as “ghost” all this time really just means “white dude with a pistol who wears spandex for some reason”?

Spider-Man, 11/1/16

I admit to laughing aloud at “we’ve no defense against Starr’s bug-bomb!”, because he’s saying it like the bug-bomb is a high-powered super-weapon developed by an evil genius, and not, say, an ordinary pest control product you can buy at any store over the counter. Anyway, we appear to have gotten to the point in the story where things have gotten quite silly enough, so thank God the original Ant-Man brought his canister of Undoing The Central Problem Of This Plot Potion.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/1/16

Coach Bushka, forced into retirement by incipient dementia caused by the very nature of the game he loves, about to leave for the last time the job that feels like home for him and go off into the gathering twilight of his life, pauses as he remembers his predecessor’s mortal remains, which have been sitting in a darkened corner for years and have been so thoroughly neglected that they’re covered with dust and spiderwebs. I don’t want to say “peak Funkyverse” but I feel like we’re at least on the slopes.

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Spider-Man, 11/4/16

Hey, remember J. Jonah Jameson, who was forced out of his job beloved job at the Bugle, by Egghead? To the best of my knowledge he’s been completely out of the loop on Spidey and Ant-Man’s quest, and has presumably come over to Egghead’s house on his own initiative to cut the Gordian Knot of this extremely silly storyline and just bludgeon Egghead senseless with a lamp.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/4/16

So it turns out that all Coach Stropp ever wanted was to have his ashes carried over the goal line one last time before Bull left, since his team was stopped on the goal line in their attempt to win a championship. And it didn’t work! Bull tripped and spilled his powered remains all over the field, a few yards out! I absolutely love this, because the only time I respect Funky Winkerbean is when it really, really owns its total oppressive gloom. I honestly hope we get a solid week of an increasingly agitated Bull trying to get the cremains back in the jar, weeping as he watches flakes of Coach Stropp’s bones fall between his fingers over and over again.

Dick Tracy, 11/4/16

So Selfy Narcisse’s characterization has veered wildly over the course of this plot, from “slick, unctuous fixer for an nativist politician” to “comically preening narcissist” to “sinister poisoner” to “dude who likes to do sweet jumps over drawbridges.” But it’s his latest incarnation — “guy who practically grew up at the zoo, and who now is presumably going to lay low at the zoo, disguised as an orangutang or monitor lizard or something even more hilarious” — that has really won me over. Let’s follow Selfy’s increasingly insane adventures for months!

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Mark Trail, 11/8/16

Hey, remember how Mark got a couple of boats blown up while he was on the job, and then his boss wouldn’t let him rent boats anymore, so he rented a helicopter instead? Well, I’m not sure if I’m exactly following the action here, but it looks like a fireball from the the volcanic, ant-infested island where Mark and Abbey are trapped just landed directly onto Cal’s helicopter. Will Woods and Wildlife’s insurance policy be required to cover this accident? That all might depend on whether Cal’s able to testify in the court case, since I can’t really tell whether he died a horrible but swift death, or will have to live for years haunted by the sight of his beloved helicopter reduced to a mass of twisted, flaming metal before his very eyes.

Spider-Man, 11/8/16

Haha, it’s true, these guys are simpletons, and they can’t prove anything, unless Hank Pym has a voice-activated tape recorder in the same pocket as his enlarging spray! You know how superheroes are always leaving villains tied up for cops to find, but then end up fighting those same villains again a few months later? Well, the reasons for that are starting to become clear.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/8/16

Heh heh, these two old flames are rekindling their love in their golden years. Frankie’s sinister plan is going exactly … as … he … intended.

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/10/16

Well, it looks like someone at Hagar the Horrible likes to stoke my fascination with where the Hagarverse falls on the timeline of the Christianization of Scandinavia. Fun fact: the ritual slaughter of horses and eating of horsemeat was deeply ingrained into Germanic pagan ritual, so much so that the Vatican banned the practice in the 8th century as a means to promote Christianity; this is the origin of the modern-day Western taboo on eating horse. Anyway, Helga and the waiter look appalled by Hagar’s discovery, but Hagar himself is more quizzical than anything else. Maybe he’s cautiously feeling out the possibility that this restaurant is a secret hideout for crypto-pagans — and he’s interested in joining them in returning to the Old Ways, where you celebrated blót to gain fertility and good health, and then got to eat some tasty horse.

Shoe, 11/10/16

I love the weird, fossilized cultural nuggets and attitudes you can find embedded in the structural material used to build comic strip punchlines. How ancient is the use of “Wayne Newton” as a signifier for “very bad music,” do you think? Honestly, I would’ve gone with “Justin Bieber,” which is still a solid five years out of date but might tickle the irritation that the old people who read comic strips harbor for anything that’s happened in pop culture since they turned 45.

Meanwhile, I want a lot more information about these two condemned criminals, the Falcon and Guzzwanker. “Guzzwanker and the Falcon” has a better ring to it in my opinion, but maybe they aren’t a criminal duo but just happen to be scheduled for execution on the same day. Guzzwanker is a mild-mannered accountant who, if he hadn’t slipped up and left fingerprints on the murder weapon, nobody would’ve suspected of killing his parents to speed his inheritance. The Falcon, meanwhile, is a notorious international terrorist, and also an actual falcon.

Spider-Man, 11/10/16

“Maybe we’ll never get you convicted for murder, Starr … [one panel of dialogue that distracts you from how this sentence started] … and all four of us heard you confess to murder, so we will definitely get you convicted for it!” God, I hope that camera is still recording. The whole world needs concrete evidence of what dipshits these guys are! And, uh, evidence that Egghead is a murderer, I guess.

Mark Trail, 11/10/16

Ahhh yes, the helicopter explosion will be continuing indefinitely, just as I requested. That’s the stuff we need in these troubled times. That’s the stuff.

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Curtis, 11/13/16

I’m going to start out by saying something nice about a comic, for once! Say what you will about Curtis, but, unlike a lot of the strips I talk about on this blog, it never phones it in. The gag here is one we’ve seen a lot in the strip, but I really enjoy watching the little details of Curtis assembling his three-sandwich stack over the course of this conversation, up to and including him licking mayo off his knife, like you do (or at least like I do). The realism is a nice setup for him to dash off in the final panel, leaving a cartoonish cloud of sandwich debris in his wake.

Dennis the Menace, 11/13/16

It’s weird that everyone’s acting like this is Joey’s brand new baby sister despite the fact that she’s clearly at least 18 months old, right? Of course, her eyes are a terrifying, milky, pupil-less blue, so she’s also clearly a space alien or a demon from hell. Presumably she hatched from a leathery egg twenty minutes ago and has used her awful mental powers to convince the children that she’s always been here and that her nightmarish agenda for our planet is “wonderful” and “so cool.”

Spider-Man, 11/13/16

So when earlier this week we learned that Spidey had webbed a camera to the ceiling of Egghead’s den, I assumed that the writers were working with a vague memory that he had set a camera up at some point earlier in the storyline but had forgotten that in fact that camera was in a tree out in the front yard. But, nope! Turns out that in fact Spidey just ran outside and got said camera moments after JJJ bonked Egghead unconscious. This is hilarious in and of itself, but it’s even more hilarious that experienced newspaperman Jameson is just now putting together how suspicious that all is. I’m looking forward to how this plays out, what with the NEXT narration box giving Spider-Man the exact opposite of standard good advice.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/13/16

This is definitely one of Slylock’s most giggle-worthy mysteries to date, from the crime itself — do we want to live in a world where it’s illegal to mess with dandyish beavers by forcing them to watch televised chess? — to the puzzle’s solution. Look, Count Weirdly is weird! It’s right there in the name! Maybe he likes to eat his soup with a fork. Maybe that’s why it’s taken him 15 minutes to eat a single bowl of broth!

Shoe, 11/13/16

Wow, I’m not sure what strip I expected to see discussing the corrosive effects of corporate capitalism on the human soul today, but it sure wasn’t Shoe!

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Spider-Man, 11/16/16

You know that normally I’d be very in favor of a punchline panel in Newspaper Spider-Man where our heroes mope wordlessly. But as a transit rider and advocate, I must protest against a train ride being used as visual equivalent of a sad trombone. Especially in the New York City region! Why, Peter and Scott will be back home in Queens while Jonah and Hank are still stuck on the Long Island Expressway, Jonah shouting furiously at his driver and other cars while Hank scrunches down in his seat and pretends not to notice.

It’s also obviously way too soon for the first Daily Bugle under J. Jonah Jameson’s new regime to have come out, so I assume the banner headline in the paper Scott is reading is over a story about how New York is now for the first time in years entirely free of Ant-Men. Gonna be an awkward correction at the bottom of page C-12 tomorrow!

Crock, 11/16/16

It does take some warming up to, but Wadsworth is laying out his people’s philosophy in a nutshell. Vultures don’t believe in fairies or make believe. They believe in each other, and their own ability to make this world a better place for themselves and their families. They believe they’re capable of anything, even getting money when their baby teeth fall out despite the fact that they don’t have any teeth.

Pluggers, 11/16/16

One of the longstanding mysteries of Pluggers can be summed up pretty simply: what is a plugger, exactly? Today’s strip I think encapsulates it nicely: a plugger is someone young enough that they still know people who move and old enough that they know a lot of people who are dying, and also someone who hasn’t figured out that you can put addresses into your computer now.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/17/16

Oh, whoops, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the Great Frozen Money Dementia Caper, have I? Well, here’s the short version: Milton met up with a dude who dumped him at the bus station, not before switching jackets, leaving Milton with the dude’s cell phone and the dude with Milton’s cash. This was exactly as boring as it sounds, until today when we abruptly smash cut to Scooter living a life of comically PG-13 debauchery at Morgantown’s finest “Gentlemen’s Club” (legally, they can’t call it a strip club because nobody takes their clothes off).

Dick Tracy, 11/17/16

Both of America’s citizens with Lunarian DNA have been lying low in Diet Smith’s heavily fortified compound ever since the unpleasantness, but apparently Mysta still gets to drive out into the world occasionally to pick up “the magazines.” I have to say that it makes me respect Diet a lot less as a genius inventor, and respect the Lunarians a lot less as a futuristic menace, to learn that none of them have ever heard of the Internet, a network that can, among other things, allow you to read the magazines on your computer.

Spider-Man, 11/17/16

Yesterday’s Spider-Man would’ve been a great final slapstick moment for this plot, which really makes it too bad that it was accidentally published on Wednesday. Now they’ve got four days of narrative dead space to fill! I predict that by Sunday Peter and Scott will be making out, just to put an end to the awkward pauses.

Beetle Bailey, 11/17/16

Not sure what exactly can get the hired hands toiling at flaccid long-running legacy comic strips to feel shame, but I sincerely hope that getting beat to a pop culture joke by the Family Circus by two and a half months is on this list.

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Shoe, 11/19/16

Wait, if Punxsutawney Phil really had Secret Groundhog Powers letting him know about the coming rise in global temperatures, wouldn’t he have bought some nice little place in Canada, miles away from the ocean? No, I think this is evidence that the whole Groundhog Day business is corrupt, and Phil is retiring with his ill-gotten gains from Big Winter.

Spider-Man, 11/19/16

I see two ways this storyline can go. MJ might use her break from acting and her vast wealth earned from Broadway stardom to take her and Peter on a lovely two-week vacation somewhere nice, where he spends his time sulking about the fact that his wife makes more than him until he’s forced by circumstances to fight crime, at which point he starts sulking about that. Or she could just wax rhapsodic about the repairs! She already looks pretty dreamy about it in the final panel, to be honest. “The roof! Oh, Peter, they’re going to fix the roof!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/19/16

Welp, this Rex Morgan plot wrapped very quickly and without much conflict or action, and thank goodness! Who needs that kind of overstimulation from the funny pages? Certainly not me! Anyway, I appreciate our victorious cop putting a dramatic pause before saying downtown in panel three. Really lets us know that this whole things is wrapping up, right? If you want to imagine that the action freeze-frames and then Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” starts blaring out, I think that would add to the experience.

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Spider-Man, 11/21/16

I am really enjoying JJJ’s world-weary expression in panel three here. It takes a lot of emotional energy pretending that it isn’t super obvious that Peter Parker and Spider-Man are the same person, you know? Like, Jonah may be a blowhard, but he’s not a moron. He just likes getting those Spider-Man pictures. The Spider-Man pictures sell papers, and he loves selling papers. The whole “SPIDER-MAN: THREAT OR MENACE?” pose was probably sincere, once, but now it’s a key part of his shtick, and he can’t give it up. It’s exhausting performing Comically Gruff Newsman all the time, guys. Exhausting. Just let him have a minute here.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/21/16

Hey guys, remember how our gang tracked down Starbuck Jones serial star Cliff Anger, and found out that, true to his name, he used to star in cliffhangers and also was angry all the time? Well, if you wanted some background on his perpetually steamed emotional state, good news: we’re about to get some fun anecdotes about how he’s super mad because his prison term derailed his movie career, or maybe about how he went to prison because of some act of violence driven by his uncontrollable temper. Either way, his new girlfriend seems drawn to his irrepressible bad boy nature.

Slylock Fox, 11/21/16

It’s really gotta disappoint Slylock to waste his time on human-on-human crime like this. This once-great species should be retraining and adapting to the new sentient beast-focused economy, not nonproductively stealing each other’s meager savings. Personally, I blame their culture: look at the media they consume, all full of violent power fantasies. Sad!

Marvin and Mother Goose and Grimm, 11/21/16

This Thanksgiving, let’s all give thanks for our wives. Wives, am I right? They’re, uh, bad? This seems … off message, but I guess it’s what we’re going with.

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Mary Worth, 11/22/16

My goodness, the corpse of Iris and Wilbur’s relationship is barely cold and look who just waltzed into her life? It’s a hunky fellow student who can match Wilbur’s chest hair but also sports luxurious locks and a roguish, manly stubble. Plus he knows that chivalry isn’t dead! You can tell because he refrained from saying “You dropped your extremely dopey hat!”

The Mary Worth house art style may have changed, but it’s still kind of impossible to tell how old anyone is, so I’m not sure if this handsome he-hunk is supposed to be an older student, like Iris, or if she’s just decided that if it’s OK for Wilbur to date her, it’s more than OK for her to date a twenty-year-old. Anyway, I like the smiles of approval the hip (?) young (????) couple of college students are bestowing upon them from the background.

Dick Tracy, 11/22/16

So, yeah, I don’t know how much detail I covered it in here, but the thing with Mysta Chimera is that she’s not actually the original dead Moon Maid who was Dick’s daughter-in-law, but is rather some other lady who was genetically modified to think that she’s Moon Maid by someone who I forgot for purposes I no longer remember. Anyway! Turns out she’s the weird old gangster dude’s daughter? Mostly I wanted to show you this strip because I find it funny how much more Mindy Ermine looks like a terrifying space alien than Mysta Chimera does.

Spider-Man, 11/22/16

Definitely one of my favorite parts of Newspaper Spider-Man is Peter’s reactions of entirely unmoored horror whenever his wife suggests perfectly nice things. “Drive to California? But … we’re so close to Premier Silver status on United! That means complimentary Economy Plus seating as long as seats are available at check-in! This is a disaster for us!”

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Spider-Man, 12/2/16

Ah ha, our new Newspaper Spider-Man plot is under way, and its antagonist is … Ronan, The Accuser! This is as good an opportunity as any for me to remind you that, despite the fact that I have made my name as a “comics guy” and have a love of Mary Worth and Mark Trail veering into dangerously unironic territory, I find most superhero comics extremely dopey, not least because they feature villains named things like “Ronan, The Accuser,” (and sorry, purists, I have decided that comma is a canonical part of his name and will be using it in every reference from now on). As moronic as Ronan, The Accuser seems and as dumb as his conflict with Spider-Man will inevitably be, at least you have to respect the franchise-driven media marketing strategy that brought him to newspapers everywhere. After all, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is coming out in a mere, uh, six months, and so we need to start building buzz now for when Ronan, The Accuser squares off against Peter Quill and our other heroes, just like he did in the first film, where they defeated him and he … uh … died? So he won’t be in the sequel? Man, Newspaper Spider-Man never misses an opportunity to not be useful in any way.

Marvin, 12/2/16

Haha, check out how grotesquely smug Jeff looks in panel three, because the only part of his life he has in order is strong-arming his wife into getting a job! This is some extremely relatable content right here. Marvin: come for the poop jokes, stay for the economic anxiety expressed through marital discomfort!

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Spider-Man, 12/11/16

There’s a lot to love in today’s Spider-Man — MJ’s ridiculously impractical outfit, Peter getting his ass kicked, Peter making a superhuman effort to get off a dumb wisecrack before losing consciousness as a result of said ass-kicking — but it’s the next-to-last panel that will be long remembered as the comics panel of the year, maybe the decade. The sight of, among other things, an ice-cream sandwich, a slice of cake, a bottle of ketchup, a pot and a cup of coffee, a raw steak, and a delicious hoagie floating pell-mell in the general direction of Ronan, The Accuser is absolutely amazing, and I don’t even regret the fact that we don’t actually get to see how he processes all those foodstuffs into energy. Like, do they get absorbed through his skin, or does he just unhinge his jaw and they all fly down his gullet, or what? Surely Ronan, The Accuser doesn’t engage in anything so pedestrian as “chewing.”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 12/11/16

Shoutout to Slick Smitty for treating Max with utter and complete contempt in this little adventure. Having been presumably caught red-handed with evidence of his low-grade silver theft, Smitty has refused to even pretend that Max has the ability to impose some kind of legal consequences on him, and, rather than flee one step ahead of the actual law, has brought his latest hookup with him to enjoy the spectacle of Max running all over town on his tiny little legs and then futilely digging a hole in what I assume is a hilariously escalating state of agitation. Slylock does not look happy to have received this call.

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Slylock Fox, 12/17/16

Today’s Slylock Fox offers an important look at how the world evolved from the sudden, awful moment of the animapocalypse to the mostly organized society we know from the main narrative of Slylock and his mysteries. In the Six Differences panels, we see the early days of animal sapience, where the abruptly intelligent beasts are engaged in a Hobbesian war of all against all: the cat eagerly reaches for the fish, who squirms in terror, unable to escape, while a dog watches on smiling, devouring the stabbed corpse of a bird who was presumably as self-aware as any of these beings about an hour ago. Years (decades?) later in Las Vegas, the lights are still on, and Slylock is on the case, apparently enforcing securities law, making sure these wealthy, tails-and-top-hats beasts aren’t defrauded by one of the few remaining humans. It’s amazing how quickly the systems that protect first life, then property replicate themselves!

Spider-Man, 12/17/16

One of the things about laughing at Newspaper Spider-Man is that the character was always, across all iterations, supposed to be kind of funny, in a hapless teen way, even though the strip depicts him as a hapless twentysomething, which is … less attractive. So anyway, it’s pretty clear that Peter reaching out for help to other, better superheroes but only getting their voice mail is supposed to be funny. And yet I believe that Ronan, The Accuser’s magical conveyor belt of foodstuffs was intended to be entirely straight-faced! Sometimes parsing the levels of irony embedded in newspaper comic strips so I can tell whether I’m laughing with them or at them is exhausting, guys, but this … this is the life I chose.

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Spider-Man, 12/23/16

Huh, when Peter dashed heroically into that diner to get his ass kicked by Ronan, The Accuser, he sure didn’t seem to care whether anyone knew about his secret identity! I guess he wants to be sure to be dressed in his rad superhero outfit if he meets anyone cool, like an astronaut.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/23/16

“And her life turned out great, right? I don’t know a ton about her but I’m assuming she’s fine.”

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Spider-Man, 1/16/17

Say, what’s been going on with the Amazing Spider-Man lately? Welp, that space capsule he got dressed to open up contained beloved Guardian Of The Galaxy Rocket Raccoon, returning this May to theaters everywhere thanks to CGI and Bradley Cooper’s golden voice! Now he and Spidey and MJ are off on a wacky road trip to catch Ronan, the Accuser, but first, they must defeat their greatest enemy: sleepiness.

Shoe and Slylock Fox, 1/16/17

Here we have pretty firm proof that Shoe and Slylock Fox take place in different universes. In Shoe, the bird-people built up their civilization themselves, and within living memory: only a few generations ago, they lived in nature, like the birds we know. We can assume that any similarity between their material culture and ours can be chalked up to convergent development. Slylock and his sapient animal counterparts, on the other hand, are clearly living in the cities that humanity built, riding New York’s subway and marveling at the Statue of Liberty in the harbor (do they think her a dead Goddess of a vanished race?). But the construction crane seems to indicate that the animals are at last beginning to put their own imprint on the city; maybe in a century or two all evidence of humanity will be finally lost.

Crankshaft, 1/16/17

I think it’s important to remember that even those artists we think of as driven by pure, inner genius functioned in a larger society and economy and had to cater to a certain extent to popular tastes. In this sense they’re different from comic strip creators, who can apparently just go with smug, unfunny punchlines with no obvious appeal to anybody.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/19/17

Hey, remember Buck? No, not the sexy, homeless archaeology grad student who was camping out on the Morgans’ property so he could investigate some ancient war crime; no, I mean Rex’s old pal whose wife tried to murder him with a nail gun and then later it turned out said wife was Rex’s ex-girlfriend from high school and it seems I didn’t cover the end of this storyline so I’m not sure how it all worked out? I think Buck broke up with his wife, though! But based on his set role as the strip’s sad sack, I’m going to assume that he’s gotten himself deep into some depressing ponzi scheme and he’s trying to pull Rex in as well. Haha, look at Rex’s eye’s glazing over and soon as Buck starts his pitch!

Spider-Man, 1/19/17

Welp, Rocket’s only been on our planet for a few hours, but he’s already well acclimated to the Spidey Way Of Heroism, i.e., doing a half-assed job for a little bit and then dozing off. It’s also worth noting that Rocket was originally wearing an adorable little outfit and now he’s … stark naked? I guess a naked raccoon shouldn’t be disturbing but when you’re established as wearing clothes even if you’re a species that doesn’t normally wear clothes, once you take off your clothes you’re naked, that’s the rule. The fact that Peter and MJ are fully dressed isn’t helping.

Gasoline Alley, 1/19/17

Meanwhile, Gertie continues to test the waters to figure out when Walt will finally be senile enough that he’ll voluntarily drink Drāno.

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Spider-Man, 1/31/17

Panel three of today’s Spider-Man is most definitely a portrait of a guy who barely understood what was just said to him in panel two. “Carved images, huh? From … ancestral Pueblo peoples, you say? I guess they carve … images … of things they see … that are interesting? Could they carve Ronan? If you say ‘ancestral,’ does that mean they’re not still around? So they couldn’t carve anything? Or maybe they are still around but they don’t carve images anymore? At least I know that there are exactly 24,000 of them. I’m real solid on that.”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/31/17

I’m not sure how I would describe a clinic where a bored medical tech who isn’t even bothering to make eye contact with you says that your scan looks “very good” right before giving you vague information about ways in which it looks extremely not good and then leaving you twisting in the wind until your next doctor’s appointment who knows how many days from now, but “super” isn’t it! Are these the same people who sent Funky bad prostate cancer news via m-mail eight years ago? Back then he greeted the bad news with heavy-lidded ennui; today we’re approaching genuine panic. That jolt of adrenaline lets you know you’re alive, Funky! You know, for now.

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Slylock Fox, 2/6/17

“Kooky?” That’s the adjective you choose for Count Weirdly? “Kooky?” This is a man who’s brainwashes his sapient serpent sidekick so completely that she willingly commits her unborn babies to his cause, turning them into living booby traps and condemning them to a life of crime from the moment they hatch into the world! Look at her face — she’s positive thrilled to watch her newborns kill, and possibly die, to serve Count Weirdly. So yeah, I think I’d go with “history’s greatest monster” rather than “kooky,” thanks very much.

Spider-Man, 2/6/17

“You know … people who love you, who care about whether you live or die. Emotional ties to others that complicate your decisions, especially when it comes to risking your life. It’s a real situation, you know? A real situation.”

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Spider-Man, 2/11/17

Oh, goodie, you guys: the current Spider-Man plot has advanced to the point where we at last are getting to enjoy some super-powered combat! By which I mean yesterday Ronan, the Accuser, smacked Spidey and Rocket around a little and now everyone’s just standing there jabbering at each other. Anyway, today we learn that our web-headed hero has a distinctive odor, at least to Rocket’s fine-tuned snout! What do you think Spider-Man smells like? Probably some combination of “I invented this high-performance, tight-fitting superhero costume but didn’t really think about making it machine washable and I don’t really get around to hand-washing it very often and also usually I wad it up into a little case immediately after engaging in strenuous superheroics” and failure, right?

Hi and Lois, 2/11/17

Sorry, Ditto! Your dad’s gonna be eating all the ice cream, lying on the couch for months on end, staying home from work on long-term disability because he tried to lift that enormously heavy generator by himself without bending his knees.

Mary Worth, 2/11/17

That vigorously spewing fountain thrusting upwards in the background as Zak and Iris press their bodies close for the last time? It represents their tears, y’all. Their tears. Get your minds out of the gutter.

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Spider-Man, 2/16/17

One of the arguments for the idea that advanced alien races visited Earth in the distant past is drawn from our own mythologies. Detailed stories of gods and goddesses, and other beings far more powerful than ordinary men and women, aren’t just made up out of whole cloth, the theory goes; they represent garbled cultural memories of the visits of extraterrestrials. These creatures left such a lasting imprint on our preliterate ancestors that we unconsciously not only remember them but reproduce them in our beliefs and art. And I think panel two is indisputable proof that, tens of thousands of years after it was buried beneath a New Mexico volcano, the Kree Sentinel is still well remembered by humanity:

Gil Thorp, 2/16/17

Over in Gil Thorp, Gil is getting in on the Downward Socioeconomic Mobility Sleuthing action, prompted by this extremely respectful student detectives! See, Aaron’s mom used to be in the lucrative actuarial trade, back in sixth grade, so now it makes no sense that Aaron is living in a dumpy apartment complex like a common poor. Gil decided that the best way to get to the bottom of this whole dilemma would be to show up at Aaron’s mom’s office, unannounced, presumably during the workday, when he should be, like, coaching students or whatever, and asking, “Hey, just wondering if Aaron’s OK? There’s not anything happening at home that would upset him? Like the fact that his mother is doing some kind of white collar job in an office with cracked plaster walls, which basically is like a giant sign that says ‘CALL SOCIAL SERVICES IMMEDIATELY’? I’m just asking questions!” And indeed his visit has prompted an extremely productive family conversation at home. Another win for Coach Thorp!

Beetle Bailey, 2/16/17

Oh God, in one strip, we have explained so much of what makes Beetle’s character baffling: his seeming narcolepsy, the physical abuse visited upon him by Sarge without consequences, the way he appears fatally mangled in one strip and then back to normal in the next. “Beetle” is really a series of artificial beings, clones or androids or something, presumably being developed by the military to replace all-too-fallible humans in war and create an unbeatable army. The program is … not going well, with none of the Beetles scattered around Camp Swampy living up to expectations. And despite the fact they look like humans and talk like humans and (let’s consider Miss Buxley’s part in this experiment) love like humans, they are not treated as humans worthy of respect. Sarge is no doubt about to pummel this one into goo, like he has so many others, and then go find one that’s actually up and walking around, just like you might rummage through your desk drawers looking for a functional pen.

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Dick Tracy, 2/21/17

Ugh, OK, fine, Dick didn’t just shoot the Brush in the face, like I thought yesterday. But on the bright side, if you’re just tuning in and don’t know what the deal is with his freaky hair, you might think he just got his face blown off?

Rex Morgan, 2/21/17

Hey, let’s get re-invested in what’s going on in Rex Morgan, M.D.! [sees today’s strip is about an old man settling in to take a nap on a plane] Let’s get re-invested in what’s going on in Rex Morgan, M.D., in, like, a month or two, maybe!

Spider-Man, 2/21/17

Rocket’s been walking around on his hind legs this whole time, so strictly speaking it seems pretty clear that Ronan, the Accuser doesn’t know what a quadruped is, actually.

Mary Worth, 2/21/17

Oh, man, Mary’s going to take Iris on a magical journey to show what the world will be like if she and Zak had never met. It’ll be like It’s A Wonderful Life! Alternate-universe Santa Royale will be pretty much the same, of course; the main difference is that alternate-universe Iris still won’t know what an orgasm is.

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Mark Trail, 3/9/17

“How is a tetanus shot going to help with bears?” is a great question, Mark, great question, but maybe we should back up a little bit and ask something more basic: how is Doc, who is a “Doc”-tor of Veterinary Medicine, going to get a tetanus shot for Mark, who is ostensibly a human? I know Lost Forest is pretty isolated, but I feel strongly the Trails should get their medical care from professionals who are trained to care for people, not animals. If you ever need a hookup for recreational horse tranquilizers Doc’s your guy, though.

Blondie, 3/9/17

Look on the bright side, kids: in this strip you’re two teenagers spending a lot of time and energy discussing newspaper comic strips, a which is not something anyone would ever stereotype teens doing in the year 2017!

Spider-Man, 3/9/17

As usual, I have more or less lost interest in Spider-Man as it goes through the motions of super-powered combat, but I do feel obliged to acknowledge when the strip comes up with a phrase such as “But now — my cosmi-rod is in position — to be activated!” that is a surefire way to ruin any sexual experience it’s uttered in the midst of.

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Crock, 3/20/17

You might think this is just a typical cartoon where a lonely desert-dwelling child’s only friend is a freakish buzzard. But, not so! Check out Little Otis’s blank, pupil-less stare in the second panel. That buzzard isn’t his friend at all; it’s hypnotizing him. Imagine “How should I introduce you to my mom, Wadsworth?” spoken in an eerie monotone. The only introducing that’s going to happen will come once Otis, under Wadsworth’s mesmerizing gaze, murders his parents and “introduces” the foul carrion eater to their delicious corpses.

Slylock Fox, 3/20/17

Hey, sinister grinning bear (?) lumberjacks: instead of stealing this poor beaver’s trees, have you considered recruiting him, for a good-paying job in the lumberjack industry that apparently still exists in this animal-ruled world? Honestly, how is it that in the animal economy there’s a single lumber company that isn’t entirely beaver-staffed?

Family Circus, 3/20/17

It’s bad, in the sense that it’s supposed to be “on fleek” (and I’m 100% sure the Family Circus isn’t clever enough to intend this to be an error either on Billy’s or Big Daddy Keane’s part), and also in the sense that the Family Circus shouldn’t be doing jokes about the phrase “on fleek.” Just bad all around. Bad bad bad.

Spider-Man, 3/20/17

Given that Rocket Raccoon isn’t well known on the version of Earth that has the misfortune to be depicted in Newspaper Spider-Man, I love that the lower word balloon in the second panel ends in an exclamation point. You’d think that the cop would say “Spider-Man — and a raccoon???? [comical BOI-OI-OING sound effect],” but nope, he’s just accepting this as yet another one of life’s passing mysteries.

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Spider-Man, 3/28/17

So MJ has to get Ronan, the Accuser, currently in suspended animation, to Albuquerque to use as a human Kree shield against the violent, nightmarish Shemp-bot. And she’s getting there the old fashioned way: using the free market! No “government handout” needed for this entrepreneurial gal! Yes, it’s completely believable that whatever cash she happens to have on hand is enough for her to buy a large commercial vehicle, which is presumably the driver’s main business asset, as well as pay for several hours of labor from both the driver and four day laborers. The system works!

Mary Worth, 3/28/17

Ooooh, I’m guessing this eager couple are about to have their lives meddled in — for the better — over the course of this cruise! What do you suppose their problem is? Maybe they’ve never actually seen a body of water larger than Lake Michigan, so they’ll immediately start panicing the moment they get on the open ocean! Or, since they seem to believe “Hoosiers” and “Cruisers” rhyme, maybe they aren’t really from Indiana or even native speakers of English, and Mary’s about to blow their sinister spy ring right open.

Dennis the Menace, 3/28/17

Call me a prude if you will, but I feel personally menaced by this open display of Mitchell-on-Mitchell sexuality. I DON’T WANT TO THINK ABOUT HENRY’S EROTIC BATHING FANTASIES, OR, WORSE, HIS EROTIC BATHING REALITES, OK? I DON’T. I DON’T.

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Spider-Man, 4/7/17

One of my favorite shows that died too soon was The Grinder, which on paper was about a famous actor (Rob Lowe), whose long-running TV series in which he plays a lawyer (called The Grinder) has ended, and who moves back home to Boise to live with his brother (Fred Savage) and father, who are actually lawyers; he then decides to help with the family law firm, despite lacking any actual legal training other than starring in The Grinder (the show within the show). This is a cutesy premise that becomes dizzyingly self-referential as Lowe’s character approaches all real-life legal problems as he would on the show-within-the-show, which almost always seems to work albeit in unexpected ways, because applying the logic of the show-within-in-the-show fits right in with the characters’ reality, which is of course also a TV show; Savage’s character becomes increasingly agitated over the course of the show’s single season as the universe seems to come unmoored around him. Anyway, one of Lowe’s character’s trademark moves, both in the show and in the show-within-the-show, was to reply to someone who told him that something was impossible by dramatically saying “but what if … it wasn’t?”, followed by a swelling music sting. Again, within the skewed world of the show, things usually work out so he turns out to be right; but what I’ve always appreciated about Newspaper Spider-Man is its gritty realism. Spider-Man can’t do the impossible, even within the context of his heightened powers, because he’s just some chump making it up as he goes along, and even when he wins, it’s mostly by accident. Spidey isn’t saying “or maybe he can!” with any of Rob Lowe’s preternatural self-confidence. He hasn’t figured out anything at all. He’s just stalling for time.

Mark Trail, 4/7/17

I was going to make some joke about these dudes trying to armed-kidnap Mark in the middle of a crowded airport in these security-crazed times, but then I remembered that time I flew into Great Falls Airport in Montana, which had more mounted animal heads than TSA agents and didn’t even have bathrooms available once you passed security, so I’m guessing maybe you could pull this off in Rapid City? Guess we’ll find out, and also find out if this bald dude is capable of cracking a smile!

Gil Thorp, 4/7/17

“But they don’t call me that anymore. Because if there’s one thing we know about volcanoes, it’s that once they stop erupting, they never erupt again and anyone who treats them as an ordinary mountain and builds a home nearby is never in any danger whatsoever! Say, what do you suppose this spring storyline’s going to be about!”

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Mark Trail, 4/10/17

Welp, looks like Mark’s very self-important reveal of his employer has gone right over the bald head of his kidnapper. Sorry, Mark! Usually when you tell people that you write articles for America’s #1 glossy lifestyle magazine for the aspirational outdoorsperson, they show some respect. Not so when you deal with illiterates and ruffians, it seems. And yet … who’s this gentleman in panel two? Is he the real power behind this criminal gang, one or two steps up the Bald Guy Hierarchy? He’s wearing a suit and tie and has a neatly folded pocket square, which means he no doubt appreciates long articles about, like, new kinds of tents or whatever the hell it is Woods and Wildlife publishes. Anyway, I’m not sure if this guy is really involved in our story, or if he’s just some fellow passing through Rapid City Airport, or if he’s the Kingpin, heralding a crossover event that will establish Mark Trail as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but his little smile shows that he knows what’s up.

Dick Tracy, 4/10/17

I had to laugh at the “YELLOW MASK” label in the final panel, an explanatory box of the sort usually reserved in Dick Tracy for tiny gadgets or whatever. Then I remembered that, in theory, anyway, the primary venue for Dick Tray comic strips is the daily paper, where they’re published in black-and-white, so the need to label the visual joke makes slightly more sense. “Look, it’s, uh, it’s a mask, that matches his coat, which you also can’t see the color of but we assume if you’re reading this you know it’s yellow? Just a mask, for his eyes. We know it’s a little confusing. He’s not supposed to stick his dick in it or anything.”

Spider-Man, 4/10/17

One thing that comics are good for is creating new Homeric epithets out of whole cloth and just pretending they’re things that normal people would say in real life, like “badge-boys!” I also like Spider-Man acknowledging that while being a police officer is a full-time job, being Spider-Man is just kind of a hobby he indulges whenever he feels like it, because with great power comes great responsibility so long as there’s nothing good on TV.

Dennis the Menace, 4/10/17

I’m pretty sure that a young child putting his most treasured possessions in the collection plate at church is … about as non-menacing as you can get? Unless he’s trying to bribe God! That’s fairly menacing, theologically speaking.

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Blondie, 4/18/17

You know, whenever I see a strip with a gag like this, I sincerely hope it’s the end product of a long meeting between representatives of the Fitbit marketing department and the Cayman Islands-based LLC that owns the rights to the Blondie characters and trademarks, at the end of which they agreed on a plan to mutually leverage their brands across platforms, using Dagwood’s well-known humorous “ownership” of the sleeping space to promote awareness of Fitbit’s functionality that promotes good sleep health. Because the other option is that Blondie decided to give some other company free advertising space in the comics, and that’s honestly pretty sad.

Mary Worth, 4/18/17

Haha, Toby, defensive much??? It’s pretty telling that her immediate response to any mention of humans who have experienced a normal emotional pair-bond is to blurt out “My marriage to Ian is not a sham!! People look at a more-or-less beautiful, moderately vibrant young-ish woman married to a rotund chin-bearded early-late-middle-aged academic and immediately think ‘Oh, he’s her sugar daddy,’ and that’s hurtful. For one thing, Ian’s not even rich! Have you seen where we live?’”

Marvin, 4/18/17

Oh, whoops, I guess yesterday’s carpool shenanigans were just the launching point for a whole storyline about various members of Marvin’s family who use him as a tiny, warm body to take advantage of traffic laws that are meant to cut traffic by providing incentives to multiple adults to who would otherwise drive their own cars to share a ride instead. Anyway, I particularly enjoy the way Jeff’s expression shifts from “emotionally numb” to “crushing despair” as his hunky co-worker suggests that the he drive to work with a diaper full of Marvin shit in the car to keep away pesky and presumably squeamish law enforcement officers.

Spider-Man, 4/18/17

“Ha ha, yes, Starlord and his pop tunes! Perhaps you remember the smash hit film Guardians of the Galaxy, whose trailer used Starlord’s walkman playing Blue Swede’s version of ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ to great effect? Well, the sequel’s coming out in just a few weeks, and its trailer features [checks YouTube] Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain!’ Sounds enticing, eh? I certainly hope this giant robot hasn’t ripped Spider-Man’s arms out of their sockets yet!” The sad thing is this is literally the best Newspaper Spider-Man has ever been at promoting a Marvel Cinematic Universe property.

Six Chix, 4/18/17

This woman some years ago went on a “fantasy weekend” to Yosemite, because her fantasy was to fuck a bigfoot. And she achieved her goal! Never give up on your dreams, everybody!

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Hi and Lois, 4/27/17

“We had yell-phones. ‘Hey, Dot!’ That’s how we’d yell. And if someone lived outside of yelling distance, well, they weren’t our friends! How could you be friends with someone outside your village? There would be no way to know what clan they were a part of, to know the ties between your ancestors and theirs that defined your status relations! If you encountered any such person outside the palisade, violence was the immediate result! You couldn’t know if they were friend or foe so it was kill or be killed on sight. I have the blood of so many strangers on my hands! What were we talking about? Oh, right, phones, we didn’t have those.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/27/17

I know that Snuffy Smith is a notorious chicken thief — the syndicate apparently considers this more acceptable to joke about in the daily comics than his other traditional livelihood, moonshining — but it took me a while to realize that the joke here was that the chickens were evidence because he stole them. Maybe it’s because I’m a big fan of Roald Dahl and Alfred Hitchcock, but my immediate assumption was that Snuffy and Lukey murdered someone using a chicken as a weapon.

Spider-Man, 4/27/17

“Oh, you wrapped up the story with a couple days left to go? Well, uh, you could talk about some of the characters from the upcoming movie, I guess. Don’t bother looking up any pictures to see what the actors look like. Just work from memory! It’ll be fine!”

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Phantom, 4/29/17

Hmmm … can’t shake a “feeling of death,” Big Guy? Maybe it’s because you sleep cheek-by-jowl with your ancestors’ corpses, decorate yourself with skull jewelry, and live inside a gigantic death’s-head?

Nah. More likely it’s just a premonition that your city-bred wife, out stalking a pygmy tribal chief in the deep jungle, is about to get all slain by one of his adorable little arrows.

Crankshaft, 4/29/17

Wait, sad to outlive your dreams? But that way you’d still be around to enjoy them after they turn into facts! Sounds kinda nice — sign me up!

Not Lillian, though — she’s lived in the Funkyverse long enough to know this ain’t no Disney movie (the depression cats are a giveaway). So she games the system, adopting only those dreams that will fail slowly enough to outlast her. That way, she can die basking in the delusion that her remaining dreams still had a shot. Not like her dream to open a used bookstore above the garage — that sucker failed from the get-go and mocks her to this day.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/29/17

OK, Rex Morgan has been setting up this porno for so long the only question left is the dramatis personae: Niki and Kelly, sure, but who’s on third: rich-girl Holly — or Kelly’s Mom Summer (ew)?

And pace Josh, Niki’s actually far from a novice at this sort of thing: a decade ago, June blackmailed him into “cleaning her garage,” if you know what I mean. And that was before he got his wet hands all over Rex’s trout.

Anyway, it’s great to see this classic soaper returning to its roots. Its sexy, creepy roots.

Spider-Man, 4/29/17

Spider-Man plugs Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise almost as hard as Mary Worth plugs Carnival Cruise Lines. Probably for more cash, but definitely with a lot less effort. Never change, Web-Slinger!

Hello, faithful reader! I’m sitting in while Josh enjoys a Spring Break chock-full of enjoyable activities on a colossal liner steaming around the Caribbean, or maybe just sneaks out back for a delicious cigarette. Either way, reach me at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net if you have any problems with the site.

If you use the commenting feature, be aware that I’m notified automatically when a comment is placed in moderation, so there’s no need to alert me by email or in a follow-up comment. I’ll clear comments as soon as I see them, which won’t always be immediately. Thanks for your anticipated patience!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Crankshaft, 5/1/17

Crankshaft, 5/2/17

Sure, Ed — those moms are chasing your empty bus.

Just look at the lovingly detailed bricks and rain, Ed’s meticulously randomized blackheads (4‑2‑3 — thank you, click-to-zoom feature!), and that enormous block of overwrought dialogue. Say what you will, a lot of time goes into making this strip. Leaving no time to read it, I guess?

I was vaguely unsettled by Monday’s Crankshaft even before Tuesday’s contradicted it, and this morning I realized why — Ed is smiling. Normally his face is a mask of aggrieved belligerence even when he’s doing things he enjoys, like gardening, barbecuing, or watching his beloved Cleveland sportsball teams. So if you ever need to get on Ed Crankshaft’s good side, God help you, start him bragging about what a thoroughly accomplished asshole he is.

Curtis, 5/2/17

So, tell us — did the guy rebuild his broken life or not? Sounds like he made a pretty good start! Don’t try to sell the moral ’til you’ve finished the fable, Aesop.

Pluggers, 5/2/17

Hey Andy, if social and family relationships baffle you, try making sense of Pluggers.

Spider-Man, 5/2/17

Before the doorman got in the way, Peter was driving straight into the lobby to save himself a couple steps. And check out the terror-font when Aunt May shows up — he knows she’ll get him up at the crack of dawn all week to make her damn chamomile tea and serve it up on the lovely balcony. Between the galactic defenders and widowed aunts, how’s a guy supposed to catch a nap?

OK, so it seems my superpower is finding logical errors in Crankshaft dialogue — still more useful than anything we’ve seen from Spider-Man!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Mark Trail, 5/9/17

Each of these law enforcement officers is all man, of course: you can tell by their rugged features and aggressively retreating hairlines. But it seems they’re the last bastion of traditional American can-do masculinity in this sadly enfeebled police force. They should be out there rounding up known scumbags and maybe busting a head or two in the interrogation room in order to track down these kidnappers, but instead they’re sitting around the office waiting for the fancy college-boy “analysts” to pinpoint what’s “weird” about the criminals’ “body language” like they work at Us Magazine, for Pete’s sake! Hurry it up in there, brainiacs, Mark can’t keep up his soothing baritone monologue for much longer!

Spider-Man, 5/9/17

Oh, man, remember the greatest Newspaper Spider-Man storyline of all time, when Aunt May wanted to marry the Mole-Man and Spidey tried various techniques to thwart their love but eventually the nuptials had to be called off because Aunt May developed Spelunker’s Lung and couldn’t serve as queen of her beloved’s cave-kingdom? Welp, it looks like Mole-Man has finally decided he needs to see his ex again, if only to know that she’s happy, and since Aunt May has no Instagram for him to stalk, he’s got to do the logical thing: follow her to Los Angeles, keeping a low profile by dressing like a dwarfish pimp, and stare at her longingly through the window of a restaurant that’s recently rebranded itself to cash in on La La Land fever. Sadly, one of LA’s omnipresent Beefy Restaurant Security Guys is going to escalate this situation into an unnecessary mole-fracas.

Beetle Bailey, 5/9/17

I’m not sure who exactly this joke is for. Is it meant to prompt legacy comics trufans into knowing grins as they think to themselves “Ah, yes, Beetle Bailey and Lois Flagston are siblings, one of the comics’ lesser-known trivia items”? Is there a Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC company-wide policy on occasionally reminding readers of this, so as to lay the groundwork for the Bailey-Flagston Cinematic Universe franchise they’re very much hoping to sell to a major studio? All I know is that this postal worker is justifiably horrified to learn about the abuse and bullying that are sadly rife in our armed forces.

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Pluggers, 5/11/17

I kind of admit I’m not … entirely sure what’s going on here? Like, it doesn’t matter whether you like iced tea or lemonade (THE ONLY TWO ACCEPTABLE DRINKS, and don’t try mixing them together to form the abomination that is an “Arnold Palmer”), and it doesn’t matter if you’re fundamentally an optimist or a pessimist if you’ve got … friends? I approve of friendship, of course, but I don’t understand why it needs all these false binaries as a setup. I also am a little unsettled by the anxiety behind the “just happy to have a glass.” Maybe this is why the plugger dog-man is sitting on an overturned bucket instead of a chair, because he had to sell all his chairs, and he only has his bucket and two glasses left. Remember, Pluggerville’s pawn shop is the most depressing place on earth!

Dick Tracy, 5/11/17

So it turns out the Margies’ CosplayCon scam involved a fake robbery to grab the cash prize for best costume, yawn. Anyway, with that out of the way, they’ve really kicked it up a notch for their next crime: digging up the corpses of prominent comics artists and reanimating them, using forbidden science! It’s a little on the nose for new-look Dick Tracy, but I’m on board.

Spider-Man, 5/11/12

Say, were you wondering how this week’s super-powered combat played out??? ANSWER: a guy hit another guy in the shin with “some kinda stick” and then ran away. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!!!

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Rhymes With Orange, 5/14/17

I was originally puzzled by what appears to be the 17th century New England setting for this panel, but apparently the reputed African origins of the “it takes a village” proverb are a bunch of hooey, so colonial Massachusetts is as likely a place as anywhere else for this joke to play out. Anyway, kid, let me remind you that mouthing off to your elders is an extremely good way to get condemned to death for witchcraft.

Mary Worth, 5/14/17

Today’s Mary Worth just recaps the last few daily strips, so in a sense it doesn’t provide anything new, but in a larger, more important sense, it provides something incredible: this strip, which has featured dubiously sourced quotes from Albert Camus and St. Augustine in the past, now offers us an epigram from Mr. T. God bless this perfect day!

Spider-Man, 5/14/17

OK, Mole-Man, you’ve been dragging out a whole series of “final glimpses” of your beloved, for real. Still, I offer you today’s final panel to enjoy, in which our lovestruck villain clings to the back of a limosine with the relative limosine-clinging power of a mole.

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Spider-Man, 5/26/17

I’m not usually in the business of determining when things are racist or not, but I have to deem giving a black cop the line “Mole man or soul man” at least somewhat … questionable. But fortunately the strip quickly pivots away from race to class, as we learn that the police, far from being impartial arbiters of the law, are at the beck and call of the elite: these officers, against their better judgement, apparently have no choice but to set this violent, stick-weilding maniac free at the whim of some rich movie star.

Six Chix, 5/26/17

I actually kind of love that this cartoon is set in some boring white-collar office. They’re not spies or government agents or anything like that, just ordinary people driven to paranoid insanity by the realities of modern life.

Shoe, 5/26/17

“Plus, I’m a bird! I don’t have any hair to speak of! Now just trim my plumage like I asked.”

Family Circus, 5/26/17

Haha, it’s funny because Dolly doesn’t fully understand her own anatomy! Yes, that’s definitely what’s going on here. Surely “Dolly” isn’t a swarm of alien insects, testing the tensile limits of the human flesh-suit they’re using to infiltrate our society. That would be repulsive, and horrifying.

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Spider-Man, 5/30/17

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a cruel double standard when it comes to Newspaper Spider-Man. On the one hand, I cheerfully mock the strip’s treatment of the superheroic combat one expects to be the staple of the superhero genre, which is extremely infrequent and underwhelming when it actually happens. On the other, I actually don’t care that much about actual superheroic combat, which is why Newspaper Spider-Man is definitely my favorite superhero genre work of all time. I love it because it allows me plenty of room to follow my own personal obsessions, like the Daily Bugle’s place in the modern media landscape, and now the geopolitical situation of Subterranea! I am thrilled to learn more about how the Mole Man lost his position as ruler — did he flee a violent revolution one step ahead of the guillotine? Was there a peaceful grass-roots political movement that eventually rendered the Mole Man’s position untenable? Did he make the mistake of sharing power with an elected Parliament, which eventually voted depose him and declare Subterranea a Republic? And — why has he ended up in Los Angeles? Did the US offer him asylum in return for decades of rule marked by extremely friendly relations with ExxonMobil and a blind eye to literally Subterranean CIA black sites? Or is he just too gross for even Saudi Arabia to take in?

Six Chix, 5/30/17

Six Chix is, for better or worse, a gag-a-day comic. Each strip is a self-contained little world, and I feel like the “joke” here is too big for just one punchline out of nowhere. You really need to explore a theme like this — namely, that for two unlucky seniors a lifelong marital commitment has turned into a terrible prison in which each serves as the other’s jailor — over years using longstanding characters. It has to be earned, damn it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/30/17

Fellas, maybe don’t laugh so vigorously and tongue-lollingly! it’s all fun and games until someone gets fatally hexed.

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Family Circus, 6/1/17

I’ve never been fully on board with the theory that the Keane Kompound is a generations-long project to produce a racially pure strain of humanity via extensive inbreeding, but today’s panel is certainly another piece of evidence pointing in that direction!

Mary Worth, 6/1/17

Ha ha, we’ve been so focused on “Will Derek cheat on his wife or won’t he???” that we’ve missed the fact that Toby’s already slept with half the dudes on this boat!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/1/17

Canine horniness: just another reason why law enforcement in Hootin’ Holler is so slipshod.

Spider-Man, 6/1/17

Guys, I know she’s old, but … she’s right there

I’m pretty sure she can hear you????

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Spider-Man, 6/3/17

OH MY GOD, NEWSPAPER SPIDER-MAN, WHICH I ALREADY DECLARED MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO COMIC OF ALL TIME, HAS JUST NAME-CHECKED AN OBSCURE FIGURE FROM LATE ANTIQUITY, THE HISTORICAL PERIOD THAT I STUDIED DURING MY ABORTIVE ACADEMIC CAREER! Was today’s strip written specifically for me? Probably! Anyway, let’s go through a quick rundown of all the interesting details and historical inaccuracies they’ve managed to pack into just a few sentences:

• The historical figure in question was actually named Romulus, which (IRONY ALERT) was also the name of the legendary founder and first ruler of Rome. The -ulus ending was a diminutive in Latin, so Romulus means “Little Rome.” Augustus was one of the Roman titles for emperor, and during his reign Romulus was known as Romulus Augustus; Augustulus, meaning “little emperor,” was a nickname given to him by later historian.

• Romulus was, if not little, at least young: he was emperor for only a year, and he was 16 at the time. His father Orestes, who was a Roman general, was the real power behind the throne.

• Tyrannus is the origin of our word tyrant, but in Latin in the 5th century A.D. it didn’t necessarily mean “a cruel ruler,” as it’s come to mean in English; instead, it meant someone who had usurped a throne from a legitimate ruler, without much by way of value judgement beyond that. This is actually an appropriate name for Romulus, then, because he became Emperor when his father overthrew Julius Nepos, the legitimate Romen ruler.

• Romulus’s claim to be “the last Roman emperor” is actually pretty tenuous. In the 5th century A.D. there were usually two Roman emperors, one ruling from Italy and the other from Constantinople; over the course of the century, the western half of the empire fell apart due to external invasion and internal fragmentation, while the eastern pulled through in one piece; by the 470s, the Western Roman government only controlled Italy and the western Balkans. When Orestes put Romulus on the throne, Julius Nepos fled to Dalmatia, where he was from, and continued to rule there. Then, a year later, Odoacer, the German general who was in charge of most of the Western Roman army, killed Orestes, deposed Romulus, and placed himself under the authority of the distant Eastern Emperor, although in practice he ruled Italy as his own kingdom. Julius Nepos, the legitimate Western Emperor, ruled Dalmatia until he was killed in 480, and the emperors in Constantinople kept doing their thing (and called themselves “Roman Emperors,” although the empire was eventually almost entirely Greek) all the way until 1453.

• Because Romulus was only a teenager, Odoacer spared his life, sent him to live with his family in southern Italy, and even gave him a pension. He pretty much vanishes from history at that point, though there’s a preserved letter from a Roman administrator that might indicate that he was still receiving his pension more than 30 years later. So is it possible that he became eternally undead due to forbidden sorcery and now seeks to claim an underground empire to compensate for the realm that was stolen from him when he was a boy? Sure, why not!

Marvin, 6/3/17

Marvin may be an awful-hell infant who’s willing to stew in his own shit-filled diapers forever just to annoy his parents, but even he understands the basic concepts of consent.

Pluggers, 6/3/17

No matter how deep pluggers get into hoarding, they can never fill the hole in their lives left by the family that abandoned them.

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Dick Tracy, 6/7/17

Ugh, remember how the last Dick Tracy storyline started out with low-stakes cosplay grifting perpetrated by three women named Margie and then took a hard right turn into baffling anti-Semitism? Well, we’re going to just ride that level of discomfort straight into this new storyline, where beloved Dick Tray ancillary character B.O. Plenty, last seen siring a hideous nightmare-baby, I think, gets evicted from his haunted home after having failed to pay the mortgage on it.

Spider-Man, 6/7/17

Mole-Man’s “He’s vowed to do so!” in panel one is endearingly naive and is perhaps indicative that he wasn’t devious enough to maintain political power in the underground realm. Lots of politicians vow to do things before they enter office — cut taxes, fix health care, conquer and enslave the surface dwellers, whatever — but often move those goals to the back burner once they’re confronted with the realities of governance. MJ’s observation in panel three is on the mark and further evidence of Mole-Man’s diplomatic incompetence: if he had access to an immortality serum, surely he could’ve opened trade negotiations with the world above and at least gotten some windows installed in the earth’s crust to let a little sunlight through.

Hi and Lois, 6/7/17

“I hope Mother Earth, the metaphorical embodiment of our planet’s ecosystem as a nurturing parent, doesn’t get jealous of my actual mother, who’s rocking a hot bikini bod and making everybody horny” –an infant in an actual comic published in newspapers around the country

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Funky Winkerbean, 6/8/17

I’m no “weed-ologist” but I’m given to understand that if you’re looking for a drug that will give you energy and help you focus when you’re tired, marijuana is not ideal for the task? Quite the opposite, in fact!

Spider-Man, 6/8/17

I for one would be extremely glad to see the Tyrannus storyline dropped entirely and instead we pivot to Mole-Man becoming a beloved oddball character actor à la Wallace Shawn.

Pluggers, 6/8/17

Pluggers can’t put away the booze like they used to, and they can’t chew that well either.

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Dick Tracy, 6/19/17

It’s not a secret that I have come to miss the days when Dick Locher helmed Dick Tracy, not least for its violent batshit insanity (the many gruesome deaths of the villains are all nicely outlined here by Uncle Lumpy) set against an art style that seemed to verge into German Expressionism. The subsequent strips since the change in personnel, though in theory featuring better art and more coherent plotting, lack the verve of the Locher era. I feel like things have been getting slightly nuttier lately, and today’s panel is as glorious as it is inexplicable. Is Blackjack robbing Paragon Bank, in a crime unrelated to B.O. Plenty’s problem with the institution’s out-of-control mortgage department? Or is Blackjack secretly running the bank, with his army of masked thugs forcing innocents like our mustachio’d bank exec here to illegally foreclose on houses? How do said thugs get their masks to drape just so? Why is B.O. Plenty wearing sleeve garters like a dealer on a riverboat casino? Is the musical notation floating over our characters’ heads part of the bank’s decor, or is it meant to represent the muzak system playing blissfully away while this scene of high danger goes down? I’m looking forward to getting none of these questions properly answered this week!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/19/17

Oh, hey, so it turns out that the thing Jessica was worried Darin would accidentally discover was that … her mom helped her plan a visit for him and Pete to the Flash Museum in Central City! Now, I don’t know all the ins and outs of the world of comics books, but I’m pretty sure that most places that have “museum” in their name well let anybody in to see their exhibits who’s willing to pay the admission fee, so I’m not sure why everyone is acting like this is a huge deal? Maybe because this museum is dedicated to the Flash, an actual superhero that people have heard of, and not Mister Sponge and Starbuck Jones, which are made up and phony-baloney.

Spider-Man, 6/19/17

Don’t worry, Spidey! Despite this being’s designation as an “armadilloid,” he appears to only superficially resemble any representative superorder Xenarthra, the clade that includes armadillos and and anteaters; in particular, the creature lacks the specialized dentition that makes anteaters unique, instead displaying what a scientist might call “a bunch of big teethy slabs.” Nice try using some taxonomy knowledge to get out of having to do superhero stuff! On the other hand, you yourself are not a spider at all, just a super strong dude in a spandex suit, so maybe he can eat you, I dunno. I for one am willing to find out!

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Slylock Fox, 7/3/17

Hmm, I think there’s a lot of backstory here that Slylock isn’t getting in to. QUESTION: If Holly Hippo just wrote this recipe down last night, why is it that she can’t remember any of it today? ANSWER: It’s because she was copying it from a source she no longer has access to — possibly the closely guarded family cookbook of a competitor in the big pie-baking contest coming up! I’m assuming there’s a big pie-baking contest coming up because otherwise why isn’t there “enough time to find the thief”? Enough time for what? What’s the deadline here? Dinner? Is Holly Hippo having a freakout because she can’t cook her stolen pie recipe for tonight’s dinner? There are other desserts for tonight and other nights for dessert, Holly. Hold it together, for the love of Christ.

UPDATE: Whoooops, I somehow failed to see the first sentence of this caption, lol

Mary Worth, 7/3/17

This strip doesn’t advance our current plot at all (unless the photo Mary bought was of Derek and Esme kissing and she plans to use it for blackmail) but obviously I couldn’t pass over Toby in her ’80s finery. The thing I wonder: did Toby know in advance that there would be an ’80s dance party on the boat (possibly it was part of the endless promotional material she browsed online) and pack those clothes, which she still owned from her youth in the early-Madonna era Lower East Side? Or does the cruise line just own a bunch of ’80s gear and let passengers wear them for theme nights, then let them keep them because, ew, cruise passenger dance sweat, gross.

Spider-Man, 7/3/17

Aunt May! Threatening to harm yourself unless your partner makes a grand emotional commitment is a classic act of emotional manipulation and abuse! YOU IN DANGER GIRL

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/7/17

I don’t want to just throw around my big-shot Hollywood insider knowledge, mostly because I don’t have any, but a “sizzle reel” is in fact … not whatever today’s Funky Winkerbean thinks it is? It’s generally a short video cut together from clips from other things aiming to sell or promote something to producers or casting directors, not the general public. You usually hear the term in connection with actors, who will have a sizzle reel of their best performances available for people thinking of hiring them. For a whole movie, a sizzle reel is something that would be created long before any filming actually took place, often pieced together from short scenes from other films in an attempt to show potential financial backers what the final product might look like. (Here’s one for the 2012 film Looper to give you a sense of how they work.)

Needless to say, movie sizzle reels generally do not include footage from documentaries about washed-up actors playing minor roles in the film, and they definitely aren’t put together right in the middle of what has appeared to be a very long and well-funded shoot. I can only assume that the financial backers of Starbuck Jones: The Movie, after viewing the dailies with despair, have abruptly pulled out, and the producers are desperately trying to find new funding, which they won’t because they have no idea what should and should not go into a sizzle reel.

Pluggers, 7/7/17

My longstanding theory is that Sheila Roo, a kangaroo-lady who suffers the indignity of being rendered in white by syndicate colorists who think she’s a rabbit, is not of true plugger stock, as indicated by her employment at a job that requires a suit and her desire to eat at non-chain restaurants. Today’s piece of evidence is the way she looks at her husband with subtle but withering contempt, possibly because of his dietary habits but also possibly because of, you know, just everything.

Spider-Man, 7/7/17

Meanwhile, Spider-Man is significantly degrading the fire-safety features of a building that never did anything to him.

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Spider-Man, 7/14/17

Hey, Spider-Man! Last I checked you and your movie star wife weren’t exactly supporting your aunt in the lifestyle to which she’d like to become accustomed in return for the fact that she raised you as a single parent after your negligence got her first husband killed, so maybe you should stop throwing roadblocks between her and her true love Mole-Man. Financial considerations shouldn’t keep people apart any more than the specious religious grounds you tried to use years ago. Anyway, that all turns out to not matter, because Mole-Man is rich! Rich as a mole! I sincerely love the Parker clan’s facial expressions in the last panel here: It’s as if they’re all holding extremely still, hoping that, if they don’t say anything or make direct eye contact with anybody, this whole “Mole-Man is fabulously wealthy and will soon be part of our family” thing will work out and none of them will ever have to work again.

Blondie, 7/14/17

OK, I rag on the syndicate colorists all the time for their egregious errors (like getting celebrities’ hair color wrong, just as an example) so I suppose I should give them credit when they deserve it: Mr. Dithers having a cash-green blanket to complement his currency-themed pajamas is a lovely and subtle touch.

Six Chix, 7/14/17

Here’s today’s Six Chix! It’s about, uh, straight-up murder, I guess?

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/16/17

It’s no secret that the last exciting thing that happened in Rex Morgan was Sarah getting hit by a car, but with each new story I allow myself to experience a frisson of hope. Sure, “June’s childhood best friend comes to visit” may not seem like it has a lot of meat to it, but the presence of her child has my “I’m planning on crashing with you indefinitely” sense tingling. Remember when June’s trashy cousin showed up and wouldn’t leave because she’d had a fight with her mom, and Sarah verbalized the class-based judgements that her parents were more subtle about, and then the cousin’s dumb boyfriend showed up too and Sarah made him hand over his skateboard as his price for laying low in the basement, but eventually he painted whales in his basement prison and June’s cousin got a job as a manicurist so everything worked out fine? That was great, and what I’m trying to say is that this lady and her kid better be fleeing a dicey domestic situation, or creditors, or the Irish mob, or something interesting, or else I’m gonna be real mad.

Spider-Man, 7/16/17

The amount of time Mole-Man spends justifying the plundering of Subterranea’s public treasury for his own private gain as he fled his former realm indicates that he knows exactly how unjustified the whole thing is. “Look, uh, I left most of it behind! My former subjects, who did all the manual labor to extract it, are welcome to it! If they depose my successor! The part I took was just a tiny, tiny bit! And what about strip-mining, huh? If it’s a crime for me to bring some precious gems out of the underground kingdom, where does that leave every mining company in the world, huh?” Still, his retelling of the story does provide the opportunity for him to both use the phrase “worm-mount” and to show us said worm-mount, a freakish lamprey-mouthed beast hundreds of feet long with treasure chests lashed to its back that Mole-Man is riding like a pony, so literally anything he does from here on out is forgiven as far as I’m concerned.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/16/17

THE ANSWER IS HE LICKED IT

HE JUST UP AND LICKED COUNT WEIRDLY’S SKI-DOO

I’M SORRY, “SUPER SKI”

I GUESS SKI-DOO IS A BRAND NAME

ANYWAY, HE LICKED IT, TO SEE IF IT TASTED SALTY

SLY, WE NEED TO TALK

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Gil Thorp, 7/17/17

Oh, man, it looks like I stopped paying attention to Gil Thorp back in, uh, May? We all learned some valuable lessons about how domestic abuse is bad but also it’s possible to construct an elaborate narrative scenario that makes someone seem like a domestic abuser when they really weren’t, so don’t jump to conclusions, but also you shouldn’t let anger get the best of you or pretend to like some girl just because your friend likes her friend. Anyway, baseball’s over and now we’re coming to … football? Ugh, remember when Gil Thorp used to do delightfully insane summer storylines, like Coach Kaz moonlighting as a rock star’s bodyguard or Marty Moon getting grifted at golf or Gil wrestling a possibly senile old pro wrestler, for charity? Anyway, this year’s football plot actually looks a lot like last one, when an ex-trainer turned unpaid assistant football coach helped a goofy linebacker (?) who wanted to be a quarterback but who was extremely bad at it get marginally better at it, but never actually play a meaningful down. Anyway, are these … the same people? Does Kevin want to be a fullback now? Who are the tall Watchers cooly and dispassionately observing them from the stands? Are we gonna get a fucking bonfire this year or what?

Mark Trail, 7/17/17

There was a brief moment when I thought we were about to have a big reveal where the lady we’ve thought was a hostage this whole time was actually a member of the gang, but, nope, she was already tied up and gagged while Baldy McBankrobberboss was talking to another criminal associate, which, whatever happened to that guy, anyway? But the important thing is that I find it 100% plausible that these two FBI dudes spent hours staring at video footage of a bank robbery and thinking “There’s something off about this robber, who must be a man because bank robbing is something men, not women, do. But what it is it? Can’t put my finger on it, let’s send it to the nerds down in Analysis and see what they come up with.”

Spider-Man, 7/17/17

I’m not an expert in How Hollywood Works or anything, but I’m finding a studio flack telling an actress “thank God you weren’t killed in that freak armadilloid attack that destroyed half of Brentwood, because we need you at a junket in San Francisco right away!” to be extremely believable.

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Spider-Man, 7/20/17

It’s true that whatever media conglomerate owns the film rights to the Marvella franchise botched the initial rollout. What with the notoriously troubled production of the first movie in the series, the studio naturally decided to dump it straight to DVD — but surprisingly strong sales got people excited enough to do a theatrical release for Marvella 2. But for a big rollout like that to succeed, you need a huge marketing machine. So yes, MJ is going to have to do publicity not just in San Francisco but also Denver. The studio has just that much riding on the success of this film. Don’t be surprised if they try to jam in an appearance in Phoenix on this junket too. No expense will be spared!

Speaking of sparing no expense, one of the fun things about living LA is that it’s incredibly expensive but it’s also full of transplants from New York, an even more expensive place, who assure you that $2,000 a month for an unassuming two-bedroom bungalow in a marginally sketchy neighborhood is “a real bargain, you’d pay twice that much for a studio in Manhattan and you wouldn’t even have a yard.” So yeah, I can see that planning a SoCal wedding might seem like a bargain if your frame of reference is the tri-state area, but neither Aunt May nor Mole-Man have any family in the region (his being enslaved by the foul Tyrannus miles beneath the Earth’s crust and hers being, uh, Peter and MJ), so they might want to look further afield. I hear Denver is nice!

Family Circus, 7/20/17

The Family Circus, being largely pieced together from decades-old art, preserves an earlier America where we were much less paranoid about safety, especially when it came to children. For instance, in a post-Harambe world, would anyone let a kid climb on a short fence separated from a potentially dangerous elephant by just a few feet of level grass and another, equally short fence? They might, if that kid were Billy, and they got to know him for a few minutes.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/20/17

Haha, whoops, sorry to rain on Rex’s nerd dreams, but li’l John Carter was named after something actually cool. I assume Rex will be angrily muttering that Margie is a “fake geek girl” under his breath for the remainder of her visit.

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Spider-Man, 7/22/17

Ah, Newspaper Spider-Man, always striving to be “hip” and “with it” but always falling just a bit behind! I’m sure over at Newspaper Spider-Man HQ it feels very of the moment to have MJ’s studio publicist svengali barking about a major blogger waiting, but since I’m a major blogger myself, let me assure you that blogging is pretty much over, and has been since about 2011. The new hotness is “influencers,” which is a code word for social media stars with 500,000 Instagram followers or 4,000,000 pageviews on each and every one of their YouTube makeup tutorials or whatever. Newspaper reporting has been over and done with for a lot longer than blogging, obviously, so a more accurate scene would just be this publicist talking about how he’s got three influencers waiting, and since they’re all millennials (or, what’s the thing after millennials? Gen-Z? UGH) their attention spans are notoriously short.

Dennis the Menace, 7/22/17

I love the knowing smiles that Henry and Alice are flashing here. I’m not sure what secret they’re sharing — that Henry is a terrible liar? that in the white-collar professional world, business and pleasure mingle on the golf course, helping consolidate the wealth of the upper class? that this “business trip” is an opportunity for them both to rendezvous with their secondary partners before reuniting and reaffirming their loving bond within the a context of consensual polyamory? — but whatever it is, it holds menace in the sense that it means that the world isn’t as simple as Dennis believes.

Slylock Fox, 7/22/17

Hey, kids! Remember Grimace, the beloved character from the McDonaldland commercials? Well, he’s dead now. He got bit by a snake and he died.

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Crankshaft, 7/27/17

Much of the “humor” of Crankshaft, arises from the title character saying English words or phrases that do not actually mean what he intends them to mean, of course, but I admit to being genuinely baffled by why he’s grumpily lobbing the phrase “old-timers” at this intergenerational sex awkwardness. My best guess is that he’s mocking his daughter and son-in-law for fondly remembering a youth in which some light boob-touching in a movie theater was considered an highly anticipated erotic act, since he now uses the family computer and his copious free time to mainline the most depraved pornography humankind has ever produced.

Beetle Bailey, 7/27/17

Shoutout to this nurse for being an ally to his female comrade who was hounded out of her duties by Killer’s nonstop sexual harassment. That’s the face of a man who’s definitely going to be upping the frequency of some invasive but necessary medical examinations.

Spider-Man, 7/27/17

God help me, the second panel of today’s Newspaper Spider-Man filled me with pure unalloyed joy. The best part is that Spidey stage-whispering while peeking around a corner to get Mole-Man’s attention out here in the empty hall for no particular reason, but I also enjoy the fact that my dude has convinced everyone start calling him “Melvin” but Peter knows that, while in his absurd Spidey persona, he needs to call him “Mole-Man,” in order to keep this whole outlandish superheroics farce going.

Six Chix, 7/27/17

[Begins writing an angry 3,000-world screed about Federal Railroad Administration regs and union contract stipulations about staffing on commuter trains, to be sent to the editor of every single newspaper that runs Six Chix]

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Spider-Man, 7/30/17

You know, this is the second Newspaper Spider-Man Mole-Man adventure I’ve covered on my blog, and it occurs to me that I don’t know if he has any particular … powers? … other than his now-lost political dominion over Subterrenea. He seems to have the ability to effectively hit people with sticks, but other than that, does he have … mole-strength? Mole-vision, which would be the actual opposite of a superpower? Why does he wear those glasses all the time? Does he even have eyes? According to Wikipedia, he has “highly developed ‘radar senses’ to help his weak normal vision,” and said vision was weakened when, soon after falling into the underground realm, “he suffered permanent damage to his eyes when he gazed directly upon a highly reflective deposit of diamonds,” which, that is in no way how any of that works, man. Anyway, the point is that today we learn that, whatever his vision situation, he at least has working tear-ducts, and a working heart (I’m speaking metaphorically here but no doubt his literal heart also works).

Meanwhile, we should believe Peter when he says that he never thought he’d hear himself say that he thinks his aunt’s wedding should go on as planned. That’s because he doesn’t want her to remarry, because he can’t handle not being at the center of her emotional life. He’s a real dick!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/30/17

Ha ha, whoops, Margie isn’t dying, she’s just dying to get her hands on some sweet, sweet pills, and the Morgans are only people with a prescription pad that she has even a tenuous relationship with who she hasn’t alienated yet! Anyway, it’s nice to know that America’s #1 serial comic strip about medical issues has finally decided to tackle America’s current #1 medical issue, after having warmed up over the past year or so with storylines about non-blockbuster problems like sleep apnea and dehydration.

Mary Worth, 7/30/17

There are few things that will get Dawn “in the mood” like a cute guy muttering about his post-divorce loneliness while staring into a highball glass! This is gonna be one of those magical “when depressed and predatory meets naive and low self-esteem” romances that you read about in storybooks.

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Slylock Fox, 7/31/17

This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with this particular brainteaser, but in the ensuing decade my patience for its many improbabilities has significantly thinned. Back then I was more worried about Slylock having to rassle an octopus to get those car tires; today, I’m just here to LOUDLY SCOFF at the thought that there’s five minutes worth of air in those tires, or that Sly is going to be able to rig up some system for releasing said air into Max’s diving bell. The best move here is for him to tell Max that he’ll be back “in just a little bit” with help, safe in the knowledge that slow suffocation is no doubt among the less painful ways to die. It’ll just be like falling asleep, probably! And there are plenty more mice down at the pet store and mouse-sized shorts-and-hat sets down at the post-animalpocalypse version of the Gap.

Mark Trail, 7/31/17

“I need to do a little check on my gear before I head out!” [pulls out loaded shotgun in small, enclosed space and puts finger on the trigger] “Yep, I sure feel like a big man doing this, so it’s probably working! Better do a few more tests first, though.” [spins around wildly, making sure to point barrel in the face of everyone in the cabin]

Spider-Man, 7/31/17

BREAKING: AREA MAN BELIEVES FEMALE RELATIVE HAS RIGHT TO SEXUAL AUTONOMY AND DESERVES ALL THE DATA SHE NEEDS TO MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS ABOUT HER ROMANTIC LIFE, PROBABLY THINKS THIS MAKES HIM SOME KIND OF BIG HERO

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Mary Worth, 8/3/17

“As a mere medical assistant, you are not authorized to question the sexual behavior of doctors! And as Dr. Fletcher’s current sexual target, his status has accrued to me! Now return to your duties and cease making eye contact with me at once!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/3/17

“Oh, right, we saw those pills in your purse last night so we dropped him off at Child Protective Services while you were asleep. We’re the Morgans — we know what’s right for everybody!”

Spider-Man, 8/3/17

Mole-Man, having already easily defeated Spider-Man by hitting him in the thigh with a stick, is under no illusions about how much protection he can offer.

Beetle Bailey, 8/3/17

“Gosh, it makes me mad that so many people seem to view the U.S. military as the enforcement arm of an acquisitive, hegemonic imperial state rather than as a noble and purely defensive institution! At least I know there’s one unquestioningly pro-military pop culture franchise out there: Beetle Bailey. Now to take a big sip of coffee and read today’s strip.”

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Spider-Man, 8/6/17

Tyrannus is an ageless immortal deposed Roman emperor born in the 5th century A.D., but I’m not sure what aesthetic he and Kala are going for here. Especially Kala, honestly. Tyrannus looks like he’s doing something barely a step above “generic off-brand superhero costume from Party City,” which is fine, but Kala is … a giant bee? A fake “Latin” nightclub act from the 1930s, performed by a white lady from the midwest? A fake “Latin” nightclub act from the 1930s, performed by a white lady from the midwest, and the nightclub act is bee-themed? At any rate, I fully endorse Newspaper Spider-Man continuing its trend of spending all its energy on the domestic lives of its super-powered characters.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/6/17

In their native riparian habitat, the Beavers are master architects, building secure lodges to live in and elaborate water-control structures to create an environment that suits them. But post-animalpocalypse, the new ruling class has dictated that all newly sapient beasts must move to the human cities and imitate their near-extinct predecessors’ lifestyle. Completely out of their element, the Beavers are reduced to smearing layers of hideous green paint uniformly over the walls of their newly assigned apartment. You can tell from the expressions on their faces how unhappy they are.

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Spider-Man, 8/7/17

Ahem, anyone who’s even given a cursory look over the Griffith Observatory’s website would know that “The Observatory does not permit rentals at any time for personal or seasonal events (such as birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, and holiday parties).” There is a potential loophole, though: you can rent the observatory for an event that furthers “the goals of civic responsibility; promotion of science and astronomy; collaboration on issues in which the Observatory has a functional relationship, such as education; or celebration of Griffith Park, its donor, or the facility itself.” Surely it would advance the cause of science if Mole Man were to give a lecture to assembled surface dwellers on the strange world beneath the Earth’s surface, which we know even less about than we do the other planets in our solar system. And if someone wanted to get married at the end of his talk … well, who could possibly object? You’d have to be a cruel bully like Rebel Without A Cause’s “Buzz” Gunderson to raise a fuss!

Funky Winkerbean, 8/7/17

The point of this is that this caricaturist is going to be yet another Famous Person From The Elaborate Backstory Of Starbuck Jones Who’s Down On His Luck For Some Reason, which I’ll have lots of time to complain about later, but I do want to point out that this lady is basically saying “I hired someone to perform labor, but now I’m mad because I could’ve made one of our guests do the thing he gets paid to do, but for free!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/7/17

Ah ha ha, she’s really going to do it, isn’t she? Dump her kid at the Morgans’ while she heads out to score some pills or possibly die? This is going to be delicious.

Mary Worth, 8/7/17

“LIKE IF YOU WANT TO FUCK OR SOMETHING! I WILL DEFINITELY COME TO YOUR WEIRD APARTMENT IN AN OUTDATED CONDO COMPLEX AND DO SEX TO YOU ON THE TWIN BED IN YOUR CHILDHOOD BEDROOM WHILE YOUR DAD IS OUT OF TOWN! I’LL BE THERE … FOR SEX! YOU SHOULDN’T HANG OUT WITH DR. NED, HE’S A REAL CREEP, BY THE WAY. NOT LIKE ME, I’M NICE!”

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Spider-Man, 8/11/17

Oh, man, looks like we’re about to learn what the most powerful force in the Newspaper Spideyverse is. It’s definitely not various relative attributes of a spider, that’s for sure! Nope, it’s love, which has transformed our Plutonian tyrant into a sweet suitor for a kindly widow. The question is: will it do the same for his successor? Sadly, no! An tyrant with a healthy relationship with his bride would talk through their differences, and see if there’s a way for them reconcile her sentimental affection for weddings with his need to ruthlessly smash every aspect of the former regime to cement his power. Crossing your fingers is for nine-year-olds, dude, not eternal undead Roman emperors who are [checks wikipedia] probably around 1560 years old but nobody’s sure because our sources for the Latin west in the late 5th century are pretty spotty!

Hagar the Horrible, 8/11/17

Oh, this is a nice touch: today would’ve been Hagar the Horrible creator Dik Brown’s 100th birthday, so his son, current artist Chris Brown, has put a portrait of him on the wall of Hagar’s hut! (Here’s a pretty great picture of him.) Unfortunately, the colorist doesn’t really seem to have a handle on what’s going on with Dik’s beard, so he looks like he’s covered in gravy.

Mark Trail, 8/11/17

Uh, guys? I know we’re all doing a lot of posturing about who guessed who’s identity and everything, but, uh, have you considered not standing out there in the freezing rain? Your skin is an unhealthy shade of blue. Maybe seek some shelter, see if you can light a fire … guys? Guys?

Mary Worth, 8/11/17

Sheesh indeed, Jared! It’s like you can pull out as much charm as you want with a girl and she still thinks it’s OK to make eye contact with other men???? I personally blame feminism for this!

Family Circus, 8/11/17

Oh no, who let Billy know about the devil’s metric system

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/13/17

Oh my God, somehow I just now remembered that June and Rex’s pal/former household employee Heather is agonizing over the fact that her agèd, Alzheimer’s-afflicted millionaire husband is in no shape to father the baby she’s always wanted! When last we heard from her, more than a year and a half ago, June was broadly hinting that Heather knows how sex works so Heather should probably just do sex with someone and get pregnant that way. I largely forgot about this because it was a plotline from the substantially wackier Woody Wilson era of the strip, and most of those got dropped when Terry Beatty took over writing duties on the strip. But now! An adorable little baby has just fallen right into June’s lap, and surely she won’t neglect to reward Heather for her years of faithful service. The only question is: will June actually tell her desperate childhood friend that she’ll be fobbing her orphaned son off onto a gold-digging white-collar criminal who lives with her agitated and demented husband in a drafty castle in England somewhere? Or will she just wait for her friend to drop dead and then put little Johnny in the mail?

Family Circus, 8/13/17

You know, the Keane house is really a character in today’s strip! Specifically, it’s like some huge, sedentary beast, its maw open and ready to feed, and Big Daddy Keane is responsible for its excretory processes.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/13/17

“Tearin’ off chunks of my flesh to devour, and I’m still capable of feelin’ everythin’! It’s a nightmare from which there’d be no escape!”

Spider-Man, 8/13/17

So, just to emphasize here: an immortal supervillain is leading an army of awful subterranean monsters to the Earth’s surface … to ruin a wedding, and the monsters have to be quiet, because otherwise they’ll wake up his wife, who loves weddings. I take back every mean thing I ever said about Newspaper Spider-Man. This is literally the greatest comic ever made.

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Spider-Man, 8/20/17

One of the great running gags of superhero comics is that it should be much, much easier for in-universe characters to figure out a superhero’s secret identity than it ever turns out to be. There are a host of reasons why the “secret” is always obvious — they’re never in the same place at the same time, their voices are identical, people look more or less the same whether they’re wearing glasses or not, etc. — but in our current case, it’s because Spider-Man and Peter Parker are pretty much the exact same kind of dick. Like, if my wizened aunt was about to finally wed her longtime beau and a giant tentacle erupted form the earth to attack the wedding party, I might be more inclined to shout “run!” or “oh no!” rather than “whoa, déjà vu much???” But that’s just how Peter Parker and Spider-Man play it.

Meanwhile, speaking of dicks, I had assumed last week that Tyrannus was shushing his army of fetish-gimps as they prepared to board some form of burrowing transport and head for the earth’s surface for wedding-ruining and subsequent conquest. But nope, it turns out this is all being down remotely, and he just wanted an audience as he gloated and pulled the big lever marked “TENTACLE.”

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/20/17

This throwaway-panel scene from Hootin’ Holler reminds all of us flatlanders that we should appreciate our infrastructure privilege.

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Curtis, 8/27/17

One of the things I truly appreciate about Curtis is its eternal return to its timeless tropes, like how Curtis doesn’t want to go back to school, or, in this case, how Curtis is ritually humiliated every year as he tries on back-to-school pants. These recurring gags, pegged as they are to the academic calendar, emphasize the fact that Curtis is trapped in amber in eternal comic book time: if he was going into sixth grade in the first of those strips I linked to above, he ought to be starting his third year of grad school now! But no, he and his mother are still shopping for those same back-to-school jeans. And yet: the world has changed. Parents as likely to buy jeans for their kids on Amazon or at Wal-Mart as they are to go to a traditional department store. More and more, malls are empty wastelands. And yet some things stay constant: though the cast of characters staring at his underwear change, the sense of sexual panic that Curtis can barely understand is still overpowering, and will last, dreamlike, forever.

Spider-Man, 8/27/17

I am genuinely tickled by the idea that Spider-Man really thought he had a handle on things here, keeping all eight tentacles at bay, eight tentacles he could deal with, before being blindsided by the dectopus’s secret ninth and tenth appendages. I’m also genuinely tickled that Tyrannus is content to watch this whole battle play out on TV. Truly, Spider-Man has met the foe he deserves.

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Mary Worth, 9/1/17

Dawn may be clueless enough to believe that Dr. Ned is divorced, but at least she isn’t so naive as to fail to recognize that Jared has been lusting after her for the entire length of this storyline. Probably that time he said “If you’re at your apartment alone, by yourself, I can show up at a moment’s notice!” was the subtle “tell” she picked up on. I feel like the way Dawn is holding her bagel in panel two is extremely relevant here: it’s completely ridiculous if she intends to eat it, but it’s a perfect grip to, say, hit chuck it at someone and hit them in the mouth at point-blank range if it becomes sadly clear that they’re about to confess romantic feelings for her.

Spider-Man, 9/1/17

Why do you think Tyrannus needs to take a sip from the fountain of youth before he orders Spidey and Mole-Man’s deaths? Upon my first read of this strip I thought he was going to do the dirty work himself and needed youthful strength, but no, he’s just going to order the Dectopus to do it. Does this ten-limbed beast from deep below the earth’s crust refuse to take orders from anyone who doesn’t radiate the vitality of a twentysomething? Has the surface world’s cultural obsession with youth penetrated even down to the subterranean realm?

Mark Trail, 9/1/17

I sincerely hope that what Sheriff What’s-His-Name is going to pull out of his saddle-bag is a bouquet of flowers and bottle of champagne, and we’re about to get a long, rambling speech that includes the phrase “See, the way to deal with a grizzly bear is you have to romance it” at least twice.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/2/17

Usually Snuffy’s brushes with the law are depicted with the same jocular gloss as the rest of Hootin’ Holler’s dysfunctional culture. The crimes are generally relatively low-impact stuff like bootlegging and chicken thievery, and Snuffy goes to jail for a few days and there’s tongue-lolling hilarity all around. Today … today is different. The Holler’s judge, the only real representative of outside authority in this lawless community, looks genuinely horrified by the case he’s just finished presiding over: has his previous indulgent attitude led to this? Even Snuffy and Loweezy look like they’re suffering true shame. My assumption is that the generations-old Smif-Barlow fued finally escalated to the point where Sheriff Tate stumbled upon a ramshackle cabin on the creek where Barlow corpses were stacked like cordwood.

Spider-Man, 9/2/17

Wait, Kala and Mole-Man were engaged? You know, for a gnomish, homely, nearly blind cave-dweller, he still gets his fair share of attention from the ladies! This makes Kala’s insistence that her husband not disrupt the Mole-Man/Aunt May wedding all the more poignant. Why can’t everyone in this strip be as emotionally advanced as her?

Pluggers, 9/2/17

It’s no “Rhino-Man hocks his TV,” but “pluggers feel overpowering shame over something that’s entirely harmless and increasingly socially normalized” is pretty high up there in the pantheon of Extremely Grim Pluggers Punchlines, in my opinion.

Judge Parker, 9/2/17

“To the CIA! Once we turn in your wife, we can stop worrying about this — and, here’s the best part, probably get a big reward!”

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Family Circus, 9/3/17

I genuinely think all the facial expressions on the middle panel make this a little masterpiece. Billy is bursting with pride, of course, and so is Mommy, if more subtly. PJ is confused as to why Billy is leaving the house — when will he back? Barfy looks distraught, presumably because Billy is the number one offender when it comes to feeding dogs under the table. Jeffy is mind-bendingly furious that his brother is receiving attention and approbation. And Dolly is like, “Wait a minute, why is he leaving for school and not me? Aren’t I old enough to go to school? I’m pretty sure I’m old enough to go to school.”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/3/17

Aw, isn’t that cute, the promised double wedding at the Starbucks Jones premiere is upon us! The minister that was scraped up at the last minute is cosplaying as a “Xaxian,” apparently the villainous species Starbuck fights against. This is a million times less weird than his use of the phrase “long-haul love” in his wedding sermon, which sounds like the name of a trucker fetish website.

Spider-Man, 9/3/17

Wait, wait, are you telling me that Tyrannus was just another landless aristocrat who only became a subterranean sovereign jus uxoris when he married Kala? That this whole drama is playing out because he feels emasculated by his wife’s political and financial resources? “We’re not so different, you and I,” Spidey chuckles. “I’m also an utter dick on this subject!”

Panel from Hi and Lois, 9/3/17

This is today’s Hi and Lois throwaway panel, and it doesn’t relate at all to the rest of the strip. I assume it’s left over from an earlier version, nixed by the syndicate, where a totalitarian government has taken root in Hi and Thirsty’s suburb, forcing everyone to maintain a visibly cheerful demeanor or face prosecution for sadcrime.

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Spider-Man, 9/8/17

Newspaper Spider-Man is already famous for having whole narrative arcs play out without the title character actually doing anything, but today’s strip is even better, providing us with an little drama that takes place entirely within the context of the villain’s monologue, with our protagonist and the other characters just kind of dumbly staring at him.

I have a lot of questions about the Official Fountain Of Youth Chalice. Like: if it’s made of pewter, as it appears today, or gold, as it appeared last week, how did it shatter so easily? If it’s as important as all that, shouldn’t Tyrannus have several spares? Will some Morlock artisan need to use the only remaining chalice to craft a new backup? Wouldn’t it be easy enough just to use the chalice to measure the actual recommended dosage of Fountain Of Youth Water so that we would know how many milliliters are necessary and dispense with the need for a chalice altogether?

Dick Tracy, 9/8/17

Undercover cop Lee Ebony, currently working deep within in the Neo-Chicago criminal underworld as “T-Bolt,” is taking care to report back to police headquarters using an encoded message in case her phone is tapped, as the footnote in the first panel helpfully indicates. Unfortunately, Sam Catchem seems to be under the impression that if her phone is tapped it’ll only record her end of the call, so he’s just answering using people’s actual names. Admittedly it gets confusing that the main bad guy’s name is actually “Mr. Bribery,” so it’s unclear if he’s talking about him or just the abstract concept of bribery, but either way this is bound to raise suspicions.

Mary Worth, 9/7/17

“…to my work! Ha ha, yes, as a handsome, well-paid doctor I’m very committed to my career. [suddenly speaking much faster and more quietly]also i’m still married to my wife and we’re not in an open relationship or anything, she has no idea i fuck my young employees on the regular[normal speaking style] So, you definitely have the apartment to yourself tonight, right?”

Pluggers, 9/7/17

Ahh yes, a man-bear’s eyes bugging out in panic as he tries to cram an overstuffed sandwich into his mouth before too much food falls into the sink, forcing him to scoop up the soggy scraps with his hands for the second round of feeding. A classic indeed!

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Arlo and Janis, 4/10/08
Dennis the Menace, 9/17/17

Margaret puts her own dark spin on the Arlo and Janis classic: It was her idea, Dennis, all hers. And she has so very many ideas for you.

Menace level: Grandmistress.

Spider-Man, 9/17/17

Hoo boy, is this strip ripping off Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or what: underground standoff, chalice of immortality, unstable geology, icy-hot villainess — the works.

Now Tyrannus here is an evil guy, no doubt: he usurped a kingdom from good ol’ Melvin the Mole Man, busted up his wedding, put him in chains, talked endlessly about killing him, yada yada. But Spider-Man’s plan is to deprive a desperate old man of the cheap, plentiful resource he needs to postpone his degeneration and death? Brr. Dude, you’re a super-hero, remember?

“Next: Hiding Aunt May’s digitalis!”

Phantom, 9/17/17

Speaking of stretching the limits of heroism, seriously Phantom, I know Prince Valiant set a precedent, but you gotta crucify these guys? (OK those aren’t technically crosses, but what else: “isocelate”?)

And isn’t Guran reaching for the blackout powder just a little too often? Last time I looked, that was for enemies, or at least mildly inconvenient nosy reporters. But he may need a lot more of it once it dawns on these cops that the sketchy rando who shows up out of nowhere and starts explaining the crime to them is pretty obviously the perp. Has nobody in this godforsaken backwater seen a single episode of Law and Order?

— Uncle Lumpy

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Bizarro, 9/22/17

As a matter of policy, the Comics Curmudgeon stands foursquare behind Love, and specifically condemns ichthyophobia in all its forms.

Arctic Circle, 9/22/17

And here is your second newspaper comic mermaid sex joke of the day. Maybe there’s something in the water?

Hägar the Horrible, 9/22/17

Hägar and Helga take up residence between the whorehouse and the monastery. Expect to be seeing a lot of Brother Olaf, guys: that guy practices what he preaches.

Spider-Man, 9/22/17

“… I could not stand by and watch you become a murderer. But I’m totally down with watching you shrivel in agony to a desiccated corpse. Out of love! I’m also OK conspiring with Spider-Man to murder you. Um … love!”

Gasoline Alley, 9/22/17

Dick Tracy reads Gasoline Alley twice — once in the paper and once online. He’s just that tough!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Dick Tracy, 9/27/17

Hey, remember the Space Coupe? It was a charmingly retro spacecraft invented by Diet Smith that allowed Dick Tracy and his pals to travel to the moon, leading to the act of cross-species sex that brought adorable li’l Honeymoon Tracy into existence! Honeymoon was actually born within this space-travelling cylinder, so she has a unique right to wear that t-shirt, I suppose, though I can’t help but think about people who died horribly in it not that long ago!

Gasoline Alley, 9/27/17

Speaking of dying horribly, looks like Rufus is about to be involved in a fatal officer-involved shooting on the streets of Neo-Chicago! Presumably it will be easy to spin his impenetrable fake rustic dialect as resisting arrest in some way.

Judge Parker, 9/27/17

Oh my God, did a member of the Parker-Driver clan experience a consequence of some kind??? And it was for something she barely even did! (She and her arms dealer dad might’ve done a few light murders in the course of extracting herself from a CIA rogue op she probably should’ve noticed she had accidentally become a part of.) Anyway, three years in the clink in Parkerverse time will be the equivalent of … maybe 40, 50 years in real time? Enjoy reading the joyous strips featuring April’s release on your holo-pads in space, everybody!

Spider-Man, 9/27/17

Uhhhhh, Peter, she’s … already a widow? Uncle Ben? “With great power comes great responsibility?” Is any of this ringing a bell, Peter

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/3/17

Oh, say, what’s going on with Les and his trilogy of graphic novels about his dead wife? Well, it seems he’s descended into cultish madness, seeing himself as the Prophet of some mysterious God (cancer?) and determined to lead his reader-flock to the land that God has promised them (death?). Jokes on everyone else, though, because we all know that Moses never made it to the promised land! Les will just be sitting by the River Jordan (the entrance to the oncology department?) watching everyone else pass through, and presumably writing maudlin comic books about them.

Family Circus, 10/3/17

There’s a lot of things to unpack here, but let’s just start with the fact that PJ is literally a baby and can hardly be said to have any “habits” to break. The more troubling truth is that the Keane Kompound has descended in anarchy and a neglected PJ is lashing violently out at everyone, even the religious leaders who have come to try to broker peace — and yet, due to a congenital family condition, Billy can only report this terrible state of affairs via cute wordplay.

Spider-Man, 10/3/17

“Old friend — get it? You’re thousands of years old and you’re going to crumble to dust soon! Ha ha! The friend part isn’t true, I actually don’t like you very much.”

Mary Worth, 10/3/17

Don’t listen to her Wilbur, give us every hot Latin detail, especially the sexual ones

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Hi and Lois, 10/5/17

I guess the joke here is about how Ditto cleaned his hands by … ruining one of the good towels, with his hand-filth? Anyway, I’m more intrigued by the giant steaming bowl of light-brown whatever on the counter behind Lois. Be sure to get all the dark brown off your hands, Ditto! Your whole family is going to be elbow deep in the light-brown goo soon enough! You don’t want to contaminate the goo, do you?

Spider-Man, 10/5/17

Ah, yes, our heroes have executed their strategy perfectly: isolate the villain from the substance he needs to stay alive, then claim that, despite the villain’s control of an army of thousands, only Spider-Man, with the proportional strength of an creature that we can all agree is primarily known for its digging prowess, can dig to said substance in time, then save the villain’s life and rejuvenate him so that he returns to the height of his powers. There are literally no holes in this plan!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/5/17

Hmm, looks like Rex Morgan is pivoting away from dogs too nightmarish to look upon and senile billionaires and the people who get to live their houses rent-free to … counterfeit comic book art being auction off on eB[I PASS OUT FACE-DOWN ONTO MY KEYBOARD OUT OF BOREDOM BEFORE I CAN EVEN FINISH THIS SENTENCE]

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Spider-Man, 10/26/17

Aww, isn’t that poignant — Spider-Man wishes he could use his superpowers to win battles against not just mutants and space aliens and mad scientists, but against sadness. If it makes you feel any better, Spidey, most of us don’t actually call you a super-hero.

Hi and Lois, 10/26/17

Ditto often strikes me as the happiest member of the Flagston clan, and today’s strip offers great insight into his secret: he keeps his expectations extremely low.

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Gil Thorp, 11/4/17

This entire “Uncle Gary schemes to get Rick to sing the national anthem” storyline is like the old philosophical irresistible force/immovable object problem, only with half-baked Gil Thorp plot points. Here, the conflict is between Gary’s monomanical attempts to get his nephew behind the mic for the homecoming game, which effort is all for naught because it can’t possibly lead to superstardom like he seems to expect, and Gil’s stubborn refusal to entertain the idea, which is entirely pointless and which he hasn’t even bothered articulating a reason for. Today’s strip is mostly entertaining to me because of the final panel, in which Dr. Pearl attempts to use her Ed.D. Mind Tricks to get Gil to lighten up already.

Spider-Man, 11/4/17

Speaking as a freelancer, I have to say that Peter Parker seems to have an extremely flawed view of the power dynamics between a stringer photographer and that stringer photographer’s only client. Still, I find today’s strip extremely relatable, as I too often soothe myself by imagining J. Jonah Jameson in a state of apoplexy.

Shoe, 11/4/17

Roz is right to sport the Patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror. In the Shoe world of sapient avians, a common form of suicide is to purchase multiple cats, then lay back and allow them to feed on the bird-flesh they crave.