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107

Crime and/or punishment

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/19/25

I really appreciate how chill Hagar is about his own prosecution here. Based on the wigs, he’s probably being tried for his crimes in England, which was particularly powerless to stop Viking raids during this period, so presumably he’s sticking around out of curiosity to see what the verdict will be before his warrior band overwhelms the inadequate local Saxon levies and frees him by killing everyone in the courtroom.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/19/25

Snuffy Smith has been doing a storyline where Barney Google has reappeared and is practicing law with no more legal training than his big city smarts, and apparently he’s winning case after case. This just goes to show the importance of an adversarial legal system: after decades of townsfolk being forced to appear in court without any legal representation, the town’s law enforcement community has lost all ability to make even the basic arguments necessary to convict obvious lawbreakers like Snuffy Smith.

Hi and Lois, 5/19/25

Look at the big smiles on Hi and Lois’s faces! They’re positively giddy at the prospect of watching 2024’s feel-good Oscar fare like Anora and The Brutalist. C’mon, Chip, join in on the fun!

136

Bleak Sunday

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Shoe, 5/18/25

You know I’m a fan of the depressing Shoe strips where either the Perfesser or Skyler is sitting in the living room chair and the other one has to just stand there awkwardly in order to have a conversation because they don’t have a second living room chair and have no plans to get one. A nice touch about these strips is that often, as in today’s, the person sitting in the chair has to uncomfortably crane their neck around to talk, just to emphasize that the house layout is incredibly hostile to the very idea of the two people living there interacting with one another for more than the briefest stretches of time.

Dick Tracy, 5/18/25

“…111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603! That’s the Art Institute of Chicago, which bought the painting from Grant Wood directly after it took a bronze medal in a competition there. It was lent to a couple European museums in the mid ’10s but it’s back now. Anyway, not sure why Dick Tracy needs to get this information over the phone from a real cagey guy who probably just murdered someone instead of looking it up online like a normal person, but I don’t tell him how to do his business.”

Panel from The Lockhorns, 5/18/25

This is about … Loretta dying, right? Like definitely Leroy is musing, right in the middle of their therapy session, about how great it would be for him personally if Loretta died?

158

Current and future ghosts

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The Phantom, 5/17/25

One of the key ongoing dramas of The Phantom is the question of what woman will contribute her genetic material to the ongoing Phantom bloodline by allowing Kit to sire the 24th Phantom on her, and so far the main competitors have been Kit’s local sweetheart in Tibet or his mother and sister’s choice, Kadia Sahara, the daughter of former Phantom archnemesis The Nomad. But … is there another? Savarna, of course, has mostly been interested in Kit’s dad, having flirted with him when he thought his wife was dead and proposed a superstar teamup that the Ghost Who Has Morals rejected because she’s violent and kind of insane. As a result, it seems that flirtation has cooled — sure, rescuing her from Gravelines Prison was the inciting incident behind the years-long “Death of the Phantom” arc, but that was a purely platonic jailbreak. Anyway, apparently somewhere along the line that I forgot about she met Kit back at the Skull Cave, and like many a young man, he fell under the spell of a worldly, sophisticated older woman. Like, look at her: she’s using a napkin! Ooh la la, fancy lady!

Gil Thorp, 5/17/15

There’s been some spring sports action in Gil Thorp over the past couple weeks that quite frankly has not risen to a level of “interesting” that would get me to comment on it. But Coach Martinez attempting to summon the ghost of Pop(s) right there in the athletic department storage room specifically to prove a point to Gil, to the obvious amusement of the other assistant coaches? You’d better believe I’m ready for multiple weeks of this.

Dennis the Menace, 5/17/25

Henry, wearing that checkered suit jacket/bow tie combo in public anywhere of course marks you as a true fashion moron. But specifically wearing it to a restaurant’s clearly labelled Western night? You dipshit. You absolute fool.