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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/18/18

“It’s not as weird as being sent to check in on a patient’s beach house and finding it occupied by a bunch of strippers with hearts of gold, or as weird as stumbling upon a MRSA epidemic spread to teens all over town by infected wrestling mats, or as weird as a nanny and a couple of her friends conspiring to keep a demented old man in charge of a publicly traded corporation for their own financial benefit. Seems like that kind of fun stuff doesn’t really happen around here very much anymore! Just, uh, old comic book art hidden under the floorboards from here on out, I guess.”

Dick Tracy, 8/18/18

Thanks, Dick Tracy Narration Box, for reminding me, a Dick Tracy reader, that I’m consuming serialized content! Without this warning I may have spent the next 24 hours worrying that we’d never learn what Bribery and Lafayette Austin have to talk about, or that maybe the strip was just going to unceremoniously stop publishing altogether.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/18/18

Snuffy Smith trying to latch onto the sovereign citizen movement is possibly the least surprising development in the comics pages this year.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/8/18

So Funky has to go get Holly’s mom in Florida for complex reasons that I’ll probably have to explain at some point if I want to make fun of this strip in the next several weeks but let’s just set them aside at this point, and he’s leaving his dumb stepson Cory (I think he’s his stepson? I’ve never actually been clear on this point) in charge of Montoni’s while he’s away. I’m assuming the joke here is that Cory is trying to relate to his stepdad using awful wordplay, which is the preferred method of establishing intimacy in Westview, but Funky is just getting madder and madder because he never liked Cory and he never will. But it would be much funnier if Cory were trying to convince Funky to roll out his million-dollar idea for a new product, “Pizza Cake,” which the family then sinks all its money into promoting only to discover that Cory has just accidentally reinvented Chicago-style pizza and none of the right-thinking citizens of northeast Ohio want anything to do with it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/8/18

Our fellas are laffin’ it up, but they’re also expressing a genuine frustration about life in Hootin’ Holler: in the absence of a widely accepted system of impartial justice, disputes in this hardscrabble region are settled by the power wielded by interlocking kinship groups, and frequently escalate into violent feuds. Lukey and Snuffy live in a world where no relationship with another person is allowed to be merely tepid or neutral: either someone is your dearest friend who you would defend, literally, to the death, or a hated enemy who must be defeated, all based on an argument that happened in a saloon three generations ago.

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Spider-Man, 8/1/18

Wow, it used to be that all you had to do to be the sinister leader of criminal syndicate with a vice grip on Chinatown was be a vaguely racist stereotype and have an army of sexy swordsladies at your beck and call. But now it turns out that you also have to keep up on all the latest D-list celebrity gossip just so that you don’t accidentally chop off the head of the chump husband of some Broadway actress. The final panel is a sad and totally accurate assessment of the relative importance of journalists and people whose spouses occasionally appear in People.

Pluggers, 8/1/18

OK, see, Pluggers, we have a deal where you get to do your thing so long as the event you depict in your panel puts a little bit of a twist on the caption, and the key to this is that the caption has to be a commonly used phrase or concept for non-pluggers, and you show us the plugger spin on it. But today we’re being asked to believe that “upgrading your timepiece” is a thing? A thing anyone says? Maybe pluggers believe that this is a thing that nerds who wear smartwatches say? Hey, Pluggers: the caption to this one could’ve just been “A plugger smartwatch,” BOOM.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/1/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler’s only medical facility is infested with vermin!