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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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Mary Worth, 5/21/17

Oh, wow, Derek is absolutely furious here and I love it. “We left the States to get some peace… only to get this! My wife was briefly unable to open a bathroom door, which is definitely the worst thing to ever happen to an American overseas! Fuck foreign countries, man! I’m going home and running for Congress on a ‘Build A Protective Dome Around America Which Neither Heat Nor Light Can Penetrate’ platform!”

Blondie, 5/21/17

I’m giving you the whole comic for context, but mostly I’m posting this so you can understand why the phrase “WOO-HOO! BABY CAMEL GONNA CHUG SOME H₂0” will be haunting my nightmares — and, presumably, yours — for years to come.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/21/17

But … Barney, you’re wearing a bowler cap and a vest and white gloves and you’re riding a horse and … oh, God, he doesn’t know, he can recognize that others are trapped forever in time like a fly in a spider’s web but can’t recognize that he’s in the same prison, this is a nightmare

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Gil Thorp, 5/15/17

OK, finally, after much dramatic wheel-spinning, we have this spring’s Gil Thorp storyline coming into shape: everyone loves muckraking investigative journalist Dafne when her reporting is bringing down fat-cat school board members, but when she starts nosing around the past of transfer student/rage maniac Ryan van Auken, she’s going to find out that her fellow teens aren’t that jazzed about a free and independent press after all! The last couple weeks have mostly been about a couple of boys’ track team members engaging in some extremely mild flirting with Dafne and one of her softball friends, so that will presumably work its way into the drama somehow, though honestly I’d rather it didn’t because it was frankly pretty boring.

Also, Dafne jokes about phone conversations being totally ’90s, but note that she’s apparently switched to her cell phone in mid-conversation, because landlines, ew, gross.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/15/17

I stand by my assertion from last week that Snuffy Smith’s depiction of the rural poor is fundamentally inauthentic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reveal interesting things about the mainstream society that creates and consumes it! For instance, in today’s strip an inhabitant of this isolated, impoverished hamlet discovers that his environment has been strewn with mass-manufactured garbage, and we’re expected to believe that he’d be ecstatic about it because he can extract a few pennies of marginal value from picking through the scrap.