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Bizarro, 6/20/24

Happy Solstice, everyone! Do you think these ladies are supposed to represent the changing seasons, or that they’re just hanging out at a Neo-Pagan-themed bar? I don’t think the personified seasons would have cell phones, but if I were running a Neo-Pagan-themed bar, I’d make people keep their cell phones out of sight, because it very clearly ruins the vibe.

Dick Tracy, 6/20/24

Well well well, looks like everyone’s getting in on the Looking At Spicy Pictures In Manila Folders Action. Now, I think an important thing about art is that it can sometimes make you uncomfortable, which is how I know that the lady in panel two, her eyes bugging out and her lower lip pinned dramatically by her teeth, represents true art indeed.

Pluggers, 6/20/24

Pluggers! They’re in pain all the time! Are they dying? No, but they sure wish they were!

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Gasoline Alley, 6/11/24

So, the reason the electricity went out at Walt’s is that a big tree fell over and pulled down the power line running from the utility pole to the house, and now some guys from the power company have come out in the middle of the night to repair it. This is, obviously, annoying, and could easily be the most annoying thing that would happen to you in a given year, if your year was pretty good overall, but I do not think it could in any way be described as an “unbelievable ordeal.” It’s actually quite easy to believe! You think Walt and Gertie are going to describe it to other people and they’ll say “My God, you can’t be serious”? No, it’ll be more like “Oh wow, that sounds annoying. Nice that the power company came out to fix it in the middle of the night, though.”

Dick Tracy, 6/11/24

If we’re going to go through the trouble of continuing to make Dick Tracy comics, then I suppose part of that process has to be about exploring how Dick Tracy and his friends and foes would interact with modern-day stuff. I feel ambivalent about it, but I respect that they want to do it rather than just rehash golden age Dick Tracy stuff endlessly, and I have to say that I am marginally more intrigued to find out what Dick Tracy thinks about cryptocurrency than I was to find out what he thinks about furries.

Bizarro, 6/11/24

There are two things I love about this comic. The first is that the snowman outside the apartment has clearly spent a lot of time sculpting his snow-body into the flowing shape of a ethereal spectre, but is big enough to recognize that his friend’s cheap prop humor is more likely to win kudos than his own more subtle work. The second is that Bizarro has, in a bold refusal to adhere to conventions, chosen to do a joke about snowmen going to a Halloween party in the middle of the summer.

The Phantom, 6/11/24

A classic bit I do on my blog is to look at a day’s comic and say “Ha ha, surely the next development in this strip will be [something that is far too silly to ever happen in a comic strip]”, and a classic bit that the comics do in response is to produce a subsequent development that’s substantially sillier than I predicted. Anyway, I apologize for joking that “Space-Ox,” the private rocket company in the current Phantom storyline, is run by Elon Musk Ox (he’s just like Elon Musk, but also an ox). In fact, it’s run by Ian Mollusk (he’s just like Elon Musk, but also a snail).

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Bizarro, 3/23/24

One of my goals in this blog is to get you all to appreciate the comics as a fundamentally visual medium. You could describe a comic where the punchline is that a chicken is working in a diner and serves eggs that it just laid. But what makes this comic good is the smug and just vaguely sexual expression on the chicken’s face, along with the human customer’s expression indicating that he gets everything that’s going on here, he’s extremely disgusted, and yet feels he has no choice but to eat the eggs anyway.

Dick Tracy, 3/23/24

You ever forget how many days there are in a week? You ever forget how many days there are in a week when your job involves creating a specific number of creative works tied to the number of days in a week? I think a nice thing to do if you find yourself in that situation is to just let your characters enjoy a nice dessert before moving on with their story.

Slylock Fox, 3/23/24

It’s truly demeaning what the animals in the Slylockverse had to put up with in the days and weeks after the moment when they achieved sentience but still had to obey outdated human law. It wouldn’t be long after the moment captured here when the dog would be wearing the police uniform and the policeman would be in a mass grave. The squirrel knows the horror that awaits!