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Spider-Man, 8/14/18

Oh heck yes, Kingpin’s back! You might remember this beefy supervillain from his previous appearance in Newspaper Spider-Man, where he changed the face of evil scientific research techniques with his hit management guide, Faster! Work Faster! and then fled in an adorably tiny submarine as his evil scheme collapsed. Anyway, he’s joined forces with Golden Claw for a superstar teamup, and the techniques he’s learning as an equal partner in a criminal enterprise will inform his next book, Murder By Committee: How To Get Buy-In From All Stakeholders For Brutal Gangland Killings.

Dick Tracy, 8/14/18

You ever think about how silly Liz feels talking awkwardly into her wrist genie just sitting around police HQ, when there’s a perfectly good landline phone right there on her desk? Probably not half as silly as Dick feels having to fill out all the damn paperwork the liberals say he needs to deal with every time he kills someone, but Liz’s irritation is a lot more justified.

Blondie, 8/14/18

Man, I wish this were a Sunday strip so we could really get deep into those napping-related security questions, you know? Like, ten is actually quite a lot! I know this strip generally satisfies itself with goofy fake brand names so probably they’d start off just being about how much he loves SleepLyfe® Pillows or whatever, but I really want to get in to the contours of Dagwood’s dreamscape, and I feel like by question six or seven he’d have no choice but to get real and discuss why he prefers sleep’s temporary annihilation of self to spending time with his friends and family.

Gil Thorp, 8/14/18

So it turns out that this year instead of doing a wacky summer storyline, Gil Thorp is doing a storyline about Gil doing some golf coaching. It also turns out that the only thing duller than watching other people play golf is watching someone explain to other people how to play golf.

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Mary Worth, 7/24/18

Sorry I haven’t updated you on Mary Worth in a bit, but rest assured that what was happening like two weeks ago — Tommy thought-ballooning about how his girlfriend is eventually going to find out about his terrible past — has continued happening with absolutely no dramatic forward motion of any kind. This remained true yesterday, and since Monday is the traditional day for new plots to being in soap opera strips, I have to imagine that today’s action pertains to the Tommy-Brandy storyline somehow — but how? Who is the mysterious figure helping Mary pick up her canned tomatoes? Why is Mary buying tomatoes? How can she maintain her taupe-to-ecru food spectrum if she’s putting tomatoes in things? Let’s all tune in tomorrow to find out!

Blondie, 7/24/18

Mr. Dithers letting Dagwood get a glimpse of the poor old man he’s kept enslaved for the last 30 years is a real power move that you have to respect! I also note that Steadfaster’s weird hairstyle looks kind of like Dagwood’s, so maybe this is supposed to be a threatening look into his future? He also looks vaguely like the villain in the 1983 Doctor Who serial Mawdryn Undead, so there’s that:

I have to assume this is a coincidence, because part of the vibe I get from Blondie involves extreme hostility to nerd shit of any kind.

Crankshaft, 7/24/18

Usually when Crankshaft makes his terrible wordplay, he’s glaring at his interlocutor/victim with dead-eyed hostility, so I guess this in some marginal way can be considered an “improvement.”

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Blondie, 7/18/18

Blondie is of course absurdly scrupulous about never using actual brand names in the strip. I’ll accept “Online To-Go” as Dagwood trying to come up with a generic phrase that describes the process of ordering food from various apps whose names he cannot be bothered to remember, but the real problem becomes apparent in panel two, as, faced with the prospect of having to come up with four names in short order, the strip verges from the dopey (“Cheesey Chuck’s”) to the uncanny valley of restaurant names (“Copogna’s,” “Gleerou’s” (?)).

Spider-Man, 7/18/18

The Newspaper Spider-Man strip is finally starting to explain one of its longest-standing mysteries, which is: what exactly are the parameters of its hero’s “spider sense” in this iteration of the spideyverse, and what good is it if it can’t, say, prevent its hero from bludgeoned with a pipe or a club, or just bonked on the head by falling masonry? Well, a few weeks ago we learned that Spider-Man has to be paying attention in order for spider-sense to work (which, if you were paying attention, why would you … need spider-sense in the first place?). Today nicely demonstrates that this is a particular problem for our hero because he is in fact extremely distractible. “OK, my spider-sense is tingling very powerfully, which means I have to pay very careful attention to my surroundings in order to avoid dang–OH MY GOD THAT DOOR IS SLIGHTLY AJAR THIS IS AMAZING”