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Blondie, 10/8/18

If there’s any single ingredient we associate with Italian food like delicious lasagna, it’s tomato sauce, so it’s kind of ironic for the purposes of today’s joke that tomatoes are one of the plants that went from the Americas to Europe in the Columbian exchange. All that mass-produced Italian food, slathered in red sauce and dropped under the heat lamps on the buffet of some terrible gigantic cruise ship, would be entirely foreign to poor Columbus, though certainly wouldn’t be the thing that most left him unmoored and terrified by changes in technologies and social attitudes. Good luck, Chris! And though he’s a problematic historical figure, I think Dagwood could use some of his yen for exploring the unknown, as he’s apparently happy to just eat canned lasagna at Lou’s, the only lunch spot he ever goes to, rather than driving the extra five minutes to the Olive Garden that’s inevitably at the next strip mall over.

Slylock Fox, 10/8/18

Ugh, Slylock, water-powered interstellar travel is within your grasp! Finally, you and your compatriots will surpass the human civilization that you’ve been mindlessly imitating ever since you overthrew it! You don’t just hand over the ice and let them leave! And if your animal scientists aren’t smart enough to figure out how this alien craft works, this is the moment where you show up at the prison where they’re holding Count Weirdly and make a deal with the devil.

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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.”