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Spider-Man, 9/9/14

It does seem a little sad that, in order to find a foe worthy of Newspaper Spider-Man’s capabilities, the strip creators have had to pick a character out of the deep Spider-Man rogues gallery who’s literally a moron. I do like the Ox-eye’s view in panel two, in which Spidey attempts to physically draw the information out of his bewebbèd foe. In panel three, our hero expresses shock that someone in the criminal underground wouldn’t want to freely give out his name.

Archie, 9/9/14

I’m truly enjoying the emotional roller-coaster our hapless fast food employee is on here, from glum sadness to eye-twitching rage. Remember, advertising isn’t just business-to-consumer communications (B2C, as we say in the biz); it’s also business-to-business, or B2B! Join the fast-paced world of fast-food franchising, where you can serve delicious burgers to customers who are as attractive as these handsome actors! The sour looks all around in the final panel are a sad commentary on the web of mutual deceit on which modern consumer culture is built.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/9/14

Isn’t this charming! The mysterious millionaire who creepily wears widow’s weeds at all times and her thuggish henchman have brought these children to a windowless warehouse corridor in a dangerous neighborhood! GOOD PARENTING DECISIONS BY THE MORGANS, AS PER USUAL.

Blondie, 9/9/14

Anthropologists tend to see distinctions between societies that enforce rules of social conduct based on guilt and those that enforce them based on shame. They should probably study wherever it is Dagwood came from, since he is clearly capable of neither.

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Blondie, 9/8/14

Wait, wait, Dagwood, I want to hear more about your line of food-themed children’s books! Like Beauty and the Beef: does a simple peasant girl fall for a handsome prince who’s under a witch’s curse and has been turned into a succulent, mouth-watering plate of roast beef, and the girl must lift the spell before her love for the prince is overwhelmed by her hunger? Or Three Little Pigs In A Blanket: is this how the story should’ve ended, with the Wolf victorious and the pigs devoured, though not before their (still living?) bodies are wrapped in flaky, delicious biscuit dough? And “Wee Willie Twinkie” — clearly an anthropomorphic Twinkie, but a child, younger than Twinkie The Kid, trapped eternally in a prepubescent state like a boy vampire by Hostess Brands LLC’s devilish formula of shelf-stabilizing food preservatives. “Please eat me!” Wee Willie begs the reader. “I cannot decay over time! I’m an abomination against all that is natural and good! I long for death!” Anyway, these sound like they wouldn’t be traumatizing at all and I think Dagwood should spend a lot of time and money trying to get them published.

Dennis the Menace, 9/8/14

I originally saw the quotes around Dennis’s sentence here and assumed he was repeating something he had just heard on TV, while looking over his shoulder at his mother and presumably showing a creepy lack of affect: vaguely menacing, I thought. But I went back and looked at older panels and nope, it turns out the dialogue for Dennis the Menace is always set out in quotes, meaning that this is something he’s saying to his mom about … the fact the he’s watching people on TV making out, maybe? “Look, Mom, maybe this is several years earlier than you expected me to start looking for ‘Adult Situations’ in the television listings, but let’s establish a policy now of never talking about it, OK?” Menacing level: extreme.

Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 9/8/14

One thing that’s fun about the Funkyverse is when women in stereotypically attractive professions (newscasters, personal trainers) are drawn with heavy-lidded, half-dead eyes. Somebody knows what they like! They like it when you’re so beaten down by life that you can’t feel anything anymore. Anyway, Crankshaft controls the last viable bee colony in his county — and perhaps in the world? — giving him unprecedented power over agricultural production, and, by extension, our very existence. And also Funky doesn’t want to do his exercises! Wacky!

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Blondie, 8/18/14

Blondie has always been cheerfully hostile towards contemporary pop culture and/or modernity, so it’s pretty impressive that the strip has actually managed to find a musical reference here that isn’t dated or just completely wrong-headed. If it’s being deployed in the context of Elmo aggressively demanding that Dagwood forge an affectionate note from a wildly popular 24-year-old songstress for his own inscrutable and no doubt sinister purposes, so much the better.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/18/14

So the whole point last week’s noir-ish reverie, at the end of which someone got killed, was to remind Les of the existence of his “kill fee.” In the normal world that humans inhabit, a kill fee is what a writer gets from a publication when they fulfill the obligations of their contract but then the publication decides, for whatever reason, not to publish what they’ve written; it’s less (usually substantially yet) than what they were originally promised for the article, but the writer keeps all rights to their work and can try to sell it to someone else. But in the cutthroat world of Hollywood screenwriting in the Funkyverse, it apparently refers to a fee a writer gets when he decides he hates working on movies and just up and quits, even though he’s already gotten a big check for his script, which sounds pretty neat. Looks like I made the right choice to go west and try to make my own way in the entertainment industry!

Pluggers, 8/18/14

A physically active plugger expressing unbridled and even manic joy rather than down-home smugness or vague unease with modern life? A plugger’s all-wheel-drive that doesn’t refer to a proudly retrograde smoke-belching motor vehicle of some kind? What the hell is this even? Was someone just really, really eager to draw a bear wearing roller skates and a helmet? Not that I can blame them, it’s a pretty rad thing to draw.

Six Chix, 8/18/14

While I’m not familiar with the specifics, I’m sure there are any number of belief systems in which the sea is regarded as a single, feminine entity. Over the millennia, she’s drawn tens of thousands of sailors to their doom in her watery bosom, so the idea that she might be constantly murmuring their final terrified blasphemies seems reasonable as well.

Spider-Man, 8/18/14

I swear I’m not just saying this over bitterness over my own botched attempt to get an academic PhD, honest: I find it really pretentious when people who have non-medical doctorates go around calling themselves “doctor.” Maybe Doc Ock wanted to call himself “Professor Octopus” but then he got an angry letter from the provost reminding him that he was only an adjunct lecturer.

Momma, 8/18/14

Hello, ladies! Have you ever left the house or had interactions or experiences of any kind? Well, Momma is sorry to hear you’re such a whore.