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Dick Tracy, 10/29/18

I did a small amount of Googling to try to figure out what “the old ‘neighborhood bank’ plan” was and came up empty, but I assume it was the sort of thing that wasn’t uncommon in the early 20th century, where local, unregulated financial institutions flourished and you could never be entirely sure if you were dealing with a grey-market bank or a ponzi scheme. But today’s Dick Tracy makes it clear how you could ensure your money was safe: just get your lawyer involved and then these undeground, gangster-run pseudo-banks would have to hold onto your money for decades and hand it over to your duly appointed heirs, decades later!

Crankshaft, 10/29/18

You know, when I was a kid riding a yellow bus to school, we had both a driver and a “bus aide” whose job was to keep us from killing each other so the driver could focus on not killing us in a terrible accident. Is that even a thing anymore? Was it ever a thing in most places? Anyway, Crankshaft has never had any assistance on his bus, and he makes do by just literally not giving a shit about what the kids do, not even bothering to look at them or spend any time thinking about them, really.

Pluggers, 10/29/18

Pluggers seems like they’re doing OK at first, but when you talk to them for more than a few minutes, the extent of their cognitive decline becomes obvious.

Crock, 10/29/18

Ha ha! It’s funny because the lady cactus doesn’t want to fuck!

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Dick Tracy, 10/23/18

The new-look Dick Tracy creative team loves to go to the strip’s 87-year-deep well for old favorite characters, but also introduce new ones, and since I’m still a defiant Dick Tracy Philistine after more than a decade of making fun of the strip, I have to check in with the invaluable Dick Tracy wiki to tell which I’m dealing with. That’s how I learned that Vitamin Flintheart has been in the strip since the ’40s, and that “In 1998, Vitamin was living in New York City, appearing in a production of Hamlet. He discovered his friend Dick Tracy, who was suffering from memory loss after eating tainted food on an airline,” a storyline that I’m devastated to have missed. Kandikane, meanwhile, is a recent addition, having been introduced in the last Vitamin storyline as a documentary filmmaker/candy cane obsessive who wanted to make a movie about the old fellow. Anyway, looks like he knocked her up! Just in case you wanted to think about May-December sex stuff involving Dick Tracy characters! Now you have to think about it! I have to think about it, so you have to think about it!

Six Chix, 10/23/18

I’m honestly going to be spending days mulling over the typography of the “At The Negative Commenters Association Meeting” sign. Why is “negative commenters” in a different font? Why are all the words all-capped except for “the”? Why is “at” in weird little extra box at the top of the sign? If this really were the Negative Commenters Association Meeting and that were really a sign letting you know where you were, wouldn’t that “at” be kind of weird and not-quite-right? Anyway, this is yet another Six Chix in honor of Unity Day 2018 (or, sorry #UnityDay2018), so good luck trying to figure out how this cartoon relates to bullying, at all! Oh, sorry does that make me a negative commenter? I don’t care! This cartoon is a baffling affront to the spirit of Unity Day 2018! (Please share this blog post on social media using the hashtag #BafflingAffrontToUnityDay2018)

Crankshaft, 10/23/18

Well, it looks like Crankshaft lost control of his bus on a rain-slicked hillside, killing him and all his passengers. Was his fiery death worth the suffering of all the innocent children who perished with him? Yes, yes it was.

Mary Worth, 10/23/18

At least someone around here understands the concept of consent.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/13/18

Beetle Bailey’s Rocky, created in order to cash in on the “rock ‘n’ roll” music the kids loved so much in the ’50s, has over the years taken on a number of conflicting attributes that might be vaguely lumped together as “anti-establishment”: he’s been an anti-war protestor, a nihilist, a mutineer and assassin, a violent street tough, and an abstract impressionist, so sure, let’s make him a muckraking journalist as well, for some reason! Anyway, panel two is a good image for those of you who can only get off when thinking about an old man ashamed of his own incontinence, I guess.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/13/18

Long-distance Viking trade networks did result in cultural contacts between medieval Arabs and Scandinavians, so it’s plausible that a djinni could find itself in the The Horrible’s Norwegian shack. And djinn are canonically charismatic, so it makes sense that Helga would want to have sex with this Middle Eastern spirit being and condemn her ungrateful husband to an eternity trapped in a lamp. This all checks out!

Blondie and Marvin, 10/13/18

Say, are you a comfortable middle-aged suburbanite syndicated cartoonist looking for a venue where you can work out your irritation with, say, those showboating NBA players, or the poor? Well, good news!