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Spider-Man, 6/15/18

Oh, hey, whaddya know, Spider-Man and Iron Fist’s laudable attempts to find out why Jimmy Woo got stabbed and stop him from getting stabbed again, respectively, have unfortunately been set aside so that they can battle it out on the roof of a hospital while engaging in some of the most cringe-inducing banter this strip has ever seen, which is really saying something. Mostly, though, I’m interested in the third panel here. Like many comics, Spider-Man is extremely wedded to the classical iconography that has nurses dressed all in white and sporting a nurse’s cap, even though that hasn’t been the standard nurse’s uniform in the U.S. in decades. Another change in the nursing profession is that now there are male nurses, who never wore the cap, so putting that kind of retro outfit on them would be pretty silly, which gets you incongruous visuals like we have in this strip, where one of our sinister baddies has taken regular scrubs from the supply closet, and the other prepped for this job by shopping in the “naughty nurse” section at the local Halloween superstore.

Crankshaft, 6/15/18

Bad news, everybody: Crankshaft’s garden club isn’t going to turn into a weekly senior citizen S&M orgy, despite what we’ve all been hoping.

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Mark Trail, 5/22/18

Wow, Rusty sure looks mournful in that last panel, doesn’t he. “Yeah … he does that kind of stuff. Pushing whales back into the ocean, I mean, instead of leaving them on the beach where certain kids had lured them because they had planned to spell out ‘I THINK YOU’RE NEAT, MARA’ in 20-foot-tall letters made of strips of rotting blubber on the sand. He’s, uh, [suppresses a sob] pretty cool like that.”

Crankshaft, 5/22/18

One of the less fun running jokes in Crankshaft is about how Lena, Crankshaft’s wholly pleasant co-worker, is held in cruel contempt by everyone she works with for no discernable reason. You’ve probably enjoyed the fun stylings of “Lena is belittled for her failures as a bowler,” and so now buckle in for “Lena is belittled for her failures as a golfer,” which is exactly the same as the bowling thing except somehow even less interesting.

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Crankshaft, 5/20/18

I’m not a baby boomer, so I thought that maybe the incredibly banal sentence “I’m sorry to say the band has broken up” was uttered mournfully by Paul McCartney at a famous press conference or something, but turns out nope! Turns out that this is just a sad attempt to build a joke a backwards from a possibly real-life incident in which a FitBit — wait, sorry, “Never-Quit-Bit” — band broke, and the only band (in the group-of-musicians sense) that came to mind to make the joke specific was the Beatles. Which, I get it, know your newspaper-comic-reading-audience, but … couldn’t we come up with a more contemporary reference? One Direction? Didn’t One Direction just break up? (I’m not a baby boomer, but I’m also not, like, a young person, so I don’t actually know.)

Mary Worth, 5/20/18

Sorry, guys, I won’t apologize for just cackling in cruel delight whenever Wilbur overcomes some pathetic life drama and claws his way back up to the level of mediocrity he’s comfortable with and then just spasms with delight! The classic example of this is obviously “I shouldn’t be alive … but I am!”, but also let’s not forget the time that Wilbur used his Ask Wendy column to advise a lady to dump her husband, and when she did and regretted it, she sued him, but the case was thrown out on a technicality, leading Wilbur to literally vibrate with relief like a tuning fork. The penultimate panel here is great on its own, of course, but what really makes it special is the context, which is that Wilbur is talking to his editor in the panels before and after it, and there’s no indication that he’s muted the call in between.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/20/18

The last time Heather entered the Avery International board room, of course, it was to prop up her dementia-striken husband, hoping against hope that he could hold it together long enough to fool the board into thinking he still had control of his faculties and could therefore legitimately block a corporate merger that would’ve probably benefitted company shareholders. She committed this fraud for no reason beyond spite against Milton’s son. But bringing in a baby would obviously be beyond the pale!

Dick Tracy, 5/20/18

I sincerely hope that the narration box in panel four is meant to indicate that, here in the back room of Bank Mazuma, a mysterious robotic voice from nowhere suddenly announced “Lights out! Everybody dance!” and then the rest of this gunfight is scored to extremely aggressive techno music.