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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!

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Mary Worth, 10/11/18

So it looks like Mary’s going to go with the “Tee hee, I need a big strong man to make sure I’m not ripped off by those ruffians down at the auto repair shop” gambit to try to lure Saul out of his Sadness Condo. Charmingly patriarchal as I find Mr. Wynter’s snarled “What happened to your boyfriend?”, we all know what happened to Mary’s boyfriend: (a) this is all a ploy so he’s not even involved, (b) he has an actual job, unlike these two retiree layabouts, and (c) he’s extremely nervous and would probably react to any hard sell from the mechanics by saying “He’s right, Mary! A car without a thorough undercoating is unsafe!”

Crankshaft, 10/11/18

There’s this whole depressing long-simmering storyline that Crankshaft has revisited over the years about how Lilian thwarted her sister Lucy’s love life when they were young out of jealousy, which I can never keep the details straight because I find it tedious, and also I think Lucy died within the last ten years of real-life time or so in some tragic way … was it Alzheimer’s? I’m gonna say Alzheimer’s. Anyway, the fella who was the object of both sisters’ desire in their youth is this behattèd gentl here, who’s come to this class reunion to offer absolution, I guess, and also offer career advise: Lilian should write a book about her tragically dead sister! Sure, she’s written exactly one book, a cozy murder mystery, and cozy murder mysteries are a solidly commercial genre that you can be real successful in if you find your niche, and she landed her agent on the strength of that manuscript, but why not suddenly shift gears and write a memoir? Remember, this is the Funkyverse, where the only valid literary form is the Tragic Memoir About A Loved One Who Died.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/11/18

Speaking of the Funkyverse, Funky had planned to “run through the tape here at Montoni’s,” which I take to mean that he intended to keep working there until he died, presumably of a rage-stroke while he screamed at some tomato sauce supplier over the phone, but now he’s going to abruptly hand the job over to his nephew and peace out. Does he have any retirement savings to fall back on, or has he finally realized that dying in poverty is preferable to smelling burnt pepperoni and sadness every day for the rest of his life?

Crock, 10/11/18

This comic doesn’t make any sense because it’s established Crock canon that Maggot and Grossie live in a tent. I hate that I know this.