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Dick Tracy, 11/5/18

There’s a lot that seems amiss to the history here, in the Neo-Chicago Parallel Universe. “Miller” is a very common Jewish surname, and talk of escaping the “poverty of the ghetto” seems to point further in that direction. But then we have talk of the “local Russian community,” which definitely isn’t the same thing as the local Jewish community, though I guess it could’ve been a term used for a neighborhood of Russian Jews in particular. I remember my grandmother, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, telling me in fairly snooty terms about how uncouth some of her soon-to-be in-laws, who were Russian Jews, were, so there were definitely divisions within those communities, though while we’re at it Russian Jews would’ve for the most part come from a small shtetl in the countryside; it was Jews from elsewhere in Eastern Europe who lived in ghettos in big cities. Anyway, I guess I’m dancing around the real problem here, which is that panel two seems to imply that the Millers made the grueling overland trip from Russia to America over the frozen Bering Strait.

Six Chix, 11/5/18

Fun fact: Under British law, there’s two uses of the title “princess”: One is if you’re a daughter or a granddaughter of the sovereign, or a granddaughter of the heir to the throne, in which case the correct form of address is “Princess Charlotte of Cambridge”; the other is if you’re married to a prince, in which case the correct form of address is “Diana, Princess of Wales” or the like. Kate Middleton is considered a princess but takes her husband’s title so her formal address is “Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge,” and the only reason I know all this is that the people who edit Wikipedia pages about royalty fuckin’ love correcting people on this point with a special passion, especially when it comes to Princess Diana Diana, Princess of Wales, who they transparently despise. It’s also worth noting that Queen Elizabeth’s husband was born a prince of Greece but renounced his foreign royal titles upon getting engaged, and then wasn’t granted by special dispensation the right to be called “Prince Philip” until Elizabeth had been Queen for five years. I’m not sure what my point is here except that this comic strip is wrong even beyond the fact that any comic strip taken up entirely by pinkish diagrams of internal organs can be rightfully called “wrong.”

Mary Worth, 11/5/18

I’m actually kind of glad that this Mary Worth is going to face the fact that emotionally traumatized animals can be really rewarding to rescue but aren’t just plug-and-play instant perfect pets and need special care to really bring into their own. Anyway, that sure looks like a nice rug Saul has in his living room! It would be a shame if somebody anxiety-peed all over it, repeatedly.

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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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Mary Worth, 10/27/18

An act of providence? An act of providence? Mary, there wasn’t some crazy series of coincidences guided by a divine hand that led Mr. Wynter to this sad pup. You were the one who tricked him out of the apartment by claiming you had car problems and then drove directly to the animal shelter. This is as close to an open confession we’ve gotten of how we’ve long suspected Mary sees herself: as a direct instrument of God’s will on Earth, or perhaps even as a Deity in her own right.

Dick Tracy, 10/27/18

I apologize for my premature complaints about the realism in this story line. While it’s of course wholly improbable that newspaper syndicates would roll out, with great fanfare and expenditure of resources, a comic strip about two obscure actors from several generations ago, it’s significantly more likely that if a cartoonist contacted various newspapers and said “Say, would you like to run a comic strip I’m drawing about two obscure actors from several generations ago? You don’t have to pay me — in fact, the situation is quite the opposite, thanks to a trust fund that’s been earning investment income for decades and was set aside for this very purpose,” they’d at least hear the guy out.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/18

If this strip ran on a Monday, it would be the setup for a week’s worth of jokes about Lukey’s beefy, amiable cousin Moose, who might have been pulled from the 99 years of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith archives or might’ve just been made up today to be mined for laughs, who can say! But it’s not Monday. It’s Saturday. Moose is here because the best this strip could do for a joke today was “What if Snuffy thought Lukey was talking about an animal, but in fact it was a person who had the same name as an animal, or possibly a it’s nickname given to him because of his large stature,” and I honestly think that’s pretty sad.