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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/18/18

“It’s not as weird as being sent to check in on a patient’s beach house and finding it occupied by a bunch of strippers with hearts of gold, or as weird as stumbling upon a MRSA epidemic spread to teens all over town by infected wrestling mats, or as weird as a nanny and a couple of her friends conspiring to keep a demented old man in charge of a publicly traded corporation for their own financial benefit. Seems like that kind of fun stuff doesn’t really happen around here very much anymore! Just, uh, old comic book art hidden under the floorboards from here on out, I guess.”

Dick Tracy, 8/18/18

Thanks, Dick Tracy Narration Box, for reminding me, a Dick Tracy reader, that I’m consuming serialized content! Without this warning I may have spent the next 24 hours worrying that we’d never learn what Bribery and Lafayette Austin have to talk about, or that maybe the strip was just going to unceremoniously stop publishing altogether.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/18/18

Snuffy Smith trying to latch onto the sovereign citizen movement is possibly the least surprising development in the comics pages this year.

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Spider-Man, 8/14/18

Oh heck yes, Kingpin’s back! You might remember this beefy supervillain from his previous appearance in Newspaper Spider-Man, where he changed the face of evil scientific research techniques with his hit management guide, Faster! Work Faster! and then fled in an adorably tiny submarine as his evil scheme collapsed. Anyway, he’s joined forces with Golden Claw for a superstar teamup, and the techniques he’s learning as an equal partner in a criminal enterprise will inform his next book, Murder By Committee: How To Get Buy-In From All Stakeholders For Brutal Gangland Killings.

Dick Tracy, 8/14/18

You ever think about how silly Liz feels talking awkwardly into her wrist genie just sitting around police HQ, when there’s a perfectly good landline phone right there on her desk? Probably not half as silly as Dick feels having to fill out all the damn paperwork the liberals say he needs to deal with every time he kills someone, but Liz’s irritation is a lot more justified.

Blondie, 8/14/18

Man, I wish this were a Sunday strip so we could really get deep into those napping-related security questions, you know? Like, ten is actually quite a lot! I know this strip generally satisfies itself with goofy fake brand names so probably they’d start off just being about how much he loves SleepLyfe® Pillows or whatever, but I really want to get in to the contours of Dagwood’s dreamscape, and I feel like by question six or seven he’d have no choice but to get real and discuss why he prefers sleep’s temporary annihilation of self to spending time with his friends and family.

Gil Thorp, 8/14/18

So it turns out that this year instead of doing a wacky summer storyline, Gil Thorp is doing a storyline about Gil doing some golf coaching. It also turns out that the only thing duller than watching other people play golf is watching someone explain to other people how to play golf.

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Dick Tracy, 8/5/18

Today’s Dick Tracy is brought to you by the tourism board of Minot, North Dakota: the Magic City! Sadly, this nickname is not a testament to its rich heritage of sleight-of-hand artistry, but rather is a reference to the fact that it sprung up almost overnight in the 1880s, as if someone had waved a wand and intoned “Abracadabra!” The real reason was not because of any dark sorcery, of course, but because it was at one point the last stop on the Great Northern Railway as that line was being built across the U.S. The town’s railroading history makes it an appropriate location for this adventure, since Sawtooth escaped from his botched attempt to kill Dick Tracy by hopping on a freight train. According to Wikipedia, another nickname for Minot is “Little Chicago,” which makes sense as well because it’s where Dick Tracy, a lawless cop from Regular Sized Chicago, is going to gun down Sawtooth while he’s “attempting to escape,” Chicago-style.

Pluggers, 8/5/18

The obvious thing to point and laugh at here is of course “pluggers wouldn’t be caught dead spending time in some foreign country where the people probably don’t even speak English,” but let’s not sleep on the fact that our plugger couple is making their vacation plans based on whatever happened to show up unsolicited in their mailbox this morning. You can have your fancy digital marketing campaign with your carefully cultivated Instagram influencers; the way to a plugger’s heart, and wallet, remains direct mail.