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Gil Thorp, 11/19/18

Ah ha, it’s classic Gil, expressing shock that a kid with a decent haircut and middle-class clothes might be connected to wrongdoing, somehow! Remember when a wholly legal tattoo parlor opened in Milford and Gil destroyed it for no good reason? Anyway, I’m enjoying the fact that we’re getting this exposition dump during Coach Thorp and Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp’s desultory countryside jog. And speaking of Mimi, isn’t there some girls’ sport that shares a season with football that we could be seeing her handle instead of dealing with this snoozefest? Gymnastics? Volleyball? I’d definitely enjoy watching how varying growth spurts between freshman and sophomore year affected the tactical and emotional dynamics of the Spiking Lady Mudlarks a lot more than trying to figure out what classic French New Wave film Kaz is going to try and fail to compare to Tiki’s residency situation.

Dick Tracy, 11/19/18

It has come to our attention that the previous twist in this storyline, which involved faxing, was deemed “dangerously exciting” by many core members of the Dick Tracy readership. We are pleased to announce that the strip will henceforth be focusing on the minutia of contract law, with a special focus on payment terms.

Mary Worth, 11/19/18

“You see, we’ve gotten reports of an older gentleman who’s been manipulating people into helping him adopt shelter dogs and then … well, there’s no easy way to say this … eating them. Short, wears a bow tie? Have you seen anyone who fits that description?”

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Mary Worth, 11/7/18

Oh, actually, I guess this week isn’t going to be about the special care you need to take when adopting a traumatized dog. Nope, it’s just an elaborate metaphor, where Greta the bow-tie wearing dog is a stand-in for the bow-tie wearing Saul, who was shutting out the good along with the bad mere hours ago. Probably Greta will come around just as quickly, with help from a little roast chicken skin! Did Mary consider just luring Saul out of his apartment and/or emotional shell with some roast chicken skin? Might’ve saved everyone a lot of time.

Dick Tracy, 11/7/18

Remember when Dick Tracy was about truly horrific and violent deaths? Well, it’s about people faxing documents to other people now. Funny how things work out in this world!

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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.