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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.

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Mark Trail, 10/26/18

[dramatic music sting] SHOCKING TWIST! But how can this be? Extremely Cool Motorcycle Guy has LONG HAIR and a MUSTACHE and STUBBLE??? How could such a ruffian be an ally of Mark Trail? I certainly hope that once we learn that the faction of Jose and Cool Motorcycle Guy was really being run by Mark from behind the scenes all along, and that Mark was happily using Rusty and Mara as bait to catch the artifact-nappers, our friend pulls off his wig and wipes off the fake facial hair to reveal the clean-shaven, crew-cut hero beneath the surface.

Dick Tracy, 10/26/18

How can we tell that Dick Tracy takes place in a heightened, parallel world, similar in some ways to our own but fundamentally different from it? Well, one clue is that Dick Tracy and the Neo-Chicago Major Crimes Unit routinely kill suspects without due process and face no consequences for doing so some syndicated newspaper cartoonist launching a strip about a forgotten pair of movie heroes from fifty years ago is “dominating the entertainment news today.”

Dennis the Menace, 10/26/18

The weirdest part of this panel is the word “countryside?” Like, that’s not a huge plane, but it looks to be a twin-engine commuter jet, probably carrying at least 75 people, and while those planes often fly to airports that serve smaller cities, you’re not going to land it on some dirt airstrip in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I guess the real menace here is that Dennis has slowly wormed his way into Mr. Wilson’s trust, until he gets the point of opening up with his innermost hopes and dreams, at which point his wife can belittle and humiliate him.