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Dick Tracy, 6/10/18

Ha ha, I guess this is why they call him “Sawtooth”: if you try to make small talk with him during the 46-hour train ride from California to Chicago, he’ll bite your head off! Metaphorically. And maybe literally, later. 46 hours is a long time. And that’s the scheduled travel time. Those long-haul Amtrak routes often run very late. Lotta opportunities for, say, a guy with metal teeth to bite another guy’s head off, is what I’m saying. He’d have some soothing quiet then, by God. Except for all the horrified screaming, I guess.

Mary Worth, 6/10/18

Remember, Mary is of a certain age, so she uses euphemisms like “seeing someone at the Medical Arts Building” to mean psychotherapy and “exciting personal life” to mean “non-stop fuckfest with a hot rich dude her son’s age, to which I have given my blessing.”

Spider-Man, 6/10/18

Boy, there’s a lot of musing about hospital administrators padding out this comic before we get to the best: the NEXT: box that boldly uses the completely horrifying phrase “spider of flesh!” Imagine if you will a spider not covered in chitin like the ones you know, but rather just composed entirely of flesh. Just a spider-shaped flesh-chunk, no organs or anything like that, but somehow alive, and moving. Pretty awful, right? Sure would want a fist made of iron to come along and pound it into oblivion!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/10/18

“…with a bigger budget than most, of course. So, in other words, I’m not like a regular mom at all! I’m rich as shit!”

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Dick Tracy, 5/31/18

Oh, right, they tried to kill Dick Tracy last year by tying him to a tree and letting him freeze to death? It was both ineffective and so boring that I seem to have not covered it at all on this blog, and you have to admit it isn’t necessarily the most obvious way to kill a guy when you’re hiring a man named “Sawtooth” with razor-sharp metal teeth to do the killing. I mean, you’d think you’d want the guy to, like, bite him, right? Bite him with his deadly metal teeth? Anyway, Sawtooth is working on his own now, which means he does it his way, which, I assume, means the whole biting-to-death thing. Ha ha, look how excited he is! Gettin’ all sweaty and worked up thinking about all the biting he’s gonna do!

Blondie, 5/31/18

The thing I can’t get past in this cartoon is Elmo’s opening line: “Mom made me wear this for graduation, Mr. B.” I can’t decide which possibility I like more: that Elmo, whose extremely bad attitude is on display throughout this strip, didn’t want to dress like a damn square the way the man says you should for your graduation, but his mom forced him to conform to social norms for at least the length of the afternoon; or if Elmo’s graduation from, like, second grade or whatever is rightfully not being run by his school with any particularly degree of ceremony, but his mother is insistent that her child and each of his milestones, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are of utmost importance and should be treated accordingly.

Dennis the Menace, 5/31/18

Ha ha, we make a lot of jokes on this blog about what is or isn’t menacing, but I think we can be serious for a moment and say that a guy sitting by himself in the park telling little kids about all the fucking he’s doing overseas is pretty bad news.

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Beetle Bailey, 5/28/18

The character design in Beetle Bailey is extremely stylized, which is actually fine and not anything to complain about, it’s a cartoon, for Pete’s sake, though I will say that if anything a little too much attention is generally lavished on the ears. I mean, why draw the head as a basic oval but then spend a lot of time getting the details of all the little cartilage nubs inside the earlobe correct? Why make two characters where the distinguishing feature between them is that one of them has cauliflower ears? I guess it’s all been leading to this moment, this moment when an amiable, popular, long-running newspaper comic strip takes a sudden and nauseating left turn straight into nightmarish body horror.

Hi and Lois, 5/28/18

I guess that’s supposed to be the Flagstons’ occasionally glimpsed elderly neighbor at the lower right there, but since Memorial Day is of course as we all know a holiday set aside to remember those who died while serving in the armed forces, and the day where we honor the living for their service is called Veteran’s Day and is in November, I choose to believe that that’s actually a ghost, sadly watching these civilians enjoying their three-day weekend and not remembering the reason for the season, which is to say him. That explains why he’s standing in the yard but nobody seems to notice him, and why his words are depicted in a thought balloon (ghosts cannot be heard by the living, obviously). “Ah ha,” you’re saying, “But Josh, why is he old? We don’t as a rule send the elderly off to die in wars!” Well, jokes on you, buddy: your assumption that we live on eternally young in the afterlife is obviously flawed. This guy probably died in Korea or Vietnam in his 20s and his spectre continued to age, much to his horror. “Maybe if I can will these living souls into remembering me, that will keep me young,” he thinks. Sorry, soldier! That’s not how the universe works, apparently! Enjoy growing older and older, forever!

Dick Tracy, 5/28/18

I’ve lived in California for close to four years now, and I gotta say: palm trees? Hot tubs? Attractive women of varying ethnicities? 58 counties, representing a uniquely powerful form of local government, often weilding more influence over our day-to-day lives than the administrations of our better-known cities? You sure have the “west coast lifestyle” pegged, Dick Tracy!