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Slylock Fox, 2/13/17

I can’t remember where I read it now, but there’s a line in a review of Rogue One that I liked, discussing Darth Vader’s appearance. This is the first film where David Prowse didn’t play the body of the character, and the reviewer said that in the new movie Spencer Wilding, the new actor, looked and moved differently, so “he just looked to me like a guy in a Darth Vader costume, which, I suppose, is what he was.” Don’t we all, in essence, play-act the roles in life we aim to inhabit, uncertain of when the moment will come when we finally make them our own? And isn’t this made more difficult when someone else is so strongly associated with the job? It might’ve been the dogs, with nostalgia for their now vanquished nemeses, who explained to the other animals the utility of the postal service after the beasts took over; and, like all the creatures trying to ape the infrastructure of human society, this mailbear is doing the best he can. But it’s his hesitancy, his sense that he’s not really a postal worker, that he’s just a bear wearing an XXL uniform torn off a long-ago-eviscerated H. sapiens letter carrier, that Shady Shrew is exploiting here. Who’s to say that he isn’t in disguise, after all? Who’s to say that they aren’t all going through a vaguely absurd pantomime of their vanquished betters, with their bowler caps and trench coats and magnifying glasses?

Dick Tracy, 2/13/17

Meanwhile, over at Dick Tracy’s heist plot, the Brush, a man with a freakish shock of hair coming down from his forehead and completely covering his face, is about to change out of his landscaper’s uniform and into a security guard’s uniform, two disguises that will definitely let him blend in undetectably and not draw any attention to himself whatsoever.

Dennis the Menace, 2/13/17

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Mr. Wilson is planning to murder Dennis — he’s old, he’s lived a long life and there isn’t much left to it, prison and the electric chair don’t scare him, etc. — but it’s pretty shocking to see him admit it so openly to his wife.

Marvin, 2/13/17

I spend a lot of time grappling with the horror of Marvin’ endless poop jokes, but it’s only with today’s strip that I feel like I get the rationale behind them: apparently they’re part of some misguided Freudian belief that we’d all be better adjusted if we didn’t have to obey society’s oppressive rules about going to the bathroom in a toilet and just, like, shat whenever, man, you’re not the boss of me and my gastrointestinal tract.

Pluggers, 2/13/17

Pluggers’ dreams of a sex-robot companion became a lot more attainable once they realized that due to their age and general physical decrepitude they had lost interest in sex a long time ago.

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Dick Tracy, 2/7/17

If ’00s Dick Tracy was a continuing exploration of how many insanely violent ways a newspaper comic strip could kill off its villains, ’10s Dick Tracy is a long-running experiment in how far up the asshole of obscure comics history a newspaper comic strip can get, which is … not better? It’s different, anyway. Let us remind you that the “Moon Maid” in the current run of the strip is actually some genetically modified and mind-wiped gangster’s daughter, and so while the Tracy family has taken her in, she isn’t really Dick’s son’s wife, leaving her free to flirt shamelessly with hunky crossover star The Spirit. The Tracys’ guest is regaling everyone with the plot of a comic book from 1952, because why not, and while his words say “of course we didn’t visit the dark side of the moon where Moon Valley [the home of Moon Maid’s Lunarian people] is,” the knowing expression he’s giving the reader says “of course we did visit the dark side of the moon, where I learned the sexual techniques that bring the most pleasure to the inhabitants of Moon Valley!” Or, uh, maybe it’s just me? Maybe it’s just me.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/7/17

Look, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, you came into your current phase of existence in the 1930s when your original concept, about a ne’er-do-well horse-racing aficionado, lost its lustre and the decision was made to pivot into the then-lucrative realm of making fun of hillbillies, and ever since then, that’s been your shtick. If you wanted to, say, shift the tone and start exploring real issues of poverty in isolated rural communities, or maybe have your characters provide an outsider’s perspective on mainstream American urban and suburban life, then I think we’d all accept it and actually be pretty impressed. But don’t think you can just wedge in whatever generic jokes you’ve got rattling around in your head, à la “What’s the deal with energy drinks?” Leave those to other, non-hillbilly-based comic strips. Yours is a higher, or at least more specific, calling.

Dennis the Menace, 2/7/17

So, who’s the real menace here? The innocent child, who, like more and more of us young and old, occasionally enjoys eating traditional breakfast foods like pancakes or scrambled eggs in the evening? Or his mother, who’s asking this question having clearly already prepared the meal, presumably as part of her plan to reply to whatever he says with “tough shit, kid, you’re getting whatever’s in this casserole dish”?

Judge Parker, 2/7/17

“She’s a qualified mental health professional, with a speciality in adolescents and trauma! I’m … honestly surprised this hasn’t occurred to you already?”

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Dick Tracy, 1/27/17

As I always note with increasing nostalgia, ever since the switchup of creative teams in 2011, Dick Tracy plots rarely end in insanely violent and gory death anymore. But Joe Staton and Mike Curtis do have a knack for unearthing the most horrifyingly deformed villains from the strip’s decades-long history and fitting their traditional look into today’s more modern art style. “The Brush,” whose head is completely hairless except for a drooping reverse mullet covering his entire face, is a particularly vivid example of this, and it says a lot about our society’s tolerance that someone so profoundly unsettling looking can find work in the landscaping industry.

According to the Dick Tracy Wiki, the original Brush was a scam artist who claimed that radioactive fallout from A-bomb tests had caused his condition, when he was actually just wearing a face-wig (face-merkin?). After raising a bunch of sympathy money in a preview of modern GoFundMes, his scheme fell apart and he fled to the countryside one step ahead of Dick Tracy, only to die when the dynamite trailer he was hiding out in got struck by lightning (!!!!!!!!). So I’m not sure what relationship this dude has with the one who was blown to bits in an act of a particularly vengeful God, but if this storyline is half as bonkers as that one, I am very much looking forward to it.

Phantom, 1/27/17

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the current Phantom storyline, which, no lie, has involved a guy determined to get the Phantom on a Bangallan stamp. Anyway, the second panel is a great example of why the big purple guy is so philately-worthy: he’s punched this criminal so hard in the jaw that the dude’s head has partially phased out of our dimension, allowing it to become hopelessly embedded in the bars of his prison cell in a queasy-making, Escher-esque mess.