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Dick Tracy, 12/5/16

It’s no secret that, once the days of Dick Tracy’s violent insanity ended in 2011 (with a storyline that concluded with a villain in a bondage mask being eaten alive by rats) and a new creative team took over, I stopped focusing much on the strip here, mostly because it just wasn’t such an object of sick fascination for me any more. There hasn’t been anything particularly dramatically different about the current plotline, yet somehow it’s really caught my imagination with its string of low-key absurdities as it shambled from “a mean Congresslady wants to put space aliens in concentration camps” to “a guy who can’t stop taking selfies is lying low at the zoo.” Anyway, today’s strip particularly tickled me, mostly because of Dick’s line in the first panel. “Another storage area? Who knew that zoos had so much stuff that they needed to store? When am I going to get to stop looking in areas where things are stored and start shooting people in the face?” Don’t worry, Dick, I’m pretty sure that getting cattle prodded in the back is very much something that the Major Crime Unit’s internal review board will be glad to let you get extremely trigger happy over!

Dennis the Menace, 12/5/16

Wow, Dennis the Menace turned into bondage porn so gradually we barely noticed!

Hi and Lois, 12/5/16

Wow, Hi and Lois turned into a crushingly realistic depiction of a couple exhausted by parenthood and slowly losing whatever residual affection they had for each other so gradually we barely noticed!

The Lockhorns, 12/5/16

Is this the first time we’ve seen the top of Leroy’s head? I don’t care for it. I don’t care for it at all.

Mary Worth, 12/5/16

[I run up the stairs and throw open the door to the rooftop]

[I’m on the roof of an apartment building in a dreary metropolis]

[It’s pouring rain]

[I run to the edge of the roof and with a great heave pull aside a huge tarp]

[Underneath it is an ancient-looking spotlight]

[I throw a huge switch on its side]

[electricity surges into it and huge shaft of light beams into the sky]

[something’s written on the spotlight, something that’s now visible across the city]

[everyone for miles around cranes their necks to read the message written on the clouds]

MARY WORTH IS ABOUT TO GIVE A FORTYSOMETHING WOMAN ADVICE ABOUT WHETHER IT’S OK TO FUCK A 25-YEAR-OLD.

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Dick Tracy, 11/29/16

You have to give the new-ish Dick Tracy creative team credit for bringing the strip into something that’s semi-recognizable as the modern era. I mean, the strip’s trademark bit of gee-whiz futuristic tech is now on sale and really something of a niche market, which I’m not sure if that makes their job easier or harder! Anyway, today’s strip shows that Neo-Chicago’s Major Crimes Unit is really getting with the times; they’re less likely to get information by building long-term trusting relationships with street-level informants or via brutal beatdowns of suspected criminals, and instead are just trolling Instagram for pictures of people who seem reluctant to be photographed. Thank God Dick, at least, reacts in his usual inscrutable and incorrect fashion. “This is great. I want you to have the boys in the photo darkroom print up a blown-up version of this — obviously there’s no other way to get a better look. But that’ll take hours, so let’s the two of us head down to the zoo and start shooting first and asking questions later. Hopefully that blown-up photo will count as ‘probable cause,’ retroactively.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/29/16

I was going to go into a riff about Sarah making fun of her one-year-old brother for not having any friends, but then I realized that Sarah doesn’t appear to have any friends either, especially now that the Morgans have abruptly cut off contact with her mobster patroness. Like, who would Sarah have at her fantasy birthday party with the clown and the bounce house and so forth? Would she invite the kid who made fun of her paintings, just so she could keep him on the other side of a velvet rope and make him watch her frolic, by herself?

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Hi and Lois, 11/26/16

I just spent a lot more time and effort than I’m comfortable admitting trying and failing to remember what the name of Chip’s garage band used to be; all I could come up with is that the first word was “NOYZ” (was it “Noyz II Men”? Dare we dream we live in such a perfect world?). Anyway, I think we can all agree that whatever it was, it was a better name than “Big Bad Wolf,” which maybe is just the name they use when they get paying gigs where they have to play classic rock for Boomers, to subsidize their more cutting-edge punk stuff.

Dick Tracy, 11/26/16

Vic was so obnoxiously holier-than-thou in his first appearance in this plot that I’ve really been enjoying the fact that ever since he’s demonstrated one ethical foible after another, from easy bribeability to compulsive gambling to today’s cartoonish on-the-job drunkenness. It’s sad that supposed hood Selfy is the only one around here still sticking to the sacred Zookeeper’s Code, which states in no uncertain terms that when the guys down at the big cat exhibit call for help, you get over there as soon as possible. Anyway, Selfy’s going to get eaten by a tiger, probably!