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Mary Worth, 11/22/16

My goodness, the corpse of Iris and Wilbur’s relationship is barely cold and look who just waltzed into her life? It’s a hunky fellow student who can match Wilbur’s chest hair but also sports luxurious locks and a roguish, manly stubble. Plus he knows that chivalry isn’t dead! You can tell because he refrained from saying “You dropped your extremely dopey hat!”

The Mary Worth house art style may have changed, but it’s still kind of impossible to tell how old anyone is, so I’m not sure if this handsome he-hunk is supposed to be an older student, like Iris, or if she’s just decided that if it’s OK for Wilbur to date her, it’s more than OK for her to date a twenty-year-old. Anyway, I like the smiles of approval the hip (?) young (????) couple of college students are bestowing upon them from the background.

Dick Tracy, 11/22/16

So, yeah, I don’t know how much detail I covered it in here, but the thing with Mysta Chimera is that she’s not actually the original dead Moon Maid who was Dick’s daughter-in-law, but is rather some other lady who was genetically modified to think that she’s Moon Maid by someone who I forgot for purposes I no longer remember. Anyway! Turns out she’s the weird old gangster dude’s daughter? Mostly I wanted to show you this strip because I find it funny how much more Mindy Ermine looks like a terrifying space alien than Mysta Chimera does.

Spider-Man, 11/22/16

Definitely one of my favorite parts of Newspaper Spider-Man is Peter’s reactions of entirely unmoored horror whenever his wife suggests perfectly nice things. “Drive to California? But … we’re so close to Premier Silver status on United! That means complimentary Economy Plus seating as long as seats are available at check-in! This is a disaster for us!”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/17/16

Oh, whoops, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the Great Frozen Money Dementia Caper, have I? Well, here’s the short version: Milton met up with a dude who dumped him at the bus station, not before switching jackets, leaving Milton with the dude’s cell phone and the dude with Milton’s cash. This was exactly as boring as it sounds, until today when we abruptly smash cut to Scooter living a life of comically PG-13 debauchery at Morgantown’s finest “Gentlemen’s Club” (legally, they can’t call it a strip club because nobody takes their clothes off).

Dick Tracy, 11/17/16

Both of America’s citizens with Lunarian DNA have been lying low in Diet Smith’s heavily fortified compound ever since the unpleasantness, but apparently Mysta still gets to drive out into the world occasionally to pick up “the magazines.” I have to say that it makes me respect Diet a lot less as a genius inventor, and respect the Lunarians a lot less as a futuristic menace, to learn that none of them have ever heard of the Internet, a network that can, among other things, allow you to read the magazines on your computer.

Spider-Man, 11/17/16

Yesterday’s Spider-Man would’ve been a great final slapstick moment for this plot, which really makes it too bad that it was accidentally published on Wednesday. Now they’ve got four days of narrative dead space to fill! I predict that by Sunday Peter and Scott will be making out, just to put an end to the awkward pauses.

Beetle Bailey, 11/17/16

Not sure what exactly can get the hired hands toiling at flaccid long-running legacy comic strips to feel shame, but I sincerely hope that getting beat to a pop culture joke by the Family Circus by two and a half months is on this list.

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Shoe, 11/14/16

A fun thing about living in the modern age is that it’s extremely easy to see an odd turn of phrase and find out where it came from. In this case, you can quickly work your way backwards and see the first definition of “farce” that Google gives you:

So, you learn a couple of things here. One, this joke was clearly constructed by the thought process of “Hmm, we need a phrase that means ‘farce’ to go in the first panel to set up the punchline. I guess I’ll just look up the definition!” And two, the writer clearly found the offered definition not quite adequate. “Hmm, buffoonery, horseplay, uh huh, uh huh, that’s all good … wait a minute, what about the puns? It’s not a farce without the puns, by god!”

Dick Tracy, 11/14/16

The late, lamented Congresswoman Bellowthon might’ve thought that her plan to put space aliens in internment camps would be a sure-fire vote-getter among the American people at large. But it’s meeting opposition from a wide variety of people, ranging from authoritarian police officers with Lunarian relatives to weirdly dapper gangsters. It’s the pageant of democracy in action, except for the part where the Congresswoman was murdered!