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Dennis the Menace, 11/7/16

• September 28, 2008: Dennis is illiterate
• April 2, 2012: Dennis is literate, but pities Joey’s illiteracy
• November 7, 2016: Dennis attempts, in his own idiosyncratic way, to teach Joey how to read

I can’t decide if Dennis’s personal journey, followed by his decision to invite his best friend into the wonderful world of reading, is sweet and not menacing at all, or extremely menacing. Why do they need to be able to write and read messages to each other? What are they up to?

Dick Tracy, 11/7/16

Vic the zookeeper sure took a quick turn from “you’re a hood and your political career is evidence of that” to “holy gee, look at all them simoleons!,” and now we know why: he has a terrible gambling problem! I’m not really sure how this high-stakes kitchen card game relates to proposals to put American citizens with alien DNA in internment camps, but, you know, maybe Dick Tracy is about to abruptly shift to a narrative style like Richard Linkletter’s Slacker, where we follow a character from one setting to another and then follow a new character from that setting to the next, and so on. Like, maybe after the game’s over we’ll find out about the beardy dude’s home life, and then see what drama his tween daughter is dealing with at school the next morning. It’d be a nice change of pace, honestly!

Hi and Lois, 11/7/16

Oh man, Lois looks furious. That black armband is a clue: one of her fellow scrapbookers was recently killed in a vicious drive-by stitching, another casualty in the seemingly endless Craft War, and she’s still in mourning. That glue gun was intended to be turned against the quilters, but it looks like the first victim will be much closer to home.

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Spider-Man, 11/4/16

Hey, remember J. Jonah Jameson, who was forced out of his job beloved job at the Bugle, by Egghead? To the best of my knowledge he’s been completely out of the loop on Spidey and Ant-Man’s quest, and has presumably come over to Egghead’s house on his own initiative to cut the Gordian Knot of this extremely silly storyline and just bludgeon Egghead senseless with a lamp.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/4/16

So it turns out that all Coach Stropp ever wanted was to have his ashes carried over the goal line one last time before Bull left, since his team was stopped on the goal line in their attempt to win a championship. And it didn’t work! Bull tripped and spilled his powered remains all over the field, a few yards out! I absolutely love this, because the only time I respect Funky Winkerbean is when it really, really owns its total oppressive gloom. I honestly hope we get a solid week of an increasingly agitated Bull trying to get the cremains back in the jar, weeping as he watches flakes of Coach Stropp’s bones fall between his fingers over and over again.

Dick Tracy, 11/4/16

So Selfy Narcisse’s characterization has veered wildly over the course of this plot, from “slick, unctuous fixer for an nativist politician” to “comically preening narcissist” to “sinister poisoner” to “dude who likes to do sweet jumps over drawbridges.” But it’s his latest incarnation — “guy who practically grew up at the zoo, and who now is presumably going to lay low at the zoo, disguised as an orangutang or monitor lizard or something even more hilarious” — that has really won me over. Let’s follow Selfy’s increasingly insane adventures for months!

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Dick Tracy, 11/3/16

For my money, the line “this is no place for you” is the funniest thing in the comics today. At first I thought it meant that Selfy was a big shot who shouldn’t be risking getting monkey poop on his shiny shoes or something. But then I realized that I had it backwards, which was even funnier: the zoo is too good for a scumbag like Selfy! This is a decent place, where we cage wild animals for bored schoolchildren to gawk at! It’s no place for political hacks who wear tuxedos in their daily life and other monsters. Ol’ Vic tried to keep Selfy on the straight and narrow, tried to teach him the way of the feces shovel and the tranq gun, but it was too late: he was well on his way along the all-too-common young-hood-to-congressional-staffer pipeline, and not all monkey chow in the world could save him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/3/16

Hey, it looks like Chekhov’s packages of frozen cash finally went off, a year after they were placed on the mantlepiece in an extremely non-casual manner! Anyway, my top two choices for what happened to the money are (a) Heather used it to hire a hit man to kill Milton and make it look like Jordan did it, so he has no choice but to obey her whims, sexually, or (b) Milton used it to wire the house with explosives so that he can go out on his terms, which is to say with some of his faculties still intact and taking his wife and household staff with him. Either way, Jordan is right to “oh, boy!” dramatically!

Family Circus, 11/3/16

That’s actually not right either, Dolly. Mommy is letting the breeze ruffle her hair and is imagining what it might be like to be driving a convertible, by herself, in whatever direction she pleases. Mommy stopped looking for Jeffy a solid twenty minutes ago.