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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!

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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.