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Apartment 3-G, 3/23/14 (panels)

“Listen, you idiot! I have found a need to fill: as a nurse, at this hospital! In fact, I think I’ll take your job, since it’s so obviously vacant! Sheesh, who do you think I am — Lu Ann?”

Dick Tracy, 3/23/14

When Chester Gould launched Dick Tracy in the 1930’s, newspaper comic strips were a big deal. Like reality TV today, comics had prima-donnas, feuds, alliances, bitter contract disputes, knockoffs, parodies, the whole megillah. One of the best parodies was Al Capp’s Fearless Fosdick comic inside his own L’il Abner. Fosdick “ran” from 1942 through 1977 and spun off comic books, TV shows, endorsements (Wildroot Cream-Oil), jazz compositions, and toys. And here it is again, reparodied in its own source as “J. Straightedge Trustworthy” by in-strip cartoonist Vera Alldid. Wheels within wheels.

Anyway, I hope that Dick Tracy tries to recreate the entire 1930’s comic-strip ecosystem, especially if it makes good on the hint in panel 2 there.

Hi and Lois, 3/23/14

Hi and Lois entertains the Boomer fantasy that their nostalgia represents the apex of culture, but has the wisdom not to push it.

Mary Worth, 3/23/14 (panel)

“Gee whiz, weed and booze are already taken …. I guess it’s meth for me, then!”

Time for me to toddle off into that good night: Josh will be back Monday with your Comments of the Week and brand-new comics snark. Thank you for the wonderful response to the fundraiser, and for a fun week!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Judge Parker, 3/20/14

The Bowers/Abbotts père et fille share a private moment and a little shop talk. The thought of simply declaring her Dad’s gift and paying import duties and taxes on it never crossed April’s mind. “Can money even move in that direction — ‘away’?”, she muses. Somehow it doesn’t seem physically possible!

Welcome to the family, girlfriend – a true Parker at last!

Or maybe not? Long-running strips need to be really careful about irrevocable steps like marriages, graduations, and deaths. They upset a strip’s balance, limiting the ways characters can contribute. And if there’s one constant in Judge Parker over the last fifty years, it’s that Randy Parker is a clueless, self-satisfied tool, perpetually used and discarded by women. This principle is so much a part of the strip’s bedrock that even on the eve of his wedding, I can’t believe they’ll go through with it. I fully expect that April will die in a hail of gunfire or (more likely) disappear into the jungle at the last possible moment. Anyway, stay tuned — we’ll know in mere months!

Luann, 3/20/14

That said, what on earth is going on in Luann? Everybody’s been moving through middle-school and high school over the strip’s 29 years, and now they’re seniors announcing college plans for the fall. Ethnic ciphers Rosa and Delta are off to Yale and Howard, most of the cast to nearby “Moony Uni” (OK sure, some kind of Unification Church outfit, I guess), and Luann to the local Community College.

Is Luann really just six months away from becoming a “college hijinks” strip, or a soaper about declining academic standards and unsustainable student debt? Is inert, self-absorbed, academically dishonest Luann even remotely plausible as a college student? All these questions will have to wait, because: OMG YOU GUYS PROM!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/20/14

Yet another newspaper drops Herb and Jamaal, and Herb blames his son for it.

Spider-Man, 3/20/14

“I was going to save those men — but their plight has flushed Spider-Man out of hiding! Now they can just die for all I care, for putting that stink on my beloved city!”

You’ll breeze through Customs when you hide those conflict diamonds in a fashionable Comics Curmudgeon tote bag, Send your generous contribution today!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Gasoline Alley, 2/18/14

Oh, hey, Gasoline Alley! I haven’t been bothering you to keep you up with Gasoline Alley, so here’s the deal: the government agents called in to try to figure out how Walt could possibly still be alive were followed by a newspaper reporter, for whom Walt spun a fanciful tale of having discovered the Fountain of Youth in an Egyptian tomb, though given his current state of decrepitude it would’ve been more realistic if he had claimed to have found the Fountain of Eternal Life That Keeps Your Aged And Increasingly Frail Body Alive Beyond Its Natural End Point. Anyway, once word got out people, reacted pretty much as I explained they would when Six Chix did a Fountain of Youth joke, only the canny Walt is using the opportunity to personally profit from others’ gullibility. Should be all fun and games, until the angry mob tears him to bits!

Six Chix, 2/18/14

Speaking of Six Chix, today’s Six Chix has an important lesson for us: that no matter how hard life gets, we should marshall our resources and just hang on and endure and wait for the one thing in life that we want more than anything in the world, which will probably kill us.

Dick Tracy, 2/18/14

Speaking of things I haven’t been bothering to keep you up with, Dick Tracy exists! I’m going to continue to not bother to keep you up on the plot, but I do want to point out that this lady with the off-the-shoulder sweater has been in the strip repeatedly for weeks and this is the first we’ve seen that she goes around barefoot in tattered jeans all the time. Is this what Dick Tracy thinks a hippie looks like? Probably! Anyway, “You see, as Mother Earth’s creation, I must touch her” is a good thing to say to someone if you don’t want them talking to you ever again.

Slylock Fox, 2/18/14

As you all should know, I’m very interested in the moment when the Slylockverse was born, when the animals rose up and overthrew the humans who had reigned over them for far too long. We often catch glimpses of this in the Six Differences strips, though today’s isn’t particularly subtle: a bear, probably a juvenile by the size of him but still plenty big and strong, has burst through the front window of this suburban home, and is about to just start up and mauling some people.