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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!”

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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.

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/15/13

I don’t know why, but I was under the impression that Lisa’s Forbidden Diary, the one that will help Les get inside his late wife’s head and unlock her cinematic secrets, was from, like, a time in her life when she and Les weren’t married and spending all their time together. Turns out nope! It’s just a record of all the stuff that Les probably would’ve known if he’d been paying attention at the time. Anyway, the very first passage Les reads consists of Lisa making a clunky joke and then noting smugly that the people she made it at didn’t seem to get it, probably because they weren’t smart enough. “That’s my girl,” Les thinks, smirking in her memory, smirking because she cannot. “That’s my girl.”

Heathcliff, 11/15/13

So it took me a while to figure out exactly what’s going on here, mostly because Heathcliff’s jeans have been colored the exact same shade of orange as his fur, and I was going to berate the syndicate colorist for doing this, but really, has Heathcliff ever worn pants before? Wouldn’t his sudden decision to do so cast an unflattering and frankly disturbing light on the years of pantslessness that led up to this point? Anyway, what’s going on here is that Heathcliff, who is wearing jeans that are the exact same shade of orange as his fur (and, side note, imagine leaving the house wearing only garments that precisely matched your own skin tone, imagine how everyone would look at you in mingled fascination and horror), is no-hands eating a turkey leg, and gorged himself to the point of bursting his pants button at exactly the right time for said pants button to hit a dog in the face. It seems like an awful lot would have had to go exactly right here for this plan to work out, but I guess Heathcliff is bored with his usual dog-harassment and wanted to take on a real challenge, you know? “He gets them with girth” says a nearby child, to give an example of another thing I’d rather not think too much about.

Dick Tracy, 11/15/13

I’m sorry, did you think Dick Tracy was an anachronistic square-jawed fascist wholly unfamiliar with American pop culture? Dick Tracy wants you to know that he’s cool, or at least was cool, back in the late ’70s and early ’80s. You know, back when he was young, taking in the post-punk and early new wave scenes in New York, hanging out with all those guys before they were famous, doing coke in the bathroom at CBGB with Patti Smith, what have you. Later he had them all arrested, of course.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/15/13

You guys, there is literally nothing Rex Morgan likes hearing better than “it’s going to cost them triple,” especially when the person reaping those tripled costs is a member of the Morgan family whose finances Rex is responsible for. Look at how pleased he is in that third panel, to hear about all the money his lawyer will be extracting from a local nonprofit arts organization! I’ve literally never seen him so happy. Just for comparison, this is the face he makes when a patient thanks him profusely for saving his life:

Mark Trail, 11/15/13

I take back what I said yesterday about the Mark Trail bug talk being boring — at least, boring in some conventional sense. Now I think it’s boring in a fascinating sense, like a five-hour Central European art house film where a village is increasingly infested with flies that represent the legacy of Communism or maybe just man’s own inherent corruption, and the inhabitants endure the plague with grim stoicism. There’s a shot of several flies on an old man’s face that goes on in silence for nearly two minutes. “Is he ever going to brush them off?” you wonder. He does, eventually. But they come back again a moment later, and he realizes that swatting them away was futile. The moose may seek shelter, but humanity has the self-awareness to know that it’s all hopeless.