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Dick Tracy, 1/26/24

Fan fact, everybody: “the Amazing Baxter” is actually Fata, in a very clever disguise as a man, which the square, conventional minds of Neo-Chicago simply cannot see through. “He’s not like Fata!” declares Sam. “He’s a fella and she’s a lady!” Only Dick’s keen perception can see beyond the gender binary to the officer-involved shooting that he’s earned for this week.

Gasoline Alley, 1/26/24

Ha ha, Slim’s been banished from his own home due to false adultery accusations, and now he has nowhere to go and is starting to panic that he’ll freeze to death in his car! Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, but it does put out good ones occasionally, if you don’t like Slim, and I don’t.

Hagar the Horrible, 1/26/24

Hagar definitely went out and killed that moose in between panels, right? He didn’t just have the head lying around somewhere?

Marvin, 1/26/24

Jeff, you won plane tickets! I know you’ve been telling everyone that you won a vacation, but you actually just won plane tickets. That’s not the same thing at all!

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Dick Tracy, 1/23/24

I think it’s sweet that these two ladies keep a poster of their deceased corpse-guy (he was a corpse-guy before he was deceased, to be clear) mentor/lover(?) around. Still, I don’t know how he’d feel about having extremely generic aphorisms attributed to him in response to extremely specific situations like “I accidentally poisoned the wrong person but I need to continue to earn my living as a stage magician.”

Marvin, 1/23/24

The funny thing here is that we definitely know that Marvin didn’t buy that “I [heart] daddy” mug; probably it was Jenny, in a desperate attempt to convince her husband that their child is worthy of human affection. Anyway, she’s wrong, he isn’t, and Jeff is right to take this free vacation and Jenny should go with him. Honestly they should change their names and never come back!

Blondie, 1/23/24

A pretty good sign, I feel, that I’ve lived my life right is that when a photo goes viral of a guy at a Detroit Lions game eating a comically large sandwich, multiple people send it to me with some variation of “OMG it’s Dagwood!” Anyway, I’m pretty sure Dr. Austin kept saying “oh my” has he brought increasingly advanced instruments to bear on Dagwood’s torso, which all readings indicate isn’t full of guts like a normal human’s but just an endless, insatiable ~v o i d~

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Dick Tracy, 1/12/24

Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, Tess is a private investigator and her agency deals with different aspects of the same shadowy underworld that her husband fights against and now it may cost her life, but get a load of panel two, which contains the most ominous and noir instance of someone taking a piping hot loaf of bread out of the oven in the history of baking. Dick knows that no matter how delicious fresh bread is and how satisfying and surprisingly easy it is to make it in your own home, the human heart is inherently rotten and no society can ever be free of the crime and corruption that only violence wielded in the name of the state can keep at bay.

Gil Thorp, 1/12/24

Now that Coach Hernandez has been tamed into friendship with Gil, we need a new bad guy, at least for this basketball season. Should it be this guy, a basketball coach with a perm? Yes, absolutely, 100%. Even during the brief heyday of perms on men in the ’80s, an NBA coach getting a perm was a pretty automatic indication that he was leaning into his role as a sinister villain. A bepermèd high school coach? In the year of our lord 2024? This guy’s a monster, a maniac. You’re making a deal with the devil, Howard!

Dennis the Menace, 1/12/24

Dennis dropping random malapropisms Family Circus-style is the weakest of menacing weaksauce, but it gets even weaker when those “malapropisms” are actually real words that people use in everyday life. I guess some people, such as the current creative team behind the legacy newspaper comic strip Dennis the Menace, had the privilege of not growing up in Buffalo, New York, and so the sort of weather conditions we endured several times a year sounds like something only a child could come up with in their wildest fatasies. Hope you enjoy heading out to the links in Palm Springs any time of year after sending this kind of bullshit to your editors! (Yes, I live in Southern California too, but I haven’t forgotten my roots.)