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Dick Tracy, 12/2/09

So it turns out that one of my earlier assumptions — that Dick’s reference to “long hair stuff” meant that he and his wife would be attending one of those subversive rock and roll shows, put on by some damn hippie band — was off by several centuries. It turns out, intriguingly enough, that up until the 1960s “long-hair music” denoted classical music. You can find the etymology here, but the gist is that 19th century artists and intellectuals (the damn hippies of their day, like this shaggy-haired punk here) tended to wear their hair long; by the 20th century, the term came to denote intellectuals generally, most of whom by now had gotten respectable haircuts, and by the 1930s it was being used by jazz musicians and journalists to refer to classical musicians, who apparently appealed to a more high-falutin’ educated audience.

Obviously this whole association between classical music and long hair in American vernacular English was abruptly and definitively ended by the advent of the aforementioned long-haired hippies and their rock and roll music. Thus, Dick’s persistent use of it is revealing. Like all right-thinking American law enforcement officials, he hates hippies with every particle of his being; in his fight against what they and their dope-smoking have done to this nation’s moral fiber, he simply refuses to even acknowledge their existence, and will speak as if the 1960s never happened and everyone associates long hair with tempestuous 19th century German artists.

Almost as interesting as all this social etymology is how depressed Dick looks in panel two. “Am I ready for long-hair music?” he asks himself, as if this was the last stage in a man’s life before death. “Normally the only music I listen to is made up of perps begging for mercy as their bones are shattered. Has it really come to this?”

Mary Worth, 12/2/09

AAAUUUGGGGGHHHH WILBUR CLOSE-UP TOO CLOSE ABORT ABORT ABORT

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Gil Thorp, 11/26/09

Greetings, faithful readers! I hope those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving did so with your real friends, a whole bunch of beer bottles, and celebrated as our Pilgrim forefathers did, at a picnic table in some dark, lonely park somewhere.

Mark Trail, 11/26/09

Those of you who are criminals have a lot to be thankful for! Specifically, you can be thankful that in America’s forgiving justice system, you can go from being a law-breaker to being law-enforcement official simply by choosing exactly the right time to kick one of your erstwhile criminal associates in the face.

Dick Tracy, 11/27/09

As for me, I’m mostly thankful that Dick Tracy refers to any concert not performed by the U.S. Marine Corps Band or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as “long hair stuff.”

Mark Trail, 11/29/09

And I’m also pleased that Mark Trail decided to pass over more obvious animals on Thanksgiving weekend and go for the deep’s more terrifying tentacled monsters, offering us in the process a lovely image of a nervous human approaching the rotting corpse of 50-foot-long giant squid and a giant depiction of a living squid of indeterminate size regarding us inscrutably from his watery lair. And, sure, the bottom left panel is a repeat of one from a previous squid-themed Mark Trail installment, but what of it? If I had produced an awesome drawing of dozens of squids flying through the air like a barrage of betentacled missiles, I’d run it every damn day if I could.

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Spider-Man, 11/20/09

It really shouldn’t come as surprise to anyone that the quality control over at the newspaper Spider-Man strip is less than stringent; but, as several faithful readers have written to me to point out, the feature appears to be reaching for stunning new levels of “Eh, why bother?” It seems that at some point this plotline’s pathetic villain has had his name switched from Bigshot to Bigtime. This is obviously troubling, not least because there was already a newspaper Spider-Man villain named Bigtime just last year. Worse, while Bigtime — who earned that moniker when his all-pervasive clock fetish matched up with his given name of Bigelow — seemed like a pretty lame nemesis for a superhero at the time, he’s like the love child of Catwoman and Lex Luthor when compared to Bigshot, who got his name because he’s short. It’s a sad day when your villainy suffers in comparison to someone whose crimes were entirely timepiece-themed.

Dick Tracy, 11/20/09

So this is something like the fourth separate and contradictory explanation that’s been offered for the events of this Dick Tracy plot — which explanations, I should add, have taken up more strip time than the events they are attempting to explain. This one makes even less sense than the others. In my experience, circuses tend to travel from place to place, and thus there’s no “property” to purchase, unless we’re talking about the actual tent itself, for which I’m guessing there isn’t a huge resale market. Cyber the tiger looks as enraged by this as anyone about all this, and I sincerely hope he (or she?) finally just eats everyone to shut them up.

Judge Parker, 11/20/09

I just had this bit of realization about this plot: Sam Driver is withholding information from the police about this note, and knowledge about this note could set his client free — his client who has terminal cancer and not long to live. Presumably he thinks it would be much more dramatic to reveal his ace card during the trial (“discovery”? what’s that?) in stunning and dramatic fashion than it would be to work the whole thing out now and let his client spend the last few weeks of his life with his family. In other words, Sam, never one to rest on his laurels, is working hard to secure the title of Dickiest Man Alive.

Ziggy, 11/20/09

I’ve always been disturbed by the fact that nightmarish gore-fests like Hostel or the Saw movies get R ratings while sexy flicks like Henry and June or The Dreamers get NC-17s, and now I have another reason to feel that way: this horoscope implies that Ziggy will not be violently murdered, but will rather participate in some no doubt queasy-making sex act.

Slylock Fox, 11/20/09

The final step when drawing a member of the proletariat: the honest grime of manual labor!