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Gil Thorp, 11/7/08

At long last, the how of Matt the Hat and Jeff the ’Czak’s crackpot Jeff-killing scheme has been revealed, and it actually makes a shred more sense than one might have expected from this strip. Now all we’re missing is the why, though this being Gil Thorp we’re obviously never going to get it. If Jeff didn’t know that his heart was a ticking time bomb of death before he went to the doctor, then this is just the most pointlessly “wacky” high school dude prank in recorded history. And if he did know, then how did he know? Did he spend the entire summer eating mayonnaise out of the jar with a spoon and just sort of draw the obvious conclusion? Or did he literally feel his heart begin to die inside his chest one day? The latter possibility would at least explain why he’s so damn melancholy.

Dick Tracy, 11/7/08

There’s been an insanely long and interminable buildup in Dick Tracy as we were introduced to these two titanic metal men on a collision course, but at last they’ve met and we get to see what we’ve been waiting for all this time: robots insulting each other like fifth graders, using txt spk. Whee!

Apartment 3-G, 11/7/08

“My heart is racing with anticipation”? Tommie, with that sort of wooden, sub-par thought ballooning, it’s no wonder that you never get any panel time, and that your boyfriend and the other guy who was trying to be your boyfriend are secretly having a sex affair.

Psst! There is a great deal of invigorating talk about the recent election right over here.

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Gil Thorp, 10/23/08

Wow, it looks like our hero the ’Czak may be Gil Thorp’s most introspective and self-aware character in recent memory. Admittedly, given the parade of goofy, grinning morons who populate this strip, who refuse to turn their gaze inward even when they’re perpetrating grievous self-harm, this is like calling Jeff “the Gil Thorp character least afflicted with mutant-deformed-hand-itis in recent memory”; still, there’s something sad and appealing about his realization that his days as a goofy, grinning moron, getting up to vaguely homoerotic hijinks in the locker room, are numbered.

One of the things I actually unironically like about this strip are the occasional return visits from Milford alums — a couple of years ago, Vanilla Ice lookalike Von blew back into town to help dry out Marty Moon and romance high school girls — so I’m hoping that a few years down the road we get to see glimpses of Jeff sitting around the dorms at his third-tier state university, drinking heavily and listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” and calling angrily in to Marty Moon’s public access TV show. He’s clearly on the road to gloom already, as not even Trisha Jones’ navel in panel one, nor her blatant kissy face in panel three, can pull him out of his pit of preemptive despair.

Dick Tracy, 10/23/08

Dick Tracy is getting slightly artsier when it comes to its gratuitous violence. Sure, it could have just shown us that hapless Genesis Corporation employee being beaten to death by a giant robot while Braces laughed maniacally, but I like the fact that we’re just shown the aftermath, and left to wonder how exactly the broken window figured into the scene of carnage that we just missed.

Blondie, 10/23/08

Here, let me translate today’s Blondie for you. “Those Dagwood Sandwich Shop franchises aren’t extracting as much money from this zombie comic brand as I might like. If those stupid Peanuts kids can sell insurance, then I don’t see why this crap can’t sell … pretty much anything anyone would pay for. USE ME, CORPORATE AMERICA! I WILL DANCE TO YOUR TUNE! I, DAGWOOD BUMSTEAD, AM YOUR WHORE!”

Spider-Man, 10/23/08

Behold, the power and majesty of … NAP MAN!!! If only there were something that could keep Peter Parker awake. You know, like the anticipation of fighting a super-powered nemesis and clearing his good name, or a television set.

Apartment 3-G, 10/23/08

…aaaaand another barely disguised sexual advance from Tommie goes completely ignored.

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Gil Thorp, 10/11/08

The only Marty Moon strips I like better than the ones where he passes out drunk in his car are the ones where he’s proven ragingly incompetent at his job. Surely a reporter with years of experience covering high school sports shouldn’t get rattled by some seventeen-year-old’s idea of being a difficult interview, even if he is 6′ 9″? (I note the latter fact because this may be the first strip in weeks in which Jeff Ponczak has appeared and nobody’s mentioned his height.) Anyway, Jeff has made a terrible enemy of Marty Moon, for making him look bad on his crappy public access show that nine people watch! Marty’s vengeance against his many nemeses — Cully Vale, Gil Thorp, that Ben Franklin lookalike golf hustler guy — has generally either backfired hilariously or just gone unnoticed by its intended targets, so hopefully we are in for some wacky hijinks.

Dick Tracy, 10/11/08

The current Dick Tracy plot, involving impractical robots on opposite sides of the law, will be painfully boring until the robots fight, and maybe even then, but today’s strip deserves commentary for two points. One, I am spending way too much mental energy wondering why Dick Tracy’s robot speaks in some kind of vowel-poor version of l33t-speak but the bad guy’s robot doesn’t; and two, “Elsewhere” is possibly the most minimalist and least informative change-of-scene narration box ever deployed in comics, even beating out “In another room.”

Archie, 10/11/08

Is anyone else hypnotized and unsettled by Jughead’s shirt, which offers no explanation as to who or what it’s promoting with its enormous letter “S”? Is it meant to frustrate and ultimately educate the bourgeoisie, who naively expect written text to transmit information of some kind? That explanation would seem to fit in with Jughead’s unexplained transformation from a shiftless high school student to an avant-garde photographer with a major gallery show.

Beetle Bailey, 10/11/08

OK, we get it, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC! There’s nothing in this world you love more than golf. If you had to choose between golf and your family and friends, you’d choose golf without hesitation, since if you show up at the course by yourself they’ll assign you to a foursome, so you technically don’t need them. In fact, as today’s strip shows, you love it so much that you’d rather announce that fact than, say, coming up with one of the seven weekly jokes that basically make up your job.