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Dick Tracy, 7/5/06

I’m beginning to suspect that this Dick Tracy storyline is an extended apologia for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program; thus, it’s somewhat ironic that it brought up the subject of the U.S.’s secret monitoring of terrorist financial activities weeks before the New York Times did. Still, one begins to see their point: if our terrorists enemies are as dumb as Al Kinda here — who, while sitting in his Washington, D.C., office, changed from Western clothes into some sort of costume from a touring dinner-theater production of Sinbad the Sailor, and then greeted the entire al Qaeda network by name on his enormous wireless phone — then they probably won’t be smart enough to realize that they’re being spied on until they read about it in the liberal media.

Shoe, 7/5/06

Speaking of morons dressed in ridiculous outfits, here’s today’s Shoe. I have to admit that I’m charmed by the idea of some kind of Shakespearean method actor who refuses to change out of his costume, ever. Apparently, despite the fact that the vast majority of stage productions in this country feature contemporary characters dressed in essentially street clothes, the artist felt most Americans would fail to recognize Ye Olde Birde as an actor without this faux-Elizabethan getup, even though he utters the words “my” and “play” (in that order) in the first panel. This is a troubling assumption, but, sadly, it’s probably a safe one.

Mary Worth, 7/5/06

Ooh! Ooh! Mary Worth is being stalked! Mary Worth is being stalked! By, apparently, the world’s dumbest stalker, who appears to be standing approximately fifteen feet away from her and thinking, “Nobody can see me! Why, that branch is barely three feet above my head! I’M INVISIBLE! MOO HA HA HA!”

Oh, and: mustache, light hair — is our sinister fellow erstwhile Dawn Weston paramour/effette intellectual snob/violent rage addict Woody Hills? Dare to dream!

Slylock Fox, 7/5/06

I’m less interested in these so-called “facts” about peanut butter (no doubt supplied, along with a generous honorarium, out the deep pockets of the American Peanut Butter and Peanut Products Council) and more in the little tableau that accompanies them. From the look on the face of the groovy, hippie headbanded chick, she’s about to hit her breaking point. I’ll bet when she visualized her future as a young girl, it didn’t include dealing with a couple of buck-toothed freaks (are they brothers? father and son?) fighting over a condiment while she cleaned up after them. All I can say to Greedy McSandwicheater is that he’d better clean up those globs of peanut butter he’s spilled on the table, because that knife is temptingly close to his throat.

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Dick Tracy, 5/8/06

Um, just in case you were wondering, Dick Tracy is like TOTALLY NUTS now. How much do I love the thinly veiled Osama bin Laden character in panel one, who is wearing what appears to be a blindfold across his nose, presumably so that he doesn’t breathe in the stink of the Great Satan over his enormous cell phone? I love him a lot, that’s how much. A commentor said that they thought that “Al Kinda” (that’s the fellow apparently holding a much smaller and more modern cell phone with his foot in panel two) was an Arab caricature, but I don’t see it; he looks to me more like the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan. (The thought of a zombie Reagan working for Muslim terrorists is so delightfully bizarre that I shudder just to think of it.) The leftmost guy in panel three may look like an ethnic caricature, but he’s actually recurring character B.O. Plenty; I can provide an explanation neither for his name or his hat, just as I cannot explain the rightmost person in that panel, who I think is supposed to be either a woman or a man in the least convincing drag in the history of cross dressing. Either way, I’m beginning to believe that Dick Tracy demonstrates some of the loopy, deranged majesty as Gil Thorp, though not at the same manic pace.

Meanwhile, in Mary Worth: Don’t turn your back on her, Lou! She’s about to deploy her Power Palm!

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OK, so I skipped a day yesterday … so, to make it up, here’s a big mishmosh of stuff from the last couple of days, arright?

Get Fuzzy, 3/7/06

When I was a little kid, I used to think that white people were pink, in the sense that, if I were coloring and I wanted to color in a person who was supposed to be white, I’d reach for the pink crayon. Kinda weird, I know, but I also thought my father was black. (Hey, he has kinky hair and is really swarthy and I didn’t understand genetics, alright?) One day in first grade, this little girl who I had a crush on (to the extent that a six-year-old can understand what a crush is) decided she wanted to color with me, and we were coloring together and then she asked to borrow a pink crayon, and I assumed it was to color one of the people we had drawn, but she started using it to color in the background instead, and then I got upset yelled at her that she wasn’t doing it right, and so she left in a huff. First in a long series of relationships I managed to sabotage from the start. In retrospect, the fact the she herself was black might have had something to do with it. Interracial romance is tough, don’t let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, this may be why my all-time favorite Bucky-deployed anti-Rob slur is “Pinky.” This strip gets special props from me because it manages to use three different variants of the term in four panels.

Gil Thorp, 3/7/06

God damn, but Gil Thorp is awesome. I don’t know what’s wrong with you all that you can’t appreciate it. Where else would you see a high school basketball fan taunt a homeless teen by dressing up as a hobo? North Bend must have a strong drama department, with an emphasis on the Theater of Cruelty.

Mary Worth, 3/8/06

Yeah, she’s a pilot of sorts … the “sort” of pilot who knows how to “fly a plane.” Which is pretty much the usual “sort.” There’s only two possible motivations for Salty Cal’s ripped-from-an-infomercial line in panel two: either he thinks “pilot of sorts” is code for something kinky (and is thus in for a bitter, bitter disappointment) or he’s the first character in the history of Mary Worth who knows how to correctly use sarcasm.

Also, that little sign at the bottom left of panel one, which appears to depict a giant fish playing pinball, is the single greatest bit of incidental art ever to appear in this strip.

Dick Tracy, 3/8/06

I have no idea why this horse is dragging an unconscious German infantry mime through the snow here. I just think it’s funny that Dick Tracy has finally come to terms with the fact that his wrist-phone is no longer cutting-edge technology.

Marvin, 3/8/06

Ha, ha! Marvin’s grandmother thinks Marvin’s grandfather is fat! Oh, that kills me. Really kills me. It makes me feel dead inside. Is this what you have to look forward to after forty years or so of marriage? I can’t wait. The best part is the contrast between her smug smile and his look of utter mortification. I’m surprised she isn’t extending the weigh station metaphor and charging him.

Meanwhile, in Judge Parker, Ned has been weeping one slow-motion, gelatinous tear after another for five straight days:

Also, Rex Morgan? Still gay.

Oh yes, let’s.