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Dick Tracy, 11/17/22

Look, I know, we’re never getting back to the glory days of “guy in gimp suit gets eaten alive by rats,” but you have to admit that we’re coming pretty close with a Dick Tracy villain named “Steelface,” whose whole thing is that he has a steel plate in his face that’s magnetic, and you’d think that he’d be know about situations where such an arrangment would be dangerous, like, say, getting into an MRI machine, and also you’d think the medical techs would ask questions like, “Say, you don’t have a steel plate under that bandage, do you?”, but it turns out nope on both counts and now he’s going to get his skull ripped apart by the MRI machine’s powerful magnets. He only ended up at this hospital because he hit his head fleeing from a police raid on his stolen car operation, so we can basically credit this grisly death to the cops, or at least that’s what they’ll be telling themselves while they stand around watching the poor hospital night shift guy scraping what’s left of Steelface’s face off the inside of the MRI machine with a putty knife.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/17/22

If you were really at a concert like this and a performer made this kind of announcement, everyone in the audience would chuckle knowingly and understand that “ice cream” and “tummyache” were code for “drugs and/or alcohol” and “unconscious.” Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where literally everything is exactly as it seems on the surface, all the time.

Hi and Lois, 11/17/22

Sure, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has somehow managed to survive and even thrive in a declining newspaper industry as their readership ages, but I’m hoping that this comic means they’re about to go all-in on crypto at the worst possible time.

Crankshaft, 11/17/22

Look, not every Crankshaft has to be a big “event,” you know? Sometimes it can be something quiet and delightful, like Crankshaft falling face-first up a flight of stairs.

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Slylock Fox, 10/31/22

The thing I absolutely love and respect about Slick Smitty is that every time we see him, Slylock and the animal cops have him absolutely dead to rights, yet he still has the shit-eating grin on his face that says that he doesn’t believe he’ll receive any consequences for his actions or simply doesn’t care about them if he does. That’s true even in circumstances like today’s, when he’s dressed in an extremely stupid costume in order to pull of an even stupider crime, and hooked up to one of those lie detector machines that the animals have advanced from the current level of “not a lie detector, just a detector of elevated heart rates and other physical activity” to “detects lies, but unable to understand low-level ‘truths’ and ‘falsehoods’ as part of a larger semantic context.”

Dick Tracy, 10/31/22

I’ve had my differences with Vitamin Flintheart in the past, but I respect his theater company’s total commitment to verisimilitude. They have access to an extremely lifelike robotic dog that can talk, and yet they’re still trying to find a trained real dog for the non-talking scenes! You don’t want the human actors to start worrying about getting replaced by robots, now do you.

Gasoline Alley, 10/31/22

Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, but as its name implies, it began as a strip about people talking about motor vehicles, so I have to respect the amount of panel space it’s dedicating to people going into great detail about the different kinds of garbage trucks in use today.

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The Lockhorns, 10/29/22

“Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, ‘Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.’ Man bursts into tears. Says, ‘But doctor … I am Pagliacci.’ So he went on a killing spree. Upon reflection, doctor should’ve referred him to a qualified therapist who could have assessed him for clinical depression. Anyway. Made an opera out of it. Good opera.”

Marvin, 10/29/22

You know what would make pretty much all comics better? If, when the artist was stuck for an idea, they just came up with a flimsy excuse to do a sweet drawing of a train.

Dick Tracy, 10/29/22

Look, we’re all thinking it, so I’m gonna say it: The Dick Tracy creative team didn’t have to make Steelface’s eyes so darn dreamy. But they did, and I think most of us sincerely appreciate it.