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Dick Tracy, 9/2/22

Moon citizens have no choice whether or not to live under fascism, but they do get to pick their preferred flavor. Enjoy the wholesale militarization of society in service of external conquest? Line up behind Ro-Zan over there! Prefer the quiet suffocation of human rights under an all-powerful domestic security state? Team Thorin for you!

No matter to Dick: he’s just a cop, you guys do the executions! After all, “He who wins the war writes the history.” Or maybe, “History is written by the victors?” Dick doesn’t care; he’s just a cop: leave the quotation-mangling to Mary Worth.

Gil Thorp, 9/2/22

Speaking of mangling, remember when Gil Thorp was famous for bizarre jump-cuts between panels? No more! Now the unsettling breaks come within the panels themselves. Consider Panel 1—”They got coffee for us” : “Shouldn’t we get coffee?” : [“Uh, yeah Dad, that’s why they got it?”]. Or take Panel 2’s confusion of sarcasm with trolling. Trolling would be, “You’re bringing that nose-wart into my high school?” Panel 3 is just routine recruitment of your kid as a divorce-ally; I’ll permit it.

Mary Worth, 9/2/22

Say, it’s been over a week; let’s drop in on Jared and Jess! Guilt no longer lives in his heart! Apparently it leads to suffering or something, not sure if I’ve got that quite right? Anyway, Jess, now that Jared has discovered the joys of dumping people, guess what? No bad blood though, OK? Hate that stuff, we do.

Just a reminder that there are no Comment of the Week posts on my watch. Josh will be back Sept. 10^th; take it up with him!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Between Friends, 8/26/22

Between Friends mixes joke-a-day and soapy arcs about three middle-aged women and should therefore be called Among Friends, but that’s not important right now. Capable but paralyzingly insecure office manager Susan, passed over for promotion by manager Joan in favor of twentysomething incompetent rage-monkey Kyle, accepted an invitation to join former colleague Savreen’s startup, where the salary, benefits, perks, office environment, and culture are all incomparably better than at her old place.

But you caught that “paralyzingly insecure” part, right? Rather than face change, Susan lets herself get lured right back into the same old misery, where her manager will will give her a nominal promotion and add “disloyal” to a profile that already includes “neurotic,” “small-minded,” and “drudge.”

Sally Forth, 8/26/22

I can’t believe it’s taken five years for Jackie to come around to my suggestion that she take up money-laundering. And how you stand behind the counter at a shop like Small Wonders through a 42-phase pandemic without even considering SBA benefits fraud is completely beyond me.

Sure, Jackie, trinkets are getting more expensive—but imagination is still free!

Dick Tracy, 8/26/22

Dick Tracy‘s commitment to continuity is not so much tenuous as it is selective. “Drs. Tim Sail and Zy Ghote crashed the only remaining space coupe into Jupiter”? Nah, there’s a whole fleet of them, now equipped with big-ass Scrooch Guns. “Now that my people have left the Moon, I will serve them no more as Governor but as their Ambassador”? Nah, he appointed himself Governor again yesterday. But adorable little puffs of condensed breath to prove it’s cold there and Dick is a mammal? You bet!

Dennis the Menace, 8/26/22

“C’mon, Gina, you’re a five-year-old girl: show him how it’s done!”

Hi there! I’ll be sitting in through September 9 while Josh and his wife take a glam European adventure-vacation. Reach me at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net if you experience site problems other than comment-moderation issues (I get automatic updates for those). Enjoy!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Mary Worth, 8/14/22

Behold DaWnilbur, everyone! I love the way this matches up with realistic dream logic in that Dawn was spending hours before falling asleep saying “It’s like I’m turning into my father!” but once in the dreamscape she’s totally unsuspecting and when her hair starts falling out she doesn’t immediately grasp the metaphor, but just looks at it quizzically as the Transformation gets underway. Anyway, I truly enjoy the next-to-last panel here, in which we learn that even fully Wilburized, Dawn will still have pretty, pretty eyes.

Dick Tracy, 8/14/22

It’s never been entirely clear what form of energy the Lunarians harness/generate with their antennae, but I guess we now know that it definitely raises temperature, right? Like if poor Marina had been torn apart by, like, magnetism or antigravity or something, her killers wouldn’t be staring at the carnage in icy disdain making a cruel remark about how it all smelled, the way they would about charred flesh? Or maybe they would. I don’t know what it smells like when someone is killed horribly by space aliens, I live my life correctly, thank you very much.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/14/22

Here’s a strip where the throwaway panels at the beginning make the whole thing profoundly sad. Like, Jughaid was explicitly invited to join a band, and but then sometime afterwards either left or was forced out and is now trying and failing to make it as a solo act. What emotionally fraught Fleetwood Mac-level band drama are we not being shown here?