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Dennis the Menace, 10/26/21

[sputtering indignantly] Martha! You completely misunderstand me! Why, I wasn’t planning on slipping this loathsome tyke a handful of barbiturates, hoping he would swallow them and quickly slip into a coma or worse! I need them for me! This is one visit from the lad too many and I’m hoping for the sweet release of death myself! Strange that you’ve lived with me for so many years but it’s as if you don’t even know me at all!

Dick Tracy, 10/26/21

Oh, so, over in Dick Tracy Diet Smith’s Time Drone exploded upon its return from a trip to the past, destroying his HQ and killing several people, and now people are mad about it. Kind of wild that this guy invented a machine capable of travelling to the past, potentially altering the fabric of the space-time continuum and also eliminating all human privacy forever, and nobody seemed to care much, but if blow up one building you get a bunch of people outside your house with signs that say “BAN TIME TRAVEL.” Hey guys, I’m pretty sure they were building bombs in that building that blew up too, just putting that out there, if you’re looking for stuff to ban!

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Dick Tracy, 10/14/21

Say, remember a few weeks ago, when Dick seemed to grudgingly agree that a free press is an important element in society and gave an interview to some lady from a newspaper? Well, surprise: that lady was a criminal, and Dick, who’s never forgotten a single misshapen criminal skull he’s laid eyes on, knew it at the time, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. Too bad, because it looks like she doesn’t even work for the fake news after all! Wait, does not working for the fake news make her better or worse? Either way, I’m sure Dick is regretting not shooting her while she was trying to escape from the interview.

Shoe, 10/14/21

I’m a strong believer in the Occam’s Joke Razor, by which I mean that when it comes to setup material, entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. However, this should be balanced against the Law of Joke Specificity, which says that specific things are more funny the vague ones. Take today’s Shoe, for example. To set up the punchline, the lady bird needs to say she has a particular dream job, because it wouldn’t make a ton of sense otherwise; but the strip goes so specific, having her claim she wants to work at an English department store that went out of business in 2006, that you sort of expect that to feed into the punchline, when it really doesn’t. That said, I do enjoy the loving way the Perfesser is gazing into his beer glass in the second panel. I think we know what he is doing in his dreams when he’s not working, ha ha! (He’s getting bombed in the middle of the afternoon.)

Dennis the Menace, 10/14/21

Speaking of facial expressions, I am absolutely loving Alice’s face and body language here. This is the moment when she realizes that Dennis is never going to become a functional enough person to move out of the house, and she is not OK with it!

Mary Worth, 10/14/21

Speaking of facial expressions, I’m interpreting Libby’s here as one of grim determination. She’s not sure how many more piece of furniture she’ll need to piss on to break Estelle of the Wilbur habit once and for all, but she’s willing to do whatever it takes.

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Dick Tracy, 9/30/21

One thing I’ve always respected about Dick Tracy is that it would be easy to portray Diet Smith as an eccentric but helpful inventor always willing to do his part to aid the authorities and stop crime, but instead it’s repeatedly hinted that he is a dude who is into some real sicko shit. Sure, he could use his Time Drone to solve mysteries or find buried treasure or whatever, but what if instead he acquired footage of our most beloved president getting his brains blown out in vivid 4K video and Dolby Atmos surround sound, and then he spent the next three days watching it over and over again, alone in his office, for science?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/30/21

Oh, say, how’s the current Funky Winkerbean plot, in which a running gag from the strip’s early wacky days is revived in pseudo-realistic fashion and revealed to be a source of profound trauma for everyone involved, going? Well, the memories that Holly’s return to majoretting have dug up are sure activating some latent rage at her emotionally abusive mother, whom she now lives with, so that should be fun for all concerned. Also, she broke her ankle!

Blondie, 9/30/21

Just to prove that I’m an emotionally mature and magnanimous person, I want to show you this Blondie, which has an absolutely solid, well-written joke that made me laugh. It does happen sometimes, in the legacy comics! Is it a little unnerving to notice that Herb also has the same weird baggy wrinkle neck as Dagwood? Yes! But I’m trying to ignore it, trying not to visualizing the neck-flesh quavering like jelly, and just focus on the unusually good punchline.