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Gil Thorp, 12/21/20

Ahh, one of my favorite occasional Gil Thorp bits is when they introduce a nerd character, to balance out the jocks, although because of this strip’s relentless focus on jocks, the plot is always that the nerd must enter the jock realm! Like Remember Bobby, the stats nerd who weaseled his way into an unpaid quasi-assistant coaching gig but gave fake adderall to one of the basketball players and got fired, only to come back a few years later to attempt to humiliate Gil via billboards, except that he was ultimately humiliated himself by Marty Moon? Or remember Steve Luhm, who was technically a jock because he played basketball but also was a nerd because he was a feminist and couldn’t use street slang appropriately, and then he came back a few years later to work as a janitor at Milford High? If you’re detecting a pattern here, it’s that, despite what pencil-neck English teachers might tell you, nerds don’t actually do better than jocks after graduation, so suck it, nerds, an while it’s true that some nerd characters didn’t get a post-Milford comeuppance but just saddled with hilarious nerd dialogue instead, my point is: how will poor Vic Doucette’s hubristic desire to replace Mr. Staley as the basketball P.A. announcer (?) result in his inevitable, and justly deserved, fall from grace?

Dick Tracy, 12/21/20

A friend of mine is the daughter of a vineyard owner, and once I was talking to her dad about how the Napa wine industry survived prohibition, and he told me that one thing some vineyards did was to ship all the raw materials needed for winemaking to customers along with a very detailed instruction set that began with “Now that you have received these innocent items, no matter what you do, don’t take the following steps or else you’ll have created wine, and that would be illegal.” What I’m trying to say is that Dick Tracy, a comic strip that I feel safe in saying been historically anti-crime, seems with this storyline very eager to offer us plenty of nuts and bolts tips on how to run a narcotics distribution ring.

Dennis the Menace, 12/21/20

You know what we can all agree is extremely menacing? Munchausen syndrome by proxy!

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Judge Parker, 12/19/20

A few years back, Judge Parker Senior wrote The Chambers Affair, a mystery/spy novel that received a bad review from a snooty Ivy League academic but raves from everyone else, including vicious gun runners and the husband of the aforementioned Ivy League academic, so I assume it was a fun, breezy potboiler. I’m very sad that we didn’t get to see Alan try to pitch a sequel, in which our hero Chambers (?) spends 400 pages musing on the complexity of life and the moral grey areas we all need to grapple with, only to be laughed out of his publisher’s office.

Daddy Daze, 12/19/20

I haven’t been reading Daddy Daze for very long, but if there’s one thing I know about the Daddy Daze baby, it’s that he’s extremely, unnaturally mobile and very curious about everything, so why on Earth would you keep a breakable vase on top of an obviously wobble-prone table in the same house as him? (This problem would not be rectified by putting the Daddy Daze baby in a hamster ball.) Please, Daddy Daze daddy, demonstrate a little savvy about your own universe, I beg of you.

Dick Tracy, 12/19/20

Sam knows that a war is like just about any other product in this mass-produced age: mechanized, executed on a grand scale, leaving no room for the personal touch. Now, a broken neck? That’s an artisanal murder, that’s what that is.

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Dick Tracy, 12/12/20

Oh, wow, I didn’t think this hippie storyline would take a sharp turn into hard drugs, but sure, yes, absolutely, I’m extremely here for a Sam cleverly sneaking into the home of a couple of cocaine fiends who can’t decide if cocaine is delicious candy or a medical necessity, and who react to his stern law enforcement by throwing cocaine in his face. There’s only one possible outcome here: Sam gets some cocaine up his nose, and, as is the nature of these things, immediately becomes addicted to the terrible substance, and must fight this awful curse for the remainder of the storyline.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/12/20

Ha ha, yes, if there’s one thing Rex Morgan definitely has and is known for, it’s a sense of humor! Look, you can tell in panel two that he’d definitely be smiling, if his cheek muscles hadn’t atrophied from years of disuse.