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Dick Tracy, 3/23/20

Hmm, it seems that Shaky, who’s slowly dying, is just going to bounce from one comical house to another until he finally dies! Today’s he’s visiting his cousin Quiver Trembly, which makes me ask: has there ever been any kind of genetic testing done to determine the origin of what’s clearly a heritable condition of some sort? Anyway, you can tell that Quiver is also into crime because she thinks the answer to everything is cocaine.

Mark Trail, 3/23/20

Big excitement, everyone! The Great Adoption Tryout is underway! It’s better than any reality show! (Side note: if Harvey Camel were still alive and here, he would definitely be live-streaming this.) The mean blond kid is already sitting next to the orphan-hungry Crowleys, and I’m honestly not sure if he’s supposed to be also vying for an adoption or what, but what I do know is that he’s going to sabotage Kevin’s happiness by any means necessary, and I for one am very excited to see what he has up his sleeve.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/23/20

Look, folks, I have to deliver some tough truths: it is not OK to shoot people in the head with a nail gun! I don’t care how many hyperniche musical genres they rattle off at you. Just tell them, in a kind but firm tone, that you could not possibly give less of a shit about what “roots country” is or what distinguishes “rockabilly” from “garage rock.” Violence is never the answer, even under extreme duress!

Dennis the Menace, 3/23/20

Some might say that just being stupid isn’t very menacing. But I would suggest that it’s possible to be so profoundly dumb that you truly are dangerous to yourself and everyone around you, and Dennis is getting pretty close to that line!

Crankshaft, 3/23/20

Say, remember last week’s absolute thrill ride, “Lillian is on a podcast“? Well strap yourself the fuck in for this week’s heart-pounder, “Lillian is on the radio!”

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Six Chix, 3/19/20

I think the joke here is that the mummy is very bad at cooking because he … doesn’t have … eyes? Like, can mummies not see, in the classic horror-movie mummy canon? As near as I can tell, mummies’ traditional powers involve shuffling forward very slowly and moaning, so the fact that they can’t see anything makes them even less scary. Anyway, if I were doing this comic, I’d make the joke about how the mummy is covered with highly flammable linen cloth, preserved over the centuries by the bone-dry Egyptian desert, which would have hilarious results next to a stove’s heating elements, but I guess that’s why I’ve always been deemed “too edgy” for the newspaper funny pages.

Dick Tracy, 3/19/20

DICK TRACY UPDATE: Shaky (remember him?) had his big meetup with the Tracys and ended up getting shot in the shoulder, and now he’s laying low at some criminal safehouse for which he had the keys, except it also happens to be where crime-family-adjacent characters Ugly Crystal and her bio-dad (remember them?) are living. Anyway, this has all been funny because Shaky has been trying to “play it cool” despite slowly bleeding out from his bullet wound, and while it isn’t quite as theatrically awful a death as you would’ve seen in the Dick Locher years of this strip, watching his agony mount has been pretty impressively grim, I’ll say that.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/19/20

Wait, do all the characters in Mother Goose and Grimm live in the Land of Oz? It would explain all the talking animals, I’ll say that much.

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Dick Tracy, 3/7/20

Apologies for not keeping you up to date on this Shaky plotline, but long story short, Dick Tracy’s wife Tess is a PI now and she got some guy sent up the river and Shaky is blackmailing her because he says he has evidence that she falsely accused this dude. Tess knows this evidence is false, and has already talked to Dick about the whole situation, but nevertheless Shaky is extremely confident that he’s going to pull it off, even though he’s fairly obviously walking into a trap. This Shaky is a relative of the original, classic Shaky, so I guess the lesson here is to never trust failsons (or, in this case failcousinonceremoveds) just coasting on their family legacy to get the job done. Look at this dink! He can’t even do an animal metaphor right! Merging together two inscrutable animal metaphors doesn’t create one metaphor that makes sense, Shaky!

Mark Trail, 3/7/20

Aw, look at this mischievous little orphaned imp! I wonder what “trouble” he got up to that ended up with him being forced into doing nature stuff? Robbery? Assault? Con artistry? Hopefully Rusty can tell him what it’s like to have a dad: first you don’t have a dad, then you find some weirdo who lives out in a forest compound who vaguely feels like he should have a family but definitely doesn’t want to do sex stuff with his wife, then you live with him for a while, then you wait until a tree falls on him and you start calling him “dad” and he doesn’t actively stop you. Maybe Rusty can help you find a dad, Kevin! There’s plenty of big trees out here the two of you could drop on somebody!

Mary Worth, 3/7/20

While Dawn is out nerding it up with Jared, in Paris, Hugo is … spending time? With a woman? Like a whore? I mean, it looks like they’re in an “office” which means they’re “co-workers” and have to “spend time together” for their “jobs,” so I guess those sluts over in France just do things differently, but still: Hugo, you dog.