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Crock, 12/14/23

Not that I will ever give up on my long-running feud with Crock, but even I have to admit that this is a decent joke. Sure, in order for it to really work for you, you have to know a little about the characters and understand that Captain Preppie’s whole bit is that he’s handsome and egotistical, but for my sins, I am someone who does in fact understand Captain Preppie’s whole bit, so it does, in fact, work for me. Sometimes you just have to give the devil his due (in this analogy, the syndicated newspaper comics strip Crock stands in for the Adversary, the Lord of Lies himself).

Dick Tracy, 12/14/23

I was about to do a riff here about how today’s Dick Tracy is aimed at the fairly narrow audience of people who like to erotically ruminate on the prospect of being bested in combat by Cate Blanchett weilding a rare book case in one hand and an épée in the other, but honestly that doesn’t seem like a particularly narrow audience now that I think about it. It’s probably significantly broader than the audience for the Dick Tracy comic strip, if we’re being honest.

Pluggers, 12/14/23

I’m on the record as being cranky when Pluggers just generalizes the long-contested definition of a plugger into “pluggers are old”, so I appreciate today’s strip, which tells us that pluggers are old and also their refrigerators are more disgusting than you could possibly imagine.

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Dick Tracy, 11/30/23

I have to admit that it’s a little discomfiting to learn that X. Libris, a wealthy, sinister rare book collector who dresses in a severe black suit all the time and looks exactly like Cate Blanchett, belongs to a Planet Fitness where she goes after work to lift free weights of whatever. I was going to grudgingly acknowledge that this humanizes her a bit, but you know what? Part of Dick Tracy’s whole deal is that its villains are inhumanized, in the sense that their skulls and faces are deformed in disturbing and biologically improbable ways and they die impossibly agonizing deaths, so I’m going to have to give today’s strip a thumbs down.

Gil Thorp, 11/30/23

Welp, it took more than a year, but it seems finally everyone’s acknowledged that Gil is a Newly Divorced Dude, and so the question arises: Is he getting the emotional support he needs as he goes through this huge change in his life Who’s he gonna have sex with? Is it this kid’s grandmother? Apparently everyone in town wants a piece, but this kid was thoughtful enough to get dibs for his grandmother.

Hi and Lois, 11/30/23

“Please, just a few moments of human contact! You usually leave me alone on the floor in the middle of the living rooms for hours at a time. You don’t even close the curtains! I’m so sunburned!”

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Dick Tracy, 11/29/23

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I stayed on campus to do an independent study and worked part time at the library in their book repair lab. While I didn’t get to handle rare books like Dick Tracy’s sinister bibliophile/stab maniac X. Libris, I did learn how to handle the various tools of the trade to get more prosaic volumes back on the shelves, including some knives and knife-like implements. Did I become enough of an “expert” in this “work” to neatly stab someone through the ribs, killing them instantly? No, no I did not, and frankly I kind of resent that.

Hi and Lois, 11/29/23

When Winnie-the-Pooh got his head stuck in the honey jar, it was of course of a matter of fairly serious import to Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood, although it was obviously quite funny to those of us who read and enjoyed his adventures. The Flagstons seem to occupy an intermediary space, one in which they take on the role of both the observed and the observer, simultaneously laughing at the antics of others while engaging in antics of their own that discomfit them and amuse us. What would our own predicaments look like from an outside vantage point, if our lives were grist for narrative? Would episodes of anxiety and irritation elicit cruel laughter, rather than sympathy? Something to think about, the next time you get your head stuck in a jar of some sort.