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Dick Tracy, 10/22/20

Despite the fact that Dick Tracy wears a bright yellow coat and has a rogue gallery full of weird mutants, his strip is actually a fairly accurate depiction of police work in several senses, including the fact that there often isn’t much mystery involved in any given crime. Oh, did an heiress die from being drained of blood, vampire-style? Probably she was killed by the local professor guy who’s part of a gang of vampire cosplayers who think they should’ve inherited the money instead, and he’ll be going after the other sisters next! Anyway, I genuinely enjoy how the tubes coming out of Professor Stokes’ mouth make him look particularly pathetic. You’ll never be a real vampire, buddy, no matter how goofy an overcoat you buy!

Mary Worth, 10/22/20

It has been brought to my attention by my more drug-savvy readers that this could also be a pipe for smoking meth, not just crack like I said before, so really, who can say what Tommy is resisting here, but the point is that if you don’t enjoy the sight of our boy staring at a pipe with eyes the size of dinner plates, then I respect your opinion but I think you’re missing out one of the fundamental pleasures of Mary Worth.

Dennis the Menace, 10/22/20

A fun fact about Socrates is that he was put on trial for various trumped up charges of “corrupting the youth” of Athens, and was convicted by only a very narrow majority of the jury, but then in the penalty phase of the trial he got to give a speech about what he thought his punishment should be, and he said the Athenian government should give him free room and board for life like they did for Olympic champions, and then a much larger portion of the jury voted to have him executed. What I’m trying to say, Dennis, is that a much smarter and more menacing man than you has already tried this little strategem, and it very much did not work.

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Dick Tracy, 10/10/20

Oh, I get it now! Hope, Faith, and Charity inherited money from their distant uncle, who otherwise would’ve left it to his “eccentric” vampire pals, who would’ve used it to upgrade their prototype fang and pump system; without that funding, the project still isn’t quite at production-level quality. Now the vampires are trying to knock off the sisters to get their hands on the cash; not sure why they apparently feel compelled to do so using their subpar blood-draining apparatus instead of just, like, shooting them or whatever, though I guess it’s probably the same reasons driving them to build such an device in the first place. Anyway, jokes on you, vampires! The surviving sisters just blew the rest of the money on a sweet car, plus that’s not actually how inheritance law works.

Daddy Daze, 10/10/20

You know who else wasn’t of royal birth? A guy who was born on a backwards Genovese island colony in 1769 and given the name of Napoleone di Buonaparte! I genuinely love that, as his father drones on with outdated ideas of who can and who can’t become king, this terrifying baby is performing his own coronation with a crown he made himself. I guess we’re all his subjects now?

The Lockhorns, 10/10/20

I mean … can he? Leroy’s facial expression really seems to be of a guy who’s been trying upwards of a minute to break that club over his leg, without success. He knows he looks more absurd with each passing moment, but he can’t back out now!

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Crankshaft, 9/7/20

HOT TV RECOMMENDATION FROM JOSH: I have been enjoying Trapped, an Icelandic mystery show set in a remote, isolated small town. It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime and watching it in Icelandic with English subtitles triggered a Remembrance of Things Past-style flashback to one of the many books I had as a kid in a genre that basically could be described as “Do You Have An Extremely Dorky Kid And Wikipedia Hasn’t Been Invented Yet? Here’s A Phonebook Sized Book Full Of Interesting Facts Without Really Anything By Way Of Organization,” which had a section on the Icelandic language, which is basically still Old Norse. It stayed archaic for so long because Iceland was historically so isolated, but as the modern age dawned, the country made a conscious effort to keep neologisms out of the language, using native words for new concepts instead; the example given in the book is the word for telephone, sími, which is based on a Norse word for thread, referring to telephone wires. This is funny to me in Trapped because people talk about phones all the time, and of course exclusively use the word to refer to cell phones, which use no thread at all! Anyway, this is just to say that I was enjoying some fun etymology stuff about words we use to talk about phones and how they work, and how they embed older, outdated notions into our current speech, until fuckin’ Crankshaft came by and ruined it with a dumb joke about “poking,” ugh.

Dick Tracy, 9/7/20

I am absolutely cackling at the image of Professor Stokes or whoever using this prototype vampire chassis and biting into some guy’s neck and starting to pump with its inadequate motor and the victim just being like “Hey, uh, what’s going on? That … that tickles, knock it off, guy. If you’re trying to drain my blood, you’re not doing it very well!”