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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enjoying some fun etymology stuff about words we use to talk about phones and how they work, and how they embed older, outdated notions into our current speech, until fuckin’ Crankshaft came by and ruined it with a dumb joke about “poking,” ugh.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!”

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Mary Worth, 10/6/20

Sorry for not alerting everybody to the fact that Tommy proposed to Brandy using an onion ring yesterday, because I found it maudlin and predictable and also it rips off a bit from the Simpsons. But Brandy letting Tommy down not-so-gently by saying “Hey, we’re just having fun here, why ruin everything with labels, you know?”, presumably triggering a relapse into addiction and/or crime? I promise to keep you breathlessly up to date on developments.

Dick Tracy, 10/6/20

We temporarily step away from Dick tracking down deadly vampire cosplayers to bring you Sam laughing uproariously at a new comic in the Neo-Chicago Tribune! See, it’s funny because this guy kills people for the government, but nobody gets to kill him. This strip’s gonna be hit around the precinct!

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Dick Tracy, 9/23/20

You might remember that legitimate biologist/Dracula cosplayer Professor Stokes bragged of “collecting over a third of Faith’s blood volume in record time” (consensually, I guess?) and promised to “add her sisters’ blood to my collection as well.” I guess based on the names Hope and Charity these are the aforementioned sisters, and it’s pretty strong evidence of the uselessness of the scions of wealthy families that mere days after their sister was found exsanguinated in an alley somewhere, they’re busy squabbling over whether to buy cool cars or invest in mutual funds from extremely dubious-sounding brokerages, rather than getting the hell out of town before they too are tapped and drained like a keg at a frat party.

Mary Worth, 9/23/20

I regret to inform you that rather than the Saul romance plot we were promised, we’re getting some kind of Brandy-Tommy business. I do find it pretty funny that Iris’s attitude towards Brandy appears to be “I’m so very grateful you’re around to cater to the emotional needs of my ne’er-do-well son, because I’ve got a very busy schedule of sex with my much younger boyfriend lined up. See ya never!”

Mark Trail, 9/23/20

Oh, man, I hope the rest of the week is taken up by escalating authority figures — the mayor, the president, the Secretary-General of the UN, God himself — grabbing the phone and trying to browbeat Mark into getting on a plane, coming to New York, and receiving a tasteful engraved paperweight in front of a politely clapping audience of his peers. “Your dog’s gonna die whether you’re there or not, Mark!” says God. “Believe me, I know.”