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Dick Tracy, 10/15/19

It was all fun and games reading up on the hilarious backstory of Detective Frisk and Sal Monella, but the current storyline has turned out to be kind of enh, mostly involving Frisk tracking down Lily, her birth mother, who turns out to have sold Frisk as a baby as part of some kind of baby-selling ring she’s still connected to that Frisk is investigating, and now she’s pretending to emotionally bond with Frisk so that the ring can … catch up with Frisk, I think? Or something. Anyway, today is notable because said baby-selling bio-mom proves that she’s truly beyond the pale morally by openly lusting after Vitamin Flintheart, who’s a weird gross old man and also already spoken for. Control yourself, Lily! You should go see a production of Our Town to appreciate its metatheatrical commentary on ordinary lives, not to get horny!

Mary Worth, 10/15/19

Speaking of not getting horny, Wilbur and Estelle are strengthening their bond by belting out Sandy Denny’s 1973 folk-rock classic, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” Meanwhile, Iris has been feeling exhausted, possibly because her hot young stud boyfriend’s sexual endurance is outpacing hers. “Maybe you should cut back on your class schedule?” Zak suggests. “And focus your energy on the important stuff? Like sex with me?”

Marvin, 10/15/19

Meanwhile, over in Marvin, Marvin’s grandpa yearns to join his wife in the grave, and honestly: if the alternative is hanging around alive with the rest of his family, who can blame him?

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Dick Tracy, 10/13/19

Good on Dick Tracy for raising awareness about this strange cancer cluster, but, uh, it’s weird that this epidemiological problem is being treated as a crime that Dick and the MCU can crack if they just get the right clue or lead from a concerned citizen! I guess if this leads to Dick gunning down the CEO of a polluting chemical company whose head is shaped like a benzene molecule, I can’t complain.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/13/19

Not sure which wizened fortune-telling crone I managed to annoy enough that now I’m cursed to be the guy who has to report on it when a syndicated newspaper comic, formerly the most family-friendly form of mass-produced entertainment out there, does a joke about piss stuff, but anyway, here’s a Mother Goose and Grimm where there’s just, like, a big puddle of yellow piss, right where God and everyone can see it, and I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, it’s dog piss, that’s not so bad,” but I dunno, man, the dog can talk. He can talk, you know? I think if you know how to talk you should be able to piss in a toilet. Just my take.

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Dick Tracy, 9/23/19

Guys, I finally decided to dig into the deep lore to figure out what exactly the hell is going on with the new Dick Tracy plot, and I’m so glad I did, because the Dick Tracy Wiki’s Sal Monella article is truly a journey. It starts in 1998 with our man Sal creating cheap snacks out of garbage for a discount airline (with the help of his food scientist “Runs McGoo”), which gave Dick temporary amnesia, an episode that wildly I’ve had reason to discuss here before; that plot ended with Sal falling into a trash compactor and presumed dead, but in fact, in early 2004, he reappeared in the strip, now looking like this, due to the compactification process:

Anyway, this was the Dick Locher era of the strip, during which it had become barely concealed reactionary agitprop, so naturally Sal used his ill-gotten money to buy instruments for a band called “The Municipal Slime,” made up entirely of homeless people he hired; for their first concert he filled a stadium with garbage trucks and “the cacophonous music, foul smell, and anti-establishment nature of the event appealed to the city’s youth, and the concert sold out.” Sal now wanted to go legit as a concert promoter, but he was ambushed by Detective Frisk, who had been tracking Monella but kept his whereabouts secret from Dick and the rest of the cops because she wanted all the glory from his arrest. Frisk tried to ambush Monella at the concert; I’ll let the Dick Tracy Wiki tell the rest of the tale:

Monella was handcuffed, but his slimey hands were able to slip through the cuffs. Grabbing a gun, Monella escaped with Frisk in pursuit. Monella jumped into a passing garbage truck and Frisk followed. Additional shots were fired before the truck’s contents were dumped onto a scow on the river. The scow then dumped its load before Tracy could arrive and learn Monella and Frisk’s fate.

Anyway, I have no idea if Sal Monella is going to reappear in this storyline, but I am amused that Staton and Curtis have retconned him into just a guy with a classic mobster-lookin’ squared-off head, and not, you know, a head that was literally crushed into an unnatural cube shape by a trash compactor. I’m also amused that Dick greeted Detective Frisk, a former police officer who everyone assumed was dead, by saying “Oh, hey, we thought you were dead, by the way” and she replied, “Yeah, because I faked my death, I thought that’d be a pretty cool way to quit my job” and everyone’s just super chill about it.

Zits, 9/23/19

At one point the whole deal with the Zits guidance counselor was that Jeremy was horny for her, but I don’t think that’s involved in this intriguing plot setup. Probably he forgot to take the right classes or is failing or there’s some other problem that’s going to jeopardize his graduation (as if this strip, in which the characters never age, was ever going to let him graduate! ha ha!) but it’d honestly be funnier if he were being very literal and it turned out he was dying or something. “Have the guidance counselor tell him,” the doctors and his family decided. “She’s got a great way with kids and he finds her so arousing that maybe it’ll soften the blow.”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/23/19

Sorry, Linda, this is the CTE support group, I guess you might’ve mistaken it for the “CTE magically solving all your problems” group, jeez.