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Dick Tracy, 9/17/20

Hmm, I foolishly assumed that the professor that Annie and Honeymoon where going to talk to for their legitimate newspaper article about vampires would be in, like, the Comp Lit department, with a research speciality in Balkan folklore. But no, I guess he’s a biologist, and I sort of feel like someone should point out to him that his vampire apparatus, while innovative, seems more like a mechanical engineering project. He might give you a long transhumanist speech about how man and machine are becoming more and more aligned all the time, or he might just say “Look, if you have a better way to get a lot of blood out of a young woman very quickly — for, uh, research purposes — I’d like to hear about it.”

Slylock Fox, 9/17/20

In the first panel, the castaway is planning to eat the bird. In the second, he’s planning on making love to it.

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Crock, 9/15/20

I get that Captain Preppie’s whole thing is that he’s vanity personified, but today’s strip takes that bit to a baroque extreme. I’m not entirely sure what the joke is here: Does Preppie so identify with the high status he associates with luxury brands that he wants to become a Rolls Royce, a man-machine that combines his biological perfection with the pinnacle of engineering? Or does he believe that getting run over by a $300,000 car is the only fitting way for someone of his quality to die?

Dick Tracy, 9/15/20

Jesus, Dick, there’s a lot more to vampirism than wounding someone in the neck so they bleed out! You also have to drink their blood in order to become immortal and feed the empty place inside you where your soul used to be. That newspaper piece on vampires can’t come soon enough.

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Hello everyone! I’m back and very grateful to Uncle Lumpy for his guest-blogging prowess … and extremely grateful for everyone who donated to the Comics Curmudgeon fundraiser! Individual thank-yous are, per usual, coming your way in the next week or so. And now, tanned, rested, and ready to take on … Dick Tracy? Sure, why not.

Dick Tracy, 9/14/20

Brenda Starr and Little Orphan Annie, two iconic long-running continuity strips, sadly came to an end in the last decade, but that hasn’t stopped Dick Tracy from still plugging along (because America likes violent cops more than it likes newspapers or orphans!) and gathering up its syndicate’s intellectual property into a Tribune Content Agency Cinematic Universe. Now Brenda is going to teach Annie and Dick’s half-alien granddaughter Honeymoon to write a journalistically rigorous feature article on … vampires? Sure, why not. I’m honestly surprised that the head of the University of Neo-Chicago’s Department of Ghouls and Draculas they’re interviewing isn’t named “Professor Stakes,” as that’s the sort of on-the-nose nomenclature this feature specializes in.

Crankshaft, 9/14/20

It’s a difficult environment out there for indie booksellers — especially when they have to compete against nice old ladies who operate unlicensed bookstores over their garage, flouting the ADA and any number of fire safety codes and just daring the city’s toothless permitting apparatus to shut them down.

The Lockhorns, 9/14/20

A lot about The Lockhorns, especially the fact that they spend most of their time in a semi-featureless void space, can be explained if you imagine that they’re kept captive in some kind of containment field, possibly floating in a sphere high above the earth, and the rest of the world watches a livestream of their dysfunctional antics for entertainment and/or as a cautionary example. In this alternate universe, journalists like Jake Tapper (?) comment on major milestones in their lives, and presumably everyone’s focus on them brings us together as a nation.

Mary Worth, 9/14/20

I was pretty dubious about Saul Helps A Tween Heal, but I am cautiously optimistic about Saul Woos A Giantess!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/14/20

Honey, just because you’re saying it louder doesn’t make it true