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Dick Tracy, 4/22/19

A quirk of the newspaper industry is that, traditionally, many people have subscribed only to the Sunday paper, which was much larger than the other days’ editions, and, conversely, some people subscribed to every day but Sunday. You can see the effect of this in how the continuity strips deal with Sundays. Most structure things so that Sunday sums up the previous week’s action, accommodating both Sunday-only and no-Sunday audiences while boring the rest of us. The Phantom famously has an entirely separate storyline that runs on Sundays; Gil Thorp doesn’t bother running on Sundays at all.

Then there’s Dick Tracy, which treats Sunday as just another day of the week, man. This is hilarious to me this week because I’m imagining how anyone who didn’t see yesterday’s shootout would parse this conversation, which sounds to me a lot like Dick and Joe acknowledging, without coming right out and saying, that Tracy killed an unarmed man and then planted a gun on him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/22/19

I immediately and 100% believe that not only did Rex tell Sarah that ice cream trucks are “music trucks,” but that he also told her that they were the only legal way to listen to music of any sort. It’s great, how the music trucks will drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, bringing their songs with them! The rest of the time we get to enjoy a little peace and quiet around here.

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Dick Tracy, 4/21/19

Were you hoping we were going to find out what made “The Professor” tick? Did you think that there must be an interesting story behind an apparently successful sports columnist whose sense of professional pride led him to kill a series of gym teachers? Were you intrigued to learn more about the whole psychological deal that led him to obsess over his nickname? Well, too bad, because Dick pretty much figured out who he was right away and then gunned him down in an alley. I guess “The Professor” should’ve gotten his Ph.D. in marksmanship, so he could have at least winged Dick on the way out, or maybe in English, so that he didn’t embarrass himself by wildly misusing the word “ironic” as he expired.

Pluggers, 4/21/19

Wait, is this the first instance in history of pluggers being depicted as snobs? There are of course no channels on which programming is introduced by random drunk dudes wearing sweaty tank tops, but if there were, they would be immensely popular, and rightfully so.

Gasoline Alley, 4/21/19

Today’s Gasoline Alley is a cruel bait and switch because it allowed us to believe right up to the final panel that Rufus, one of the most irritating characters in an irritating strip, was dead.

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Mary Worth, 4/10/19

Hmm, it seems that wiring “Arthur Z” a mere $10,000 has made little to no change in Estelle’s material circumstances, but has enabled “Arthur” to trade his filthy, green-tinted hovel for a delightful seaside bungalow where he can enjoy a fine meal and glass of champagne in peace. Thus, this grift is good revolutionary praxis! I assume he refers to her as “my queen” because he sees his scheme as the equivalent of seizing one of Marie Antionette’s chateaus for the common folk to live in.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/10/19

Ah whoops it looks like, despite the fact that Jess’s co-worker was excplicity identified as “Cindy” in dialogue yesterday, my brain refused to process her as “Cindy, Funky’s ex” for some reason. In my defense, Cindy has always been portrayed in this strip both as blonde and as absolutely terrified that she’s going to get too old for her hunky actor boyfriend, so the fact that she’s let herself go grey certainly threw me. Also, I know documentary work Cindy did for Buddyblog got an Emmy nomination, and Jessica did move to LA with big dreams, but honestly, I have no memory at all of the two of them ever connecting professionally. And honestly, I’m pretty OK with my mind slowly turning to goo so long as the encyclopedic memory of Funky Winkerbean plotlines is the first to go.

Dick Tracy, 4/10/19

Dick Tracy well knows that, in his universe, the correct answer is always the most obvious one, so the fact that this sportwriter is from Tacoma, just like the serial killer he’s tracking, is all the proof he needs that the sportswriter is the serial killer, but I enjoy his contemplative look in the third panel, as if he’s seriously considering building a barbed wire fence around Tacoma so he can more efficiently interrogate all 200,000 inhabitants until he gets some answers.

The Lockhorns, 4/10/19

I’m sorry, but Leroy’s whole thing is that he’s a poorly paid white collar drone, and I refuse to believe that he somehow rates an office with a door and a personal assistant to field his calls. Was this joke so good that it was worth undermining the very nature of the Lockhorns reality? It very much was not, in my opinion!

Gil Thorp, 4/10/19

I definitely respect Gil Thorp’s total commitment to its unique, herky-jerky visual narrative style, and if sometimes that means that a moment of actually exciting sports action is described in a narration box while the accompanying panel just shows someone standing on a base bag and clapping, well, so be it.