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Dick Tracy, 5/18/19

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that the new storyline of Dick Tracy once again involves dipping back into the comics nostalgia well, with Little Orphan Annie being dragged back from comics purgatory to dance for our throwback amusement. Why not Brenda Starr, another dormant property who is owned, like Annie and Dick Tracy, by Tribune Content Agency, and who’s also a reporter, which would let us get into all sorts of First Amendment issues with the not-real-into-civil-liberties police force of Neo-Chicago? But, no, I guess we’re gonna see Little Orphan Annie trying to integrate her way into Honeymoon’s social circle, hanging out with notorious crime family relative “Ugly” Crystal and … Kandikane Lane, who is, I have always assumed, an adult? And old enough that it’s just “off-putting” and not “creepy and legally actionable” that she’s partners with a man old enough to be an old-timey movie star? Anyway, more on all this as developments warrant, which will hopefully be never.

Family Circus, 5/18/19

Note that Billy here is in fact the guy with the ball. There can be only one explanation of why he’s still alive: Billy killed all those other kids as they tried to kill him. Billy is a smiling, triumphant murderer, walking back into his home with blood on his hands but no guilt in his heart.

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Dick Tracy, 5/11/19

Oh hey, turns out I got bored with Dick Tracy’ Minit Mystery when it suddenly became be less about municipal politics and more about a leftist radical cop killer for hire (?) who killed a lady cop and that led to the local police apparatus violently cracking down on all local organized crime in civil rights violating ways, but now it turns out that, oops, the real cop killer was the lady cop’s husband! “Oops,” says Dick, “I was so obsessed with gangsters that I forgot that 55 percent of women in the U.S. are killed by intimate partners, which you’d think would be a stat at the top of your mind if you’re a person who solves murders for a living. Anyway, sorry about all the organized crime prosecutions we screwed up, by arresting a bunch of gangsters without warrants for no good reason.”

Gil Thorp, 5/11/19

Oh, hey, turns out that once the softball team got super into having interests outside of school, everyone wanted to get in on the “having outside interests” action, which they dubbed as “being too cool for school,” for some reason. Anyway, today’s the day when this relatively harmless trend pivots to becoming the ideological core of a revolutionary vanguard party!

Mark Trail, 5/11/19

Oh, hey, turns out that buzzing sound in Mark Trail was, as I predicted, bees. Bees, everyone! Ha ha, Mark is running away from a bunch of bees!

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Shoe, 5/3/19

Here’s a question that I genuinely don’t know the answer to, and I ask with no particular malice: do you think Shoe strips like this, which consist entirely of two characters in a well-established Shoe locale talking to each other in vaguely joke-like ways, are drawn to order? Or are there like tons of templates on file where an intern at the Brookins-MacNelly Foundation For Laffs can match up the number of word balloons with the joke assigned for the day and just let ‘er rip? This is, again, not meant to be a criticism of the latter strategy — it’s the only logical and efficient way to approach it, after all. But I’m asking because in today’s trip, there seems to be even less of a connection between the joke and the visuals than usual. In panel two in particular, Roz and her customer are narrowing their eyes and leaning towards each other, almost as if they’re about to launch into a physical fight, which would definitely be more interesting than a “death and taxes” gag.

Dick Tracy, 5/3/19

Anyone who’s ever read a single entry on this blog knows that I can very easily achieve a state of “Oh no, I thought too much about this thing that hate and now I accidentally love it,” and this insanely wordy Minit Mystery is now one of those things. I still refuse to attempt to “solve” the mystery or even get a firm grasp of what the hell is happening, but am I going to lie back and enjoy the sensation of letting this tsunami of backstory wash over me. This plot has it all! Authors Pat Culhane and Austin Black! Suburban slashers! Farm gals who are racist against Italians but marry Italians anyway! Can’t wait to sort of understand whatever happens next!