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Dick Tracy, 12/19/18

“Someone has to pay! And it will be either a high diver or the general manager of the local Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum! Fate has intervened!”

Meanwhile over at The Dail[y…], some enraged managing editor is walking around waving this morning’s paper in the air. “Just two stories and one photo on the front page of the Entertainment section?” he shouts, livid. “A banner headline that only goes across three columns? Someone has to pay!”

Judge Parker, 12/19/18

I love the looks of delight on Judge Parker Senior and Katherine’s face as they open the extremely expensive gift that someone just left in their house. It’s a pair of gorgeous baubles, just for them, fallen as if from heaven, which they clearly feel they deserve! But wait, what’s that note? Are there possibly … consequences to this? Strings attached? NOOOOOOO, THIS IS A NIGHTMARE

Mary Worth, 12/19/18

Wait a minute … wait a damn minute … is the Cameron who’s going to be tempted by another in this storyline … Ian? Is this perfectly nice looking young woman going to throw herself at an unpleasant chinbearded academic blowhard, while Toby, toned and constantly lounging about in athleisurewear, remains un-flirted with? This will not stand.

Family Circus, 12/19/18

A spectre is haunting the Keane Kompound … the spectre … of Santa.

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Dick Tracy, 12/15/18

Oh, hey, we’re back to the plot about Vitamin Flintheart and his heavily pregnant bride-to-be. In today’s installment, a stagehand at the play Vitamin is in (where he’s playing himself, natch, this is a strip that never misses a chance to collapse into meta-narrative in an attempt to impress you with how famous its characters are), makes a crass advance on Kandikane, leading Vitamin to loom over him with implied violence. In case you were tired of the extremely not sexy storyline about faxing and invoices, he’s a storyline that’s extremely not sexy but in, like, an entirely different way.

Gil Thorp, 12/15/18

Oh wow, I know panel one is supposed be a “cinematic,” foreshortened look down on our mysterious billboard renter, but it … doesn’t really work well, at all. He looks like a gibbon. A gibbon in glasses. It’s bad, man. Somebody should’ve stopped this.

Also, since the question is “Is Mediocre Good Enough,” to really knock ’em over with the answer, the answer has to be “yes!” Which will allow Gil and this year’s wacky crew of basketball players (seen in panel two engaging in extremely inscrutable antics) to muddle through yet another .550 season unmolested.

Six Chix, 12/15/18

The point of a strip like this is to contrast the wholesome book-acquisition in panel two with what we initially assumed to be her much darker quest, but I’m not really buying it. C’mon lady, you gotta sell it. What are you willing to do to get what you need? Are you willing to kill?

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Gil Thorp, 12/6/18

Well, our Gil Thorp plots have, in traditional Gil Thorp fashion, combined into a semi-satisfying conclusion: Tiki Jansen, forced into a little light address fraud in order to escape his erstwhile criminal associates, enlisted the help of irritating movie buff and emergency substitute punter Joe Bolek in recording himself fleeing in terror from his old schoolmates, with the resulting piece of cinéma vérité praised both for its polemical power and for its mise en scène. I’m reasonably sure that it’s been established that the Mudlarks are in no way in playdown contention, which leaves only one loose plot thread remaining: namely, that Kaz holds his girlfriend Kelly and her intellectual film tastes in open contempt. Things could get really interesting if, for instance, some young Fellini aficionado like Joe Bolek were to wander into Kelly’s travel agency and told her he was “thinking about Italy,” if you know what I mean. (“Italy” refers to watching some Fellini movies and then having sex, and then talking about the movies afterwards, instead of just rolling over and falling immeidately sleep like certain assistant coaches we could mention.)

Barney Google and Snuff Smith, 12/6/18

Hear that, whiny libs? You don’t need big government helping you with your medical bills; you just need someone to beat the shit out of you so you can’t actually spend money other frivolities like poker. Wait, is the implication here that Snuffy got beat up during a poker game, because he cheats all the time? This is really a self-solving problem when you think about it.

Dick Tracy, 12/6/18

Ah, it seems that Polar Vortex’s sinister plot, focused on faxing and slow-walking invoice payments, has been brought down in ironic fashion, because the evil crime syndicate’s record-keeping was too meticulous. We’ve heard enough — time for the cops to show up and brutalize a lot of people with flagrant disregard for due process!

Mary Worth, 12/6/18

I guarantee that Mary doesn’t remember who or what “Jimmy” is, but it doesn’t matter. She learned from the sad story of Saul’s lost love Mia that an animal can plug the emotional hole that a dead human left behind, and she learned from the sad story of Saul’s lost dog Bella that you can also just plug the hole a dead animal leaves behind with another animal. So … do you like cats, Estelle? Remember, as building manager Mary has keys to everyone’s apartments, so even if you say no she’s just going to put the cat in there anyway.