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Phantom, 3/3/15

How much of our day-to-day life is driven by conscious decision-making based on the sum of our life history, and how much by instinct? That is the question the current Phantom amnesiac storyline asks. The Phantom already has assumed many of his old Phantom-habits — crime fighting, journaling — and now he takes on one of the most important: the urge to reproduce himself! Didn’t realize how much the quest for a suitable mate was part of the Phantom mythos, did you? How many of those volumes in the Skull Cave are just full of drawings of various ladies, surrounded by little hearts and “MRS. THE PHANTOM” and “GOOD BREEDING STOCK” written over and over again?

Hey, remember when Chatu kidnapped the Phantom’s wife but let the Phantom believe she was dead, and then the Phantom got all flirty with sexy anti-pirate high seas vigilante Captain Savarna? This strip finds a lot of contrived ways to set up doomed love stories, is what I’m saying.

Spider-Man, 3/3/15

Ha ha, whoops, looks like Spider-Man’s secret identity has been revealed, revealed by some jerk with a bowl cut who used extremely basic observations of Spider-Man’s day-to-day routine to figure it out, in a way that really anyone who cared probably could’ve years ago. How’s our hero going to get out of this one? Maybe everyone is so distracted by the fact (suddenly very obvious in panel three) that Mysterio’s costume leaves nothing to the imagination that they haven’t been listening to anything he’s said for a while now.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/3/15

A corny play on words? That’s not a well-written comic strip punchline. A corny play on words, followed by another character acknowledging how corny that play on words is, followed by some depressing talk that trails off with an ellipsis? That’s a well-written comic strip punchline!

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Mark Trail, 2/20/15

“It made me think of my own wife! Her name is Hope, and I love her so much I never even mentioned her before now. Definitely I would never take her deep into the swamp where I keep my bog-palace! I mean, people’s wives get kidnapped all the time out here! What kind of monster are you, Mark, bringing your poor wife into this hellhole kidnapping-land?”

Dennis the Menace, 2/20/15

By refuting the basic premises behind harsh prison sentencing, Dennis menaces our modern prison-industrial complex and the culture of retribution that feeds it.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/20/15

Literally Funky Winkerbean is just spending days having representatives of Enormous Midwestern University be smirking dicks to the hapless teens of Westview High. I mean, I guess most people in this strip are smirking dicks to everyone else all the time, but somehow it jumps out more when non-recurring characters do it.

Lockhorns, 2/20/15

I know this is one of those things where just speaking the name summons the thing into existence, but at the moment I am very glad for the Google search results I just got:

Clearly any such stories would include a depth of emotional and sexual cruelty that would put Fifty Shades of Grey to shame.

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/19/15

Funky Winkerbean would like to remind you that life is a desperate scramble for status, and that those who fail to properly credential themselves will find themselves forever resigned to tenuous and economically marginal jobs.

Wizard of Id, 2/19/15

Wizard of Id would like to remind you that control over life and death is at the root of all political authority, and that socially sanctioned murder is the dearest fantasy of those in power.

Mark Trail, 2/19/15

Mark Trail would like to remind you that you can be duped and held at gunpoint by your closest friend, live in terror of your life for days, see a man blown to bits in an explosion, and have your company’s finances thrown into disarray, and just walk back to your office like nothing happened, like the world’s the same as it ever was! Don’t worry, some good press in Woods and Wildlife Magazine will smooth this whole thing over.