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Dick Tracy, 9/23/19

Guys, I finally decided to dig into the deep lore to figure out what exactly the hell is going on with the new Dick Tracy plot, and I’m so glad I did, because the Dick Tracy Wiki’s Sal Monella article is truly a journey. It starts in 1998 with our man Sal creating cheap snacks out of garbage for a discount airline (with the help of his food scientist “Runs McGoo”), which gave Dick temporary amnesia, an episode that wildly I’ve had reason to discuss here before; that plot ended with Sal falling into a trash compactor and presumed dead, but in fact, in early 2004, he reappeared in the strip, now looking like this, due to the compactification process:

Anyway, this was the Dick Locher era of the strip, during which it had become barely concealed reactionary agitprop, so naturally Sal used his ill-gotten money to buy instruments for a band called “The Municipal Slime,” made up entirely of homeless people he hired; for their first concert he filled a stadium with garbage trucks and “the cacophonous music, foul smell, and anti-establishment nature of the event appealed to the city’s youth, and the concert sold out.” Sal now wanted to go legit as a concert promoter, but he was ambushed by Detective Frisk, who had been tracking Monella but kept his whereabouts secret from Dick and the rest of the cops because she wanted all the glory from his arrest. Frisk tried to ambush Monella at the concert; I’ll let the Dick Tracy Wiki tell the rest of the tale:

Monella was handcuffed, but his slimey hands were able to slip through the cuffs. Grabbing a gun, Monella escaped with Frisk in pursuit. Monella jumped into a passing garbage truck and Frisk followed. Additional shots were fired before the truck’s contents were dumped onto a scow on the river. The scow then dumped its load before Tracy could arrive and learn Monella and Frisk’s fate.

Anyway, I have no idea if Sal Monella is going to reappear in this storyline, but I am amused that Staton and Curtis have retconned him into just a guy with a classic mobster-lookin’ squared-off head, and not, you know, a head that was literally crushed into an unnatural cube shape by a trash compactor. I’m also amused that Dick greeted Detective Frisk, a former police officer who everyone assumed was dead, by saying “Oh, hey, we thought you were dead, by the way” and she replied, “Yeah, because I faked my death, I thought that’d be a pretty cool way to quit my job” and everyone’s just super chill about it.

Zits, 9/23/19

At one point the whole deal with the Zits guidance counselor was that Jeremy was horny for her, but I don’t think that’s involved in this intriguing plot setup. Probably he forgot to take the right classes or is failing or there’s some other problem that’s going to jeopardize his graduation (as if this strip, in which the characters never age, was ever going to let him graduate! ha ha!) but it’d honestly be funnier if he were being very literal and it turned out he was dying or something. “Have the guidance counselor tell him,” the doctors and his family decided. “She’s got a great way with kids and he finds her so arousing that maybe it’ll soften the blow.”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/23/19

Sorry, Linda, this is the CTE support group, I guess you might’ve mistaken it for the “CTE magically solving all your problems” group, jeez.

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Mary Worth, 9/20/19

Oh my god just when you thought Dawn had gotten over Hugo it turns out that Dawn didn’t have to get over Hugo because he couldn’t get enough of her hot Westontude and he’s flown back from Paris to be with her (or maybe just didn’t get on his plane and got an Uber back from Santa Royale International to Charterstone; the timeframe for Dawn’s moping over the course of this week’s strips hasn’t been exactly clear). It’s perfectly possible that this story will bring America’s lovelorn comics readers the message that if you’re just sad about something intensely enough, you can change the fabric of reality itself, but it’s also possible that this is just all in Dawn’s mind and tomorrow we’re going to smash cut to her cry-masturbating on the couch.

Blondie, 9/20/19

Now, you’re probably wondering: if Mr. Dithers didn’t want to hug his employees, why did he tweet about “Hug Your Boss Day” just this morning? Well, he’s quite aware that he inspires a toxic melange of fear and contempt in his employees; so, by inducing fear that they might have to demonstrate physical affection for him, but then relieving them of that burden, he’s actually left them feeling more motivated and positive at the end of the workday. Say what you will about the old robber baron, but he’s a wily management genius.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/20/19

The big development in this week’s Funky Winkerbean is that Linda is going to learn if Bull (who, if I’m remembering right, was very briefly on the practice roster of the then-St. Louis Cardinals but never actually played in a game) qualifies for the NFL supplemental disability plan. And now that the week is over, we’re finally going to find o–wait, what? It’s only Friday? Uh, shoot, OK, no problem, we can do this in two strips, absolutely, nobody’s going to notice.

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/19

Hey, everyone, did you catch the fun comics news in the Grey Lady yesterday? It turns out that this week’s strips, in which a CTE-addled Bull obsessively washes the family laundry over and over again, isn’t just another round of the usual CTE-addled laffs that we’ve come to expect. Nope, according to a big, spoilers-heavy article in the New York Times, it’s just the setup for a month-long storyline that climaxes with … (wait for it) … (stop reading now if you don’t want to learn the extremely predictable denouement to all this, I guess) … Bull’s suicide! Did you worry that Lisa’s demise, being brought about more or less by random chance, wasn’t bad enough??? Well, good news, the character deaths in Funky Winkerbean are just going to get more grim from here on in, and will continue until all the demands are met.

Mark Trail, 9/10/19

Fortunately Mark Trail is a tragedy-free zone, which means that Mark probably isn’t going to be eaten by a yeti. I do enjoy that Doc has stood up in the background between panels; perhaps he assumed that, having managed to survive a desert flash flood, he’d proven his mettle and would now be Mark’s permanent companion on adventures. His facial expression in panel two indicates that he’s terribly disappointed to be displaced by some kind of freakish camel-scientist hybrid.

Shoe, 9/10/19

Shoe of course is a leader on the funny pages among strips that telegraph to us how little any of the characters want to be there or to be participating in the “jokes” or “wordplay” therein. We’re all familiar with the Patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror, but I’m fond of today’s more subtle offering, in which the Perfesser leans away from Roz between panels, as if to get as far away from this “punchline” as possible without actually getting up.

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/19

The Gasoline Alley characters, meanwhile, are proud of their punchlines! So proud they need to explain them to one another, at great length, to make sure that everyone is on the same page.