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Dick Tracy, 1/26/24

Fan fact, everybody: “the Amazing Baxter” is actually Fata, in a very clever disguise as a man, which the square, conventional minds of Neo-Chicago simply cannot see through. “He’s not like Fata!” declares Sam. “He’s a fella and she’s a lady!” Only Dick’s keen perception can see beyond the gender binary to the officer-involved shooting that he’s earned for this week.

Gasoline Alley, 1/26/24

Ha ha, Slim’s been banished from his own home due to false adultery accusations, and now he has nowhere to go and is starting to panic that he’ll freeze to death in his car! Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, but it does put out good ones occasionally, if you don’t like Slim, and I don’t.

Hagar the Horrible, 1/26/24

Hagar definitely went out and killed that moose in between panels, right? He didn’t just have the head lying around somewhere?

Marvin, 1/26/24

Jeff, you won plane tickets! I know you’ve been telling everyone that you won a vacation, but you actually just won plane tickets. That’s not the same thing at all!

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Shoe, 1/21/24

This is a truly terrible joke and I don’t want to deal with it on any of it’s “humorous” levels but I think we should pause to think about the “college roommate” angle. The Perfesser is an extremely despress fifty(?)-something extremely bird-man who can’t maintain a romantic relationship and is doing the bare legal minimum to serve as a guardian for Skyler, the son of a presumably deceased sibling. This joke seems to require a close personal relationship to work and the only one that his creators can come up with for him is with a college roommate, someone he presumably hasn’t spent time with in decades. It’s extremely grim stuff, just like every other time we get the tiniest peek at the personal lives of any of the bird-people in this strip.

Gasoline Alley, 1/21/24

Hey guys, remember the Magic Eye books, from the ’90s? They were everywhere for a little bit and I was always bitter about it because I’m nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other and have terrible stereo vision as a result, so they never worked for me and I came to resent their popularity since it felt like they were mocking me personally. Anyway, that fad ended and I haven’t had to think about them for decades but now, uh, here’s today’s Gasoline Alley, I guess. Is this even going to work as a Magic Eye thing? Just a bunch of heads in a row? Anyone whose eyes work properly, please give it a shot and report back, though I won’t think less of you if you don’t, since I would not attempt to see these withered freaks in 3D even if I were physically capable of it.

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Gasoline Alley, 1/20/24

Longtime faithful readers know that in most of the strips I comment on here, there’s at least one character upon whom I wish every ill. In Gasoline Alley that’s obviously Slim, but I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the strip’s creators also love to torment him. Why else would his plan to murder teenagers with a meteorite go awry and his house get haunted by inane ghosts? Anyway, you may remember the time he got an erotic concussion, and now we’re back to another unsettling tale of his place in our collective sexual dreamscape. His wife found a mysterious love note in his pocket that he doesn’t remember getting; could it be that Saint Agnes, who famously was to be married against her will and then punished for her Christianity by being sent to a brothel but God protected her by making her hair grow over her body and striking her would-be rapists dead, is telling Slim that his own chastity is in danger? Will his ordeal finally be ended with a knife to the throat, with eager believers soaking up his blood with handkerchiefs in memory of his martyrdom? I have frankly never wished for anything more in regards to this strip.

Pluggers, 1/20/24

Because I’m a hip young person with the cutting edge job of “blogger,” my calendar is on my computer and backed up to the cloud, but somehow I had never really thought to use the calendar’s search function before, and the other day while looking for something I discovered to my surprise — and, frankly, delight — that everything I’ve ever put in there, going back to 2003, has been retained! I can see all my quotidian appointments for the last two decades! Only today, in seeing this panel, did I realize that I have become truly one of the most unsettling beings of all: the cyber-plugger.