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Spider-Man, 9/7/18

Oh, right, so it turns out the secret plan of the Golden Claw-Kingpin partnership is the classic “lure all the other crime bosses to a meeting under the guise of forming a city-wide crime alliance, only to use the meeting as an excuse to massacre your rivals” trick, which you’d think criminals would figure out, seeing at the other people they’re dealing with are also criminals! Anyway, today we learn that the site of this meeting is … the theater where MJ’s hit play Picture Perfect is running, except that it’s closed for structur[al reasons?] and doesn’t seem to have moved elsewhere, so how big a hit could it be, really? Long story short, the criminals Golden Claw and the Kingpin lure to the Mammon won’t be the first to die on that stage, if you know what I mean. (I’m referring to MJ “dying” metaphorically in front of an audience, since I assume she’s a terrible actress.)

Funky Winkerbean, 9/7/18

I’m not sure if Bull is supposed to be actually quite bothered that his record being broken and he’s just being manic and upbeat to cover it up, or if we’re just meant to understand that his grasp on lucidity is becoming more and more tenuous, but either way this is a knee-slappingly hilarious strip! “Starting to sound like a broken record!” Ha ha, polysemy!

Judge Parker, 9/7/18

Some dude just stone-cold getting his neck snapped while some lady looks on, screaming in terror? Sure, why not! It’s not your grandpa’s comics section anymore, baby! Unless your grandpa likes seeing comics page murders! Maybe he does. I don’t know his life, man.

Gil Thorp, 9/7/18

Wow, ouch for Tiki Jansen. Not sure who he is but it sure sounds like he sucks!

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Mary Worth, 9/5/18

But if he were Dale Carnegie — if Carnegie faked his 1955 death, if he managed to still walk among us today at the age of 130 thanks to the dark spells written in blood in his forbidden necromantic tome How To Stop Worrying And Start Living Eternally, if he travels the land in disguise as a wounded and angry man to try to discover the chosen one who can win any friend, influence any person, and if that chosen one turned out to be Mary — well, I’m not saying that’s at all likely. But it’d be a pretty cool scenario, you know?

Dennis the Menace, 9/5/18

Ah yes, it appears that Dennis is finally figuring it out: the reason he’s always been allowed to run wild, been indulged as he harasses Mr. Wilson and blurts out rude nonsense in front of other adults and antagonizes his teachers, is because his mother thinks it’s funny. It doesn’t matter how many people he alienates, that he’s sabotaging his education and his future, as long as she gets some droll anecdotes about what a little shit he is that she can share with her similarly jaded friends. The facial expressions here — Dennis’s of mounting, horrified realization, Alice’s of cruel amusement — make it clear that the menacing dynamic has shifted, or perhaps more correctly that we’ve been wrong about their power relations all along.

Gil Thorp, 9/5/18

“Woo-hoo, bro! Total lack of intellectual curiosity fist bump!”

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Slylock Fox, 9/3/18

It’s hard to deny that the new animal regime of which Slylock is the enforcer has a human problem. Humans make up a vanishingly tiny portion of post-animalpocalypse Earth’s sapient population, but it seems like Slylock is constantly being called on to deal with their petty crimes and disputes. Of course, the fact that humans are a despised, impoverished minority who just lost what must have been a bloody and devastating war to the regime has nothing to do with this, so the animals in their benevolence have decided to confine the humans to a beautiful rural area along with the few animals who never made the Change, where they can steal each other’s omelettes in relative peace.

Gil Thorp, 9/3/18

It’s time for the Gil Thorp fall storyline, and the Gil Thorp fall storyline is about insufferable cineastes. Remember a few years back when the local tattoo parlor used bootleg DVDs as a loss leader, except the DVDs turned out not to be bootleg after all? Well, by making cinematic entertainment seem “edgy” and “cool,” that long-departed tattooist planted the virus of cinematic appreciation in the minds of the local youth, and now the kids all have home theaters and 2001 posters and obsessions with mid-’90s indie films and whatnot. I desperately hope we see each and everyone one of these children get repeatedly stuffed into lockers by the football team, who just want to bring pride to the community by tackling people and don’t want to get drawn into tedious arguments about auteur theory.

Dick Tracy, 9/3/18

Hey buddy! I know when you got into the drug-dealing game someone probably said “this stuff sells itself!” but that’s a bit of an exaggeration. You have to at least tell the kids that you’re selling drugs before they’ll buy it. You can’t just lean against a pole thought-ballooning about it!