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Blondie, 11/13/18

One of the more unpleasant transformations of Dagwood Bumstead over the years has been the process by which we’ve moved from “Ha ha, Dagwood sure likes to eat comically large sandwiches!” to “Dagwood is an Appetite who lives to Consume.” Today’s strip is particularly disturbing: Dagwood has, for as long as he can remember, been uniquely able to communicate with turkeys in their own language. Does this give him more empathy for the majestic birds? No. Seeing into their minds, understanding their desires, hearing their pleas for mercy — to Dagwood, that only makes them more delicious.

Gil Thorp, 11/13/18

Welp, it looks like the vaguely exciting notion of Tiki being an imposter has given way to the much duller reality of Tiki’s family engaging in low-level fraud. The final panel makes the completely implausible suggestion that the Milford athletic department somehow has higher standards than the rest of the school administration.

Marvin, 11/13/18

Sometimes Marvin does half-assed plots or at least “theme” weeks, so let me just assure you that nothing like that is happening here! There was no setup or anything yesterday for this: a comic where a toddler has been thrown into a cage full of angry feral dogs who are probably seconds away from eating him.

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Family Circus, 11/8/18

Ha ha, I love how smug that frog looks. “That’s right, buddy, you better back the heck off. There’s no way to be sure about my royal status. Unless you want to kiss me? No? You don’t want to kiss me? Guess I’ll be on my way, then. See ya, chumps!”

Gil Thorp, 11/8/18

Oh wow, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the Gil Thorp football season, huh? I guess it’s because it’s been super boring, with the month since we learned that Tiki is often late for mysterious sister-related reasons mostly taken up by two of Tiki’s less dim teammates slowly piecing together that Tiki seems unfamiliar with the major landmarks around his supposed residence and may not live in Milford at all. Anyway, today the Gil Thorp creative team apparently noticed we’re more than a week into November and we need to start wrapping this up, because suddenly we got a lot of exciting info, maybe implying that Tiki isn’t really who he says at all! An imposter! A changeling! A 32-year-old investigative reporter who’s writing a longform piece on America’s most mediocre high school football programs! The possibilities are endless and really quite cinematic, which makes it too bad that the other football season plot, the one about the irritating cineaste punter, is going nowhere just as fast.

Judge Parker, 11/18/18

Oh, wow, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker, huh? Well, here’s what’s going on in Judge Parker: Judge Parker Senior is going to jail, finally.

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Dick Tracy, 10/4/18

Oh, my, it looks like “Pauly,” the latest ill-defined member of the new criminal gang in Neo-Chicago, is a valuable crime-gang member because he came from a broken home, like [checks notes] roughly half of people in America, if “broken home” means “their parents weren’t living together for some or all of their youth.” It’s true: we’re all stone-cold killers! Point us at any cop, especially one wearing a distinctive, brightly colored outfit, and we’ll do your evil bidding! Thank goodness you’re biding your time for your own inscrutable purposes, I’ve got places to be for the next few weeks at least.

Gil Thorp, 10/4/18

Guys, Gil Thorp isn’t just about teens, and sport, and teen sports. It’s also about teens’ troubled home lives, which are a real problem in America today and also have provided fodder for some of most memorable and accidentally hilarious Gil Thorp storylines, like Aaron Aargard’s pill-addled mom, and Marty Moon pretending to be an abandoned teen’s dad so he wouldn’t be put in the foster system, and Brent “Rap-Dog” Raptor getting emotionally abused by his mother because she was afraid if his self-esteem got too high he’d go away to college. So I’m excited to see where this “slow sister” thing goes. Is she the reason Tiki transferred to Milford? Is she the cause of his non-star status? I’m on tenterhooks!

Hi and Lois, 10/4/18

Here is an absolutely true story: when I was a kid, my dad had a freshwater aquarium, and over several years we (by “we” obviously I mostly mean he but he always included me in it and I felt like we did it together) slowly added all sorts of interesting tropical fish, and we had to upgrade its size not once but twice to accommodate them all. Now, I’ve always been a dog and cat guy, but I was really fascinated by the internal dynamics of the fishtank, and got attached some specific individuals (who passed on occasionally, as fish do). There was even excitement when one fish turned out to be pregnant (?) when we got it, leading to a zillion baby fish, most of whom got eaten but a couple survived to be our first second-generation fish. After a while, we had a huge, vibrant tank full of nearly thirty fish! Then, one day, we went to the fish store and found this very weird-looking brown lumpy fish about two inches long that the guy there couldn’t tell us anything about. Not long after we got him, we started noticing some of our fish missing, and if the cause isn’t obvious from the way I’m telling this story, one day my dad came into the living room to see half of our sole remaining angelfish dangling out of the brown guy’s mouth. He ate all the first, grew to be nearly a foot long, and then died. Why didn’t we get him out of the tank when it was clear what was happening? I honestly don’t know. We never got any more fish after he died and sold the aquarium and its equipment. Maybe, deep down, like Dot and Ditto, we were bored with the aquarium. Maybe we just wanted to watch the world burn.

The Phantom, 10/4/18

As an middle-aged person with old person parents, I can state with confidence that middle-aged and old people are just as dependent on their electronic geegaws as anyone, and it’s not really fair to smugly claim that teen girls are somehow uniquely addicted to the texting and the social media and such. Still, it’s quite endearing to me that the Phantom’s teen daughter Heloise, having done a pretty good job of holding her own in combat against The Nomad, is going to finish him off by blinding him with her phone.