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Dick Tracy, 3/27/18

It has been brought to my attention by many of you that Ghost Pepper didn’t dislocate his shoulder in a car crash; he got shot by Dick Tracy from an improbably angle as Tracy lay prone on the ground behind the car. This happened in a Sunday strip that I missed (SHAME), and also the windshield got shot out in the process and the airbag activated, I dunno. The point is that Ghost Pepper’s wound is seeping blood, and, his plan to lay low at the aquarium having been foiled more or less immediately by someone needing to get into the closet where he was hiding, one assumes that he’s about to fall into a tank where something that likes the smell of delicious blood, like a shark or an orca or a kraken or whatever, is going to put him on the Dick Tracy horror death list of honor.

Gil Thorp, 3/27/18

I hereby apologize for implying that the Social Justice Teens don’t know anything about sports and don’t know what they’re doing. In fact, their highly sophisticated campaign of clownish behavior and harassment aims not just to drown out and provide an alternative to Marty Moon’s racist rants but to also draw everyone’s attention away from the patriarchal and hierarchical world of sports altogether. Way back in in the mid ’00s, earnest liberals Steve Luhm and Hadley V. Baxendale tried to bring justice to basketball season by means of incremental reforms. But Steve Luhm ended up a bitter, overeducated high school janitor, and this current generation of radicals are here to smash the system to pieces with pure, goofy anarchy.

The Phantom, 3/27/18

Meanwhile, thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, the most self-righteous nap in human history is about to begin.

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Mary Worth, 3/21/18

Good lord, I love how angry Wilbur looks in the second panel of this strip. How dare anyone write into his advice column complaining about loneliness when he, Ask Wendy himself, is the lonely one? The loneliest one? Let me ask you this, Ask Wendy advice seeker: were you grifted and betrayed by your hot Colombian lover, only to come home to discover that your ex, who you had dumped for said hot Colombian and who you assumed was eagerly waiting for you to come back to her, had instead gotten together with some hot dude who’s twenty years younger than you and also fabulously wealthy? Were you abandoned by your daughter, who’s leaving to spend months in Italy with some non-tenure-track academic who she isn’t even fucking? You’ve got a lot of nerve thinking you have problems worthy of America’s greatest part-time syndicated (?) advice columnist!

Dick Tracy, 3/21/18

It’s not luck that Dick Tracy survived his brutal dragging, doc; it just wasn’t his time. Call it fate, call it divine intervention, call it what you will: the point is that God wants a lot more violent deaths, and Dick Tracy is His instrument, carrying them out without remorse and with the full force of the state behind him.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/21/18

Naturally, Chester the Chiseler’s agenda for Darin and Mopey Pete is that he wants them to head up the new comic book company he wants to launch with his comics-collecting riches, and naturally they’re a little bit reluctant to do so, though the fact that they left the tenuous, low-paying world of print comics for big-budget superhero movie riches weirdly never comes up. I like this strip because the second and third panels illustrate the Funkyverse pessimism spiral perfectly. First, Pete points out, quite reasonably, that launching an entirely new franchise of comic books is a risky proposition, especially as the new company won’t have established beloved characters it can use to provide baseline revenue. But then Darin starts yammering about how everything is doomed to failure from the moment of creation and my god man we’re walking corpses, each and every one of us

Hi and Lois, 3/21/18

I had a whole post ready to go about how it’s weird that Hi and Lois wouldn’t even tell the twins about a gift from their grandparents, and that maybe Hi’s parents are estranged from the Flagstons and send a card every year to their grandchildren, trying to maintain that relationship, but Hi and Lois never show it to kids and have told them that they’re dead, but then I got to the second panel, where Trixie is contemplating the economic structure that the terrifying society of crows lurking on the front yard employs and I realized the family has much bigger problems.

Mark Trail, 3/21/18

I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely getting a villanous vibe from Mr. Marlin Creed from the Eden Gardens Zoo for some reason. What do you think his angle is? Do you think he’s going to try to eat that elephant? Is the “Eden Gardens Zoo” just what he calls his restaurant, where serves up delicious elephant meat to his discreet and well-heeled clientele?

Gil Thorp, 3/21/18

So the Social Justice Teens are planning on providing their own coverage of Milford basketball games that will serve as an alternative to Marty Moon’s racist on-air banter. The only flaw in the plan is that they … don’t know anything about sports? CHECKMATE LIBERALS

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Family Circus, 3/16/18

God damn that is one smug looking turtle, you guys. It’s like he’s thinking to himself, “I might’ve been late getting on the ark, but at least I got there, if you follow me? Eh? Eh? Behemoth and leviathan? This guy knows what I’m talking about.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/16/18

I don’t know if that dagger is military issue or if it’s something Sarge ordered from some creepy-ass knife catalog like the ones my elderly neighbor got and used to show to me without me asking or indicating in any way that I wanted to see them, but I love the fact that he’s got what’s clearly meant to be a vicious weapon for close-in combat and using it for an act of joy, which is to say hewing off chunks of a giant sandwich that he’s gorging on continuously over a 24-hour period.

Gil Thorp, 3/16/18

Guys, guys

the social justice teens

are going to defeat Marty Moon

in the marketplace of ideas