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Gil Thorp, 5/15/17

OK, finally, after much dramatic wheel-spinning, we have this spring’s Gil Thorp storyline coming into shape: everyone loves muckraking investigative journalist Dafne when her reporting is bringing down fat-cat school board members, but when she starts nosing around the past of transfer student/rage maniac Ryan van Auken, she’s going to find out that her fellow teens aren’t that jazzed about a free and independent press after all! The last couple weeks have mostly been about a couple of boys’ track team members engaging in some extremely mild flirting with Dafne and one of her softball friends, so that will presumably work its way into the drama somehow, though honestly I’d rather it didn’t because it was frankly pretty boring.

Also, Dafne jokes about phone conversations being totally ’90s, but note that she’s apparently switched to her cell phone in mid-conversation, because landlines, ew, gross.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/15/17

I stand by my assertion from last week that Snuffy Smith’s depiction of the rural poor is fundamentally inauthentic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reveal interesting things about the mainstream society that creates and consumes it! For instance, in today’s strip an inhabitant of this isolated, impoverished hamlet discovers that his environment has been strewn with mass-manufactured garbage, and we’re expected to believe that he’d be ecstatic about it because he can extract a few pennies of marginal value from picking through the scrap.

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Mary Worth, 4/12/17

Panel one of today’s Mary Worth is a great illustration of why I love Mary Worth and soap opera strips in general, which I realize makes me sound insane but isn’t it nice that we’ve all found each other, friends? Anyway, what makes it great is that it offers a deep dive into the midset of someone who’s deciding to sit down. “Hmm, I’ve been holding my body vertically and using my legs to move from place to place for some time … but what if I were to lower myself onto one of these pieces of furniture, which seem to have been explicitly designed for that purpose? Why, it seems obvious that I’d expend less energy that way, albeit at the price of remaining stationary for a limited period of time! What do I have to lose?”

Beetle Bailey, 4/12/17

The art in Beetle Bailey has always been, uh, let’s say deliberately simplistic. This means that Miss Buxley’s standard-issue Little Black Dress is actually just an excuse to draw an hourglass figure and then fill in most of it from neck to thighs with the paintcan tool in Photoshop. But for today’s joke (“joke”) to work (“work”), she needed to looks stunning. More stunning than usual. And so, in dedication to their craft (“craft”), the employees of Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC have taught themselves to draw cleavage. Heroic efforts all around here!

Dick Tracy, 4/12/17

Meanwhile, over in Dick Tracy, there are, uh, two ladies named Margie, with ironic nicknames, and … the programs for the convention are here???? I will bring you more reports as this fraught situation develops.

Gil Thorp, 4/12/17

Oh God … her hand … with each high five it has absorbed the life force of the hands it strikes against … growing more powerful … larger … already it’s big enough to reach from her forehead to her sternum … and nothing can stop it … nothing … oh God it’s already too late

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Spider-Man, 4/7/17

One of my favorite shows that died too soon was The Grinder, which on paper was about a famous actor (Rob Lowe), whose long-running TV series in which he plays a lawyer (called The Grinder) has ended, and who moves back home to Boise to live with his brother (Fred Savage) and father, who are actually lawyers; he then decides to help with the family law firm, despite lacking any actual legal training other than starring in The Grinder (the show within the show). This is a cutesy premise that becomes dizzyingly self-referential as Lowe’s character approaches all real-life legal problems as he would on the show-within-the-show, which almost always seems to work albeit in unexpected ways, because applying the logic of the show-within-in-the-show fits right in with the characters’ reality, which is of course also a TV show; Savage’s character becomes increasingly agitated over the course of the show’s single season as the universe seems to come unmoored around him. Anyway, one of Lowe’s character’s trademark moves, both in the show and in the show-within-the-show, was to reply to someone who told him that something was impossible by dramatically saying “but what if … it wasn’t?”, followed by a swelling music sting. Again, within the skewed world of the show, things usually work out so he turns out to be right; but what I’ve always appreciated about Newspaper Spider-Man is its gritty realism. Spider-Man can’t do the impossible, even within the context of his heightened powers, because he’s just some chump making it up as he goes along, and even when he wins, it’s mostly by accident. Spidey isn’t saying “or maybe he can!” with any of Rob Lowe’s preternatural self-confidence. He hasn’t figured out anything at all. He’s just stalling for time.

Mark Trail, 4/7/17

I was going to make some joke about these dudes trying to armed-kidnap Mark in the middle of a crowded airport in these security-crazed times, but then I remembered that time I flew into Great Falls Airport in Montana, which had more mounted animal heads than TSA agents and didn’t even have bathrooms available once you passed security, so I’m guessing maybe you could pull this off in Rapid City? Guess we’ll find out, and also find out if this bald dude is capable of cracking a smile!

Gil Thorp, 4/7/17

“But they don’t call me that anymore. Because if there’s one thing we know about volcanoes, it’s that once they stop erupting, they never erupt again and anyone who treats them as an ordinary mountain and builds a home nearby is never in any danger whatsoever! Say, what do you suppose this spring storyline’s going to be about!”