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Dustin, 6/9/23

Under The Skin is a truly great and unsettlingly weird movie that is, probably, about an alien who’s been sent to Earth to capture and harvest human beings for food. I say “probably” because that’s what the book it’s based on is about, but the movie is quite different in a number of particulars and what’s happening in it is never spelled out for you. Scarlett Johansson is the main character, and is definitely not human, and as she wanders around Glasgow, seductively luring men back to a house where they get submerged into some kind of liquid void, you see everything more or less from her perspective, which makes human society seem alien as she tries to understand and navigate it. I’m not going to give away the rest of it, as you should watch it and it’s free to stream on Kanopy, a service you can access with your public library card, but yes, Johansson does get naked in it, and in the context of the movie it is ultimately profoundly unerotic. Anyway, I love it a lot, obviously, and it has kind of a cult following but very few people actually saw it, which makes it a bizarre thing to build a comic strip punchline around, so I assume that today’s Dustin has Dustin’s dad, possibly my least favorite character in all of present-day syndicated newspaper comics, say all this as an attack on me personally. (I’m joking, of course: I actually assume this strip is a result of someone discovering that there was only a single movie in Scarlett Johansson’s filmography in which she appears nude, which resulted in an anticipated masturbatory session that went terribly wrong.)

Gil Thorp, 6/9/23

You have to respect Marty Moon: he could’ve just texted Gil those pics he took of the Mudlarks doing vape crime (the dorkiest kind of crime there is), but he went to the trouble of getting them printed out so he could flash them in Gil’s face in person before throwing them down on his desk. This is just proof that you don’t spend a lifetime covering high school sports without learning a little something about drama.

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Gil Thorp, 6/3/23

Keri, I’m not really sure that you need preternatural powers of empathy to “sense of jealousy” from a guy whose dad is lavishing so much attention on another kid that he sullenly declares “dad has a new favorite son!” But, more to the point, Coach Luke’s Son Whose Name I Forget (is it Luke Jr.? let’s say that), could you go to Korea to play baseball and then be making wordplay in Korean after just a few weeks? No? Well, maybe that’s why you don’t measure up.

Dick Tracy, 6/3/23

Wow, looks like Dick Tracy’s unconstitutionally violent crime fighting techniques have been so effective that he’s going to be fighting phone crime now! Does the FCC let you shoot people? What if you really want to, like if the perp is real funny looking or something?

Marvin, 6/3/23

Ha ha, it’s funny because the fish feel trapped and they want to escape, even if that would result in their swift death! I mean, they’re characters in Marvin, who can blame them.

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Gil Thorp, 5/30/23

One of the things I’ve always respected about baseball (the men’s version) is that, as with all sports, sometimes a level of disrespect is shown by one player to another that demands fisticuffs, but generally speaking those fisticuffs are extremely desultory, with all the players fairly quickly forming a huge mass in the middle of the field and just kind of shoving each other. My favorite part is watching the relief pitchers in the bullpen do the calculation on how long the scrum is going to last and then slowly jogging in to make an appearance if it doesn’t break up quickly enough. Anyway — and hopefully everyone understands that I’m saying this as a feminist ally — I feel like the girls of Mudlark softball could learn something from the typical low-stakes MLB brawl, because they are going at it, with roundhouse kicks and punching people in the face and such, which seem like the sort of things that could earn you a multi-game suspension at minimum.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/23

Look, man, I hate to be the one who’s more of a purist about a comic’s characters than their creators current maintainers, but Rocky’s one-note characterization is that he’s a rebel who loves the rock music. He’s not some dork who walks around a metal detector! That’s Chip Gizmo territory!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/30/23

In other news, most of the teens in the Rex Morgan gang of teens are finally graduating high school! And thank God, because by the look of them they’re all well into their 30s.