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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.

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Mark Trail, 9/26/18

OK, wait, what? Are these guys not in league with artifact-napping Becky? Are they actually a rival gang, working at cross-purposes with her? Or are they part of Mexican law enforcement, investigating in plain clothes to try to break up an artifact smuggling ring? When Rusty and Mara confront Jo(s)e and his associates, they’ll say “Kids, you’ve got it all wrong! We’re federales! You know, the Policía Federal, the institutional successor to the former mounted police!” And then Rusty and Mara will say, “If you’re the police, where are your badges?” And they’ll say, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We’re working deep undercover and can’t afford exposure. Showing you any stinkin’ badges would risk all of our lives!”

Mary Worth, 9/26/18

Oh, man, Mr. Wynter is an old grouch because he was forced to marry a woman he didn’t love! I certainly hope that we get smash cut from Bella’s lovingly tended grave in the pet cemetery to the overgrown potter’s field into which his hatèd wife was tossed without ceremony when Mr. Wynter was finally, blessedly, free of her.

Dick Tracy, 9/26/18

I’m reasonably sure that’s been well established that Honeymoon and Crystal are social outcasts at school, what with them both being mutant freaks and all. Still, I have to give props to this drug gang for trying to map out the social networks of the schools where they’re trying to sell their wares in order to maximize brand awareness rather than just having someone stand outside and say “Hey, kid, wanna get high?” to everyone indiscriminately like some half-assed dealers we could mention. It’s like the time the illicit tattoo parlor in Gil Thorp tried to woo twentysomethings by getting high school-aged customers: wildly misguided, but at least you’re putting in some effort to come up with something clever.

Hi and Lois 9/26/18

Hey, kids, it’s 2018! Why not try to get your fairly specific fetish into an extremely square syndicated newspaper comic strip? Nothing matters anymore!

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Hi and Lois, 9/22/18

Ha ha, there’s nothing that says “I love my son” like telling your wife as she walks by, completely within his earshot, “Look, I’m sitting right next to him here on the couch! You were wrong when you said I didn’t love him!” But really, the big shoutout in this strip has to go to Chip, who’s alternating between looking at his phone and reading that magazine he has draped over the arm of the couch. He doesn’t want to be there any more than Hi does!

Spider-Man, 9/22/18

J. Jonah Jameson of course discarded the traditional obituary section years ago, merging it with the wedding announcements to create a weekly “Life Moments” supplement that you have to pay to be featured in. But I assume that if Spider-Man died from some combination of being shot multiple times and suffocating from poison gas, it’d be a gleeful banner headline, for what’s that’s worth.

Marvin, 9/22/18

“Since American suburbia is bereft of truly public spaces, I thought we were going to wander around this commercial center merely for the purpose of experiencing the slow passage of time towards our inevitable and meaningless deaths in a location other than our home, for once. But you entered a series of stores with the intention of exchanging money for goods! What a twist!”