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Dick Tracy, 5/31/17

I freely admit that I don’t understand even a little what exactly Dick Tracy is doing with this “the Margies are all named Margie and it’s cute and they committed some mild CosplayCon grifting and also HARBOR AN UNREASONING HATRED OF THE JEWS” plot. I will say that Margie’s “I know how your people work, Catchem,” doesn’t ring true to me. First of all, everyone knows it’s “you people,” and second of all, most anti-Semites who “know how you people work” would probably assume that the sinister Jews are pulling the strings from behind the scenes, probably in a bank somewhere, rather than getting their hands dirty as beat cops. And yet isn’t that just any despised minority’s dilemma? Nothing will be good enough for those who hate you. Sam Catchem wanted so badly to be accepted as an ordinary Neo-Chicago police officer that he dresses like a damn leprechaun, for God’s sake, and still he catches this kind of abuse from the Margies of the world.

Hi and Lois, 5/31/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because depression is quite common amongst older people, especially if, like Mr. Wavering, they don’t have a partner, but Trixie is too naive to understand this!

Mary Worth, 5/31/17

I know we’re pretty deeply committed to the Katie-Derek-Esmé love triangle plot right now, but, you know, if Toby were to accidentally purchase a cursèd Mayan artifact as a souvenir and bring it back to Charterstone, leaving a trail of gruesome, mysterious deaths her wake, I certainly wouldn’t object.

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Mary Worth, 5/12/17

So in addition to being a shitty husband, Derek is a terrible boss as well! “Hey, Sandy, Denise, thanks for holding down the fort here at the office while I took a three-week vacation to ‘reconnect’ with the wife or whatever. You do not want to hear about how that went, ha ha! Anyway, I saw this extremely generic teal hat in a fenced-off vacation compound in Haiti and thought of you guys. Uh, I only bought one, so, I guess you can share it?”

Meanwhile, Katie is exploring the Mystery Of The Propped-Open Bathroom Door! THEORIES: Either it’s a trap laid by her romantic rival, Entertainer Esmé, who’s lying in wait in there with a knife, or the plumbing’s backed up and the toilets smell very, very bad.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/12/17

As you all know, I normally choose to think as little as possible about the decade-wide Funkyverse chrono-disconnect between Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, but I have to admit that I’m intrigued by Becky’s passing reference to “tear[ing] down the old bus garage” mere days in real time (and ten years in Funkyverse time) after the Crankshaft gang ruminated over the possibility that they’d be replaced by robots. I certainly hope they did get replaced by robots, and that moreover Crankshaft’s pension was docked so the school district could afford to buy the lubricant the robots need to function at peak efficiency.

Hi and Lois, 5/12/17

Peter Parker? No nipples. Dagwood Bumstead and Mark Trail? No nipples. Congratulations to Chip Flagston, the daily comics’ first benipplèd man!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/10/17

Snuffy Smith and Pluggers might, broadly speaking, both be lumped together as depicting non-coastal, lower-to-lower-middle-class “real American” experiences that most media neglects. However, there are big differences between the two projects that reveal this categorization to be superficial. The most obvious is that Pluggers is inhabited by chimeric beast-people, while Snuffy Smith presents us with human beings, albeit lumpy, potato-nosed ones. But more importantly, Pluggers is created based on suggestions actually from the ordinary non-elite folk it depicts, whereas Snuffy Smith has always been an exercise in rural poverty caricature, ever since the day the Barney Google creative team decided to get in on the Depression-era vogue for hillbilly jokes and never look back.

Anyway, the strip’s essentially inauthentic origin story, combined with its trapped-in-amber quality, results in characters that didn’t showcase rural poor people with much fidelity in the ’30s and certainly doesn’t depict anything even vaguely resembling their lives today. I realize that, as a coastal elitist living a mere 10-minute drive (without traffic) from Hollywood itself (8 minutes, if you count East Hollywood), I may not be the person most equipped to make that judgement, but I’m pretty sure it’s spot on. I do think I’m the right person to comment on what I guess is supposed to be some smug city slicker who’s wandered into Hootin’ Holler and can’t understand why sushi isn’t sold in every store, as it is in his beloved metropolis. Here’s my take on this chinbearded, cuff-jeaned (?), “G”-hat-wearing (???) Japanese cuisine aficionado: he’s bad. Finally, equal time in this strip for unrecognizable urban stereotypes!

Blondie, 5/10/17

There is probably no sadder person in the world than Guy Who Corrects Current Writers Of A Longrunning Legacy Strip About Their Strip’s Own Continuity, and yet I am compelled to say: it is well known that Dagwood sleeps every weekday morning until the last possible minute, dashing out to the door and barely making his carpool, often trampling his poor mailman in the process. It therefore makes no sense that he has time for a leisurely and apparently daily breakfast at Lou’s! He’s barely making it to work as it is! Although I guess it adds a meta-layer to this strip: like Lou, the Blondie creative team been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to tell this joke, and will jump at any chance to do so.

Six Chix, 5/10/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because normally a horse would be giving you a ride, not the other way around! Also, horses are incredibly bad planners. How did you think you were getting home when you left for work this morning, horse? How did you get here in the first place? Just wearing glasses doesn’t make you smart!

Hi and Lois, 5/10/17

Trixie, of course, hasn’t grown at all since this strip debuted 63 years ago. This is one of the saddest punchlines I’ve ever seen!