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Dick Tracy, 7/6/12

So the new Dick Tracy writer-artist team of Joe Stanton and Mike Curtis have been on the job for more than a year now, and I haven’t been discussing the strip here as often as I did in its previous iteration, mostly because the art is pretty good and the plots are no longer marked by incomprehensible dream-like lunacy punctuated by horrific violence. If I have one major criticism, it’s that so much of the plots seem to have been aimed at assembling all of the strip’s classic villains into one overarching criminal syndicate, which has gotten a bit tiresome to those of us not up on eighty years of Tracy lore. But over the past few week’s the assembled baddies have been caught up in an epic gunfight as Tracy and the cops bust in to make arrests, with a fair amount of carnage ensuing.

Which makes me wonder — what if the last 15 months have just been carefully putting all the pieces of the storied Dick Tracy rogues gallery in place just so they can all be killed in a crazed, botched police raid? And then the new team can say “Ha ha, this strip is ours now, we’re going to make up all sorts of new crazies?” Probably won’t happen, but it would amuse me. Plus I kind of want to see this Indonesian action film called The Raid about a police raid on a huge gang-controlled high-rise tower that goes horribly wrong (here’s the trailer, but be warned that it’s crazy violent) but in practice I probably don’t have the stomach for that much movie violence so maybe this Dick Tracy is as close as I’m going to actually tolerate.

Judge Parker, 7/6/12

Wow, for once things are not going right for our wealthy Judge Parker heroes! They’re being tailed by marijuana farming hoodlums, their fishing lodge is a dump, their reservations never went through, and the proprietress is going to assault them with a hammer at any moment. Don’t worry, though, there are still breasts, so the world makes some sort of sense.

Mark Trail, 7/6/12

If you need more evidence that Mark Trail plots are recycled from another era, imagine a contemporary American parent sending their child (or hideously ugly ward, in this case) off into the wilderness to go take some pictures of sheep. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of it, because children need to learn more self-reliance than this modern crop is picking up, plus “Rusty in danger” plots are extremely hilarious.

Apartment 3-G, 7/6/12

“So, it’s completely safe, when competent people do it, but it’ll be really dangerous with me in charge. Lemme just scan the entry for it on WebMD and then let’s get started!”

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Hi and Lois, 7/2/12

You know, it’s not like I want to think about the sex lives of middle-aged comic strip characters (wait, no, I just remembered that Luann exists, amend that to “all comic strip characters of any age”). But when Hi leans back in his easy chair with his hands behind his head so as to vaguely thrust his crotch Loisward, throwing her some bedroom eyes and suggesting they go “wherever the road takes us,” I pretty much have to, OK? Lois, meanwhile, after having had four kids and seeing how they turned out, has finally figured out the value of planning when it comes to families.

Gil Thorp, 7/2/12

In other comics couples whose boinking styles I am now involuntarily thinking about news, here’s today’s Gil Thorp! I actually believe that this strip is part of Gil Thorp’s passive-aggressive battle with its own readership, aimed at those of us who are sad that the crazy, unstructured summer storylines when anything could happen have now been replaced by just another season of boring sports action. “Oh, hey, whiny readers, do you want to see a zany summer storyline about Coach Thorp and Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp’s sex life, full of B&D sex scenes so poorly written and illustrated that they make Fifty Shades of Grey look like Anais Nin?” “Nooooo, don’t do that, just show us some golf, please, for the love of God.”

Judge Parker, 7/2/12

Yep, Sam really hankers for the simple life! Just give him a vast estate and a RV bigger than most Americans’ houses and a bottomless pit of money and he’s a happy guy.

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Judge Parker, 6/26/12

Awww yeah it’s a massive rural marijuana grow operation, everybody! Obviously Judge Parker saw that Mark Trail did a story depicting vast fields of marijuana plants and got noticed by the popular press for it and so now they want in! Judge Parker of course did its own pot-growing storyline back in 2007 and ’08, when Sam and Abbey’s elderly next-door neighbors built a mysterious landing strip and then brought Abbey some brownies which made her act all funny and she and Sam almost had sex but then didn’t and then Abbey tried spying on them to find out more and eventually they ended up getting busted totally off-panel, for growing pot. But this new batch of pot growers aren’t the sort of genteel dabblers who can afford to live in the same zip code as the Spencer-Driver clan; they’re no doubt tougher rural types, connected to both larger drug cartels and inner-city distribution networks, heavily armed and not amenable to soft, rich, big-city types literally stumbling onto their turf. Or maybe their hostility will dissipate once Avery negotiates a multimillion dollar deal for them to appear in their own reality TV series on the Discovery Channel, Real Farmers of Mendocino County.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/26/12

“For instance, you can still love someone even if they snoop on other people’s conversations, always assume that anything negative you say is about them, and get all pissy about it!”

Beetle Bailey, 6/26/12

Desperate to save his only friend from the horrors of war, Sarge tries assigning Otto to desk duty, despite his illiteracy. But the General knows that the Army needs bodies for the front line — and doesn’t care what species those bodies are from.