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The Phantom, 3/3/17

Oh, man. Oh, man. I wish I had discussed with you you every single day of the current Phantom storyline, and also the last five to ten years of my life spent experiencing and participating in various self-marketing efforts, if it would’ve helped you appreciate how very, very funny I find this entire strip and its final panel in particular. The Ghost-Who-Walks may be the end product of a 23-generation all-white breeding experiment, and he might wear purple spandex and live in a cave in Africa and cultivate a legend of immortality and refuse to let anybody, even his wife or children, see him unmasked; but it in today’s social-media-saturated world where every single one of us is in one way or another trying to get a leg up in the attention economy, it is the Phantom’s violent refusal to let anybody promote his personal brand that sets him apart from ordinary mortals.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/3/17

Hey, remember fifteen months ago when Les had really bad writer’s block and all he could put down on paper was “Once upon a time”? Well, the part of my brain that obsessively stores comics plot trivia has blessedly failed to retain what book that was exactly, but I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s the same book he’s supposed to be writing with/for Darrin now, which he still hasn’t written any of, fifteen months later, because I want Les and everyone around him to feel bad.

Mark Trail, 3/3/17

Wow, Cherry, yesterday you were all het up about bears and ferret and prairie dog surveys and today you’re getting super aggro about tornados, and I gotta tell you: ratchet back! You can’t keep Mark safe in your cabin! He’s gonna go out there, survey some prairie dogs, punch a tornado, whatever! LET HIM LIVE HIS GOSH-DARNED LIFE, OK????

Mary Worth, 3/3/17

Boy, you know what’s gotta be a real drag? If one minute your mom is explaining how that she’ll always be there to help you through your battle with drug addiction but then she just stops in mid-sentence as she spots her boy-toy with his new girlfriend, and probably runs over there and makes a scene, much to everyone’s embarrassment. That’ll really hurt! And you know what really can dull that pain? Vicodin! Just saying!

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Pluggers, 3/2/17

You know, Pluggers has blurred the line between beasts and beast-people before, and they’ve even hinted at the kind of sexual relations that mark a universe where there’s a spectrum of sapience, but this — this is pretty explicit. Too far, Pluggers. Too far! The fact that the credit for this “joke” is given to a name that very well could be given to a dog is extremely not helping.

Gil Thorp, 3/2/17

Ugh, fine, Aaron isn’t actually on drugs, it seems; his mom’s on drugs, like far too many economically downwardly mobile Americans these days. I’m still not sure why he does well at basketball around payday? Shouldn’t that be when his mom can afford her drugs? I kind of want the payday thing to be a total red herring just to prove that the Freezy Bomb Boys were entirely wrong about literally everything.

Mary Worth, 3/2/17

Hey, speaking of America’s out-of-control opioid crisis, what’s going on in Mary Worth? Well, once again, it turns out that Iris has been so caught up in her own frivolous hobbies (before it was pursuing higher education, and this time it was fucking a 25-year-old) that she’s neglected her pill-addict son. Don’t worry, though: Jesus, who has long been Tommy’s hairstyle icon, is now also his not-giving-in-to-the-temptations-of-sweet-sweet-Vicodin icon.

Mark Trail, 3/2/17

Haha, Cherry sure seems anxious in panel two, doesn’t she? “Wasn’t someone out there doing a black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey? A bear isn’t going to help that at all! A bear can really mess up that kind of thing! I don’t remember who it was who was doing the survey exactly, but if they run into a bear, that survey is toast! This is terrible! I’m not going to be able to sleep at night, thinking about all the work what’s-his-name is putting into that black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey, which just is going to be ruined by some dumb bear!” “How’s Johnny doing? We haven’t seen him in years!” says Doc, pointedly ignoring everything his daughter is saying.

Shoe, 3/2/17

“I tried that once. It made me constantly aware of the crushing aesthetic demands that our society places on women, and let me tell you: no thanks.”

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/27/17

Oh, man, it looks like the ongoing Hagar the Horrible exploration of the Norse transition from paganism to Christianity just got simultaneously more philosophical and more real. Because when you stop believing in a pantheon of fallible deities who fight amongst themselves and start worshipping an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnibenevolent creator God, you quickly run into the problem of theodicy: why do bad things happen to good people? How can a God capable of perfect action be displeased with, or even hostile towards, His own creations? We can see that some of the vikings are having an easier time reconciling these contradictions than others.

Hi and Lois 2/27/17

At the other end of the Walker-Browne Cinematic Universe’s timeline, our heroes are grappling with a decidedly more modern problem: an economic system that crushes the lives of its laborers so thoroughly that all they can do in their off time is more work. Any God is invisible to them behind so many layers of capitalist apparatus.

Mark Trail, 2/27/17

Look, Cherry, Mark was just thinking about wolves last week, OK??? He just … is it wrong for a guy to sit around spending his spare time thinking about wolves? And for one species of howling canid to prompt a pop-culture reference to another, closely related species????? Jeez, leave Mark alone, Cherry! (Real talk: Mark seems to be having some problems, and he better get his headspace in order before he becomes “Dirty”‘s prey.)

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/27/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because … Loweezy is losing weight because she’s clinically depressed? That … that’s not funny at all, actually.