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Marvin, 4/28/08

There have been a lot of subtle changes in Marvin — little tweaks to the artwork, for instance, and the move from thought balloons to word balloons. These might just be presaging a much more momentous shift, in which the strip will cease to be about a droll baby and his droll dogs and cranky grandparents, and instead will focus on toddler Marvin’s Child’s Play-style killing spree. Is the comics page ready for a baby bathed in blood spouting droll witticisms about murder and carnage? Since such material will be replacing urination jokes and dog urination jokes and, God help us, Belly Laffs, I’d say the answer is a hearty “yes”!

Dick Tracy, 4/28/08

So, it looks like the criminal and bizarre Dab Stract, whose face was shrouded in shadow when we last met him, is hideously deformed? For some reason? Just like Cole Lector was also hideously deformed? For some reason? I’m beginning to suspect that the creators of Dick Tracy have a thing for hideous deformities. For some reason.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/28/08

Actually, the medical inquiry was just a cover. No, thrifty Loweezy has recently discovered the Internet and has started supplementing Snuffy’s paltry moonshinin’ and chicken-stealin’ income with a for-pay Website, www.HotSleepingHillbillies.com, which caters to a very specific kind of fetishist. By the excited look on the doctor’s face in the second panel, you can tell that he’s a charter member of the VIP club.

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Slylock Fox, 4/20/08

I am really beginning to become concerned about the constant persecution of harmless eccentric Count Weirdly. After having been repeatedly detained and hassled by the cops for no reason, sitting in the tank again with only his faithful vulture for his companion, he’s at last decided that only a hunger strike can draw attention to the injustice of his plight. And how do the thuggish police react. “Oh, you’re not Weirdly, you’re probably a robot.” They’ve already denied his essential humanity by marginalizing him as a freak; this is just taking things to their logical conclusion. I’m surprised they didn’t just “test” to see if he was a machine by cutting him open to see if he’s full of wires and stuff.

Marvin, 4/20/08

True, this is yet another installment in Marvin’s intermittent and discomfort-making series on the sex lives of babies. But look on the bright side: “Wee Harmony” positively invites a urination joke that, thankfully, never comes.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/16/08

We’re still in the opening salvos of this Rex Morgan, M.D., storyline, so it’s all deliriously wonderful and such. Don’t worry, it’ll get boring and stupid soon enough, and then I’ll complain about it for a bit until I just start ignoring it completely; but when that day comes, I hope I’ll take some solace in the thought that any plot that contained both Rex’s snide complaint about the common people’s filthy, filthy noses and a bearded, vested man bellowing HOW ARE YOU GOING TO KILL IT can’t possibly have been all bad.

Spider-Man, 4/16/08

The “bad news” Peter Parker warned us about yesterday turns out to be even less superhero-related than usual for this strip. Still, since Peter continually (and some might say passive-aggressively) fails whenever he tries to leave the house to support MJ’s career, you’d think that he’d be pleased by this news. “You mean I can watch your movie right here at home, on the TV? Yes!”

Marvin, 4/16/08

Panel two of today’s Marvin may be the lowest point the art form of comics has achieved to date. It isn’t helped by the fact that the dogs are incongruously standing on their hind legs and towering over Marvin, making them look less like dogs and more like people in dog suits. Urine-soaked dog suits.