Post Content

The Phantom, 8/24/18

So the Phantom’s daughter Heloise has been locked in a battle of wits with her father’s arch-enemy, the Nomad, and it is not going well for her! The Nomad slipped some bogus info to the TSA at the airport where he stashes his private plane to arrange this little interrogation, and I have to say that I find it both hilarious and terrifyingly plausible that some TSA guys would say, “This random guy we’ve never met tells us he’s overheard a teenage girl saying that terrorists … are good??? Set the entire country’s threat level to orange and get ready for a seven-hour interrogation!”

Six Chix, 8/24/18

I’ve noticed that several recent Six Chix strips set in a therapist’s office have included a discreet box of tissues located near the patient’s couch, which I think is a nice bit of verisimilitude. At least it’s something to cling onto here, where we otherwise have to try to figure out whether this hippo (?) is, like … hovering over the bird, or crushing it, or if they’re both on the couch, or what.

Marvin, 8/24/18

“Five! Five is exactly the right number of coffee shops for a city to have.”

Post Content

Marvin, 8/15/18

I honestly neither expect nor require Marvin, a legacy syndicated newspaper comic strip about a baby who poops a lot, to be up-to-date on current fashion trends, but I do think it’s a little awkward that in its attempt to depict a modern-day hipster they’ve overshot and given him a fashy, the haircut beloved by your more upscale white supremacists these days. Since Miller is the third most common surname for Jews in the United States, it certainly gives a very different reading to “they may not even let you in”!

Spider-Man, 8/15/18

Oh, Kingpin, you think you’re going to be some kind of bad-ass real estate criminal, but you’ve got a lot to learn about branding! The sort of hipster “pioneers” you want to attract in your moves to gentrify Chinatown will be positively thrilled to live above the alley where MJ Parker’s first husband was brutally murdered by a Chinese gang. Then, five years later, once MJ has been married to a fellow celebrity more suited to her current lifestyle, you jack up the rent by $1,000 a month and then the finance industry people move in.

Mary Worth, 8/15/18

This is definitely one way for Tommy to gently explain to Brandy that he has no plans to put out any time soon.

Pluggers, 8/15/18

Sure, it makes sense that Branson, Missouri, is ground zero for the plugger orgy scene, but I for one could’ve gone my whole life in happy ignorance of this fact.

Post Content

Marvin, 7/31/18

It’s weird how the Marvin cast of babies walk around unsupervised, talk, can grasp object permanence, etc., and really the only thing that marks them out as infants is that they’re short and aren’t potty trained. Almost as if someone just really likes the idea of functional adults shitting themselves deliberately on the regular, and who am I to judge! Ha ha, just kidding, I judge constantly, and in non-shitting judging news, why would a baby be at all interested in a fountain of youth? I guess maybe as a baby he recognizes the extreme jealousy his youth inspires in others and seeks to monetize it; or, conversely, maybe to him “youth” means young adulthood, and he aims to accelerate his fellow babies’ aging process until their physical development matches their mental state. They’re still gonna shit their pants, though! Just a hunch I have about that.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/31/18

I’d always just pegged Parson Tuttle as an uncomplicated grifter, but now I see he has a much darker design: to use Scripture as a recruiting tool to raise an army of child soldiers, like an Appalachian Kony. Can the women in this community hold the line against the total violent breakdown of their community?

Family Circus, 7/31/18

I have to admit that seeing a sugar-drunk Jeffy announcing that he’s discovered he can just guzzle syrup straight from the bottle and plans to continue to do so made me smile. The only way this panel could be even better would be if, instead just a single demure droplet of syrup at the corner of his mouth, he was completely covered in the stuff, like he had poured it over his head and let ooze down and form a delicious, sticky mask. Can’t even open his eyes because of the syrup and happy as a clam, a dumb, gross, syrup-soaked clam.