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Dick Tracy, 10/28/20

Dick Tracy doesn’t gruesomely murder its villains like it used to, but I have to admire how efficiently this plot has wrapped up: Professor Stokes swooped acrobatically away from Dick and Liz, only to immediately be turned into hamburger by a cop car that was on its way to deal with an unrelated and presumably more normal crime. I like the focus on Dick dropping shattered remnants of the artificial fang apparatus into the evidence bag, just to remind us that, hey, you know who wouldn’t have died after getting run over by a car? A real vampire.

Mary Worth, 10/28/20

I gotta say, if your girlfriend saw you talking to a friend while he was waving a crack pipe in your face but you never actually ended up smoking crack with him, you should probably immediately tell her exactly what you did or didn’t do when she confronts you about it — or maybe even before! — rather than just saying vague, fake-sounding stuff like “It wasn’t what it looked like!” On the other hand, if you’re going to sassily tell your boyfriend that he needs to “tell it to the hand,” you need to shove the palm of said hand at his face, not just wave it around vaguely in his general direction. There’s plenty of blame to go around here, is what I’m trying to say.

Family Circus, 10/28/20

Yeah, Billy, the fundamental laws of mathematics that underlie the very fabric of our reality do in fact remain constant, sorry you find that so boring

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The Phantom, 10/24/20

Next week: NEW ADVENTURE!!!! Hopefully its climax will be as exciting as this one: The Phantom dozing off while his wife natters on about the romantic destiny of her teen son and their daughter’s friend.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/24/20

Good news! Adeela was about to have her life destroyed by a terrible combination of bureaucratic incompetence and institutional cruelty, but then one of the formerly most powerful people in the world was convinced to make a phone call and it solved all her problems! Everyone who’s more than one degree of separation from a current or former political leader can go fuck themselves, though.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/24/20

I am not a parent, but I know enough parents to sometimes get a glimpse of why the Family Circus has historically been beloved among parents, and I truly admire today’s panel, which features Daddy having been pushed to a place in his life where he’s attempting to earnestly reason with a pre-verbal toddler.

Mary Worth, 10/24/20

[cackling evilly] YES … YES! … IT’S A THREE’S COMPANY-STYLE MISUNDERSTANDING … BUT WITH CRACK AND/OR METH!

Mark Trail, 10/24/20

Mark’s new assignment is sending him to Happy Trail Farms, and based on the last two panels here, my guess is that he escaped from there years ago after being grown there in a vat.

Crock, 10/24/20

Like, a significant portion of the time the jokes in Crock are pretty difficult to parse, and normally I’d complain, but today? When the joke is about how beloved character “Maggot” got horny at the movies? I appreciate this protective layer of obfuscation.

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Dick Tracy, 10/22/20

Despite the fact that Dick Tracy wears a bright yellow coat and has a rogue gallery full of weird mutants, his strip is actually a fairly accurate depiction of police work in several senses, including the fact that there often isn’t much mystery involved in any given crime. Oh, did an heiress die from being drained of blood, vampire-style? Probably she was killed by the local professor guy who’s part of a gang of vampire cosplayers who think they should’ve inherited the money instead, and he’ll be going after the other sisters next! Anyway, I genuinely enjoy how the tubes coming out of Professor Stokes’ mouth make him look particularly pathetic. You’ll never be a real vampire, buddy, no matter how goofy an overcoat you buy!

Mary Worth, 10/22/20

It has been brought to my attention by my more drug-savvy readers that this could also be a pipe for smoking meth, not just crack like I said before, so really, who can say what Tommy is resisting here, but the point is that if you don’t enjoy the sight of our boy staring at a pipe with eyes the size of dinner plates, then I respect your opinion but I think you’re missing out one of the fundamental pleasures of Mary Worth.

Dennis the Menace, 10/22/20

A fun fact about Socrates is that he was put on trial for various trumped up charges of “corrupting the youth” of Athens, and was convicted by only a very narrow majority of the jury, but then in the penalty phase of the trial he got to give a speech about what he thought his punishment should be, and he said the Athenian government should give him free room and board for life like they did for Olympic champions, and then a much larger portion of the jury voted to have him executed. What I’m trying to say, Dennis, is that a much smarter and more menacing man than you has already tried this little strategem, and it very much did not work.