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The Phantom, 7/30/16

In the non-monastery-based Phantom Kids Go Off To School plot, the Phantom’s daughter Heloise is at her fancy boarding school in New York with her new roommate, who is, unbeknownst to anyone, the daughter of her father’s mysterious arch-nemesis, Eric Sahara, the Nomad! The girls are anxiously feeling each other about their fathers and the nebulous sources of vast wealth that allow them to attend an expensive private school. Don’t feel awkward or out of place, girls: you’re mingling with the children of New York City’s elite! Plenty of your classmates’ parents have killed people. Mostly they’ve killed them by firing them so they don’t have health insurance anymore, but still.

Mary Worth, 7/30/16

Vicodin®: It Can Help You Clean Up An Explosive Diarrhea Situation™! Ask your doctor if Vicodin is right for you, your family, and your sandwich eatery that maybe has a little more E. coli in the meat than is strictly ideal.

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Mary Worth, 7/27/16

Since we’ve already established that Tommy and Iris look uncannily alike, this is a genuinely great way to show their different life trajectories: Iris, working hard to finally get her college degree, and Tommy, enjoying is Vicodin breakfast, along with his regular food breakfast, sitting in almost the exact same post. It also looks a lot like one of those anti-drug campaigns dreamed up by squares who actually think studying hard is cool, but doesn’t really transmit the intended message to most people. Like, sure, kids, you could spend your mornings writing down a bunch of facts like a god-damned nerd, or you could lazily eat cereal and literally escape from the pain of this world, which I think most of us would agree sounds pretty great. My favorite touch is how Tommy is enjoying his coffee out of a mug that says “MOM” on it. Too bad mom isn’t there to drink out of it herself! Because she’s at the library at breakfast time! What a loser!

Marvin, 7/27/16

Dog heaven is apparently just a infinite series of small cages where dog souls are boarded for all eternity. That’s still an improvement over dog hell, which is an endless sea of urine and feces.

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Mary Worth, 7/25/16

Oh man, it looks like the “June Brigman and Roy Richardson do Mary Worth art on Sundays but Joe Giella still does the dailies” era was shorter than we thought! Farewell, Joe, who got an excellent sendoff from Uncle Lumpy back when the new team made their first appearance, and here’s a lovely blog post from strip writer Karen Moy. I actually missed the tiny “bye” in Giella’s signature box in Friday’s strip. It heartens me that his last Mary Worth panel was Tommy’s sweaty Vicodin bliss-out, which I’m reproducing here in larger format, for posterity:

Anyway, I think we should all remember Giella the way he’d want to be remembered: as the man who drew Mary Worth as Wonder Woman. Enjoy retirement, Joe!

Meanwhile, the important thing about today’s strip is that it takes a village to create a pill addict. “Gee, I hope Tommy doesn’t bother me while I try to study for my big tests! I figure the more Vicodin he takes, the quieter he’ll be.”

Crankshaft, 7/25/16

Oh, hey, remember this guy, who we all sort of thought might be Crankshaft’s future vegetative husk? Well, last week we learned that he was actually “Beanball” Bushka, Crankshaft’s arch-rival back when they played on the Toledo Mud Hens literally before World War II (don’t try to make the chronology work, you’ll hurt yourself), and who exploited Crankshaft’s illiteracy to bump him from a game where scouts were in attendance, thus ruining his big league dreams forever, but then he wrote a letter to the Mud Hens confessing and now they’re … going to retire his number? This is not just happening in the funny pages, but in actual real life on July 29th, and thanks to faithful reader Aphthakid for pointing this out to me and no thanks to faithful reader Bill Peschel for linking to the picture of the officially licensed Crankshaft bobblehead that will be handed out to thousands of baffled minor league baseball attendees. Seriously, literally nobody there is going to have a clue what’s going on. Crankshaft’s own granddaughter does her best to forget who he is.

Spider-Man, 7/25/16

Ahhhh, it looks like the new Bugle owner is Jonah’s cousin-in-law, Egghead! As someone who writes about newspaper comics for a living but consistently refuses to read or learn about superhero comics, I immediately jumped to Wikipedia for a quick primer on who this guy is. Here are some sentences taken at random from his extensive bio:

• “Ant-Man tricked him into thinking the ants had betrayed him before revealing that the ants were his friends and would never turn against him.”
• “Arnim Zola later created a proto-husk of Egghead as part of his Corpse Corp.”
• “Although his original programming was ‘to respect all human life,’ a female neo-Nazi named Big Zero (who seems to have a relationship with this Egghead) has reprogrammed him to hate several minorities.”

Guys, I know they’re basically the foundation of all modern cultural production now, but … I think superhero comics are kind of silly?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/25/16

It’s been long established that Montoni’s is Westview’s only viable business, so this labor-saving innovation is going to double the local unemployment rate. But Montoni doesn’t care! He’s lived in Florida for years. See ya, sad sacks!