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Dick Tracy, 4/14/20

Hey, folks, remember like two Dick Tracy storylines ago, when sexy part-alien Mysta Chimera was held captive by the sinister Mister Roboto? Well, if you liked that, you’ll enjoy the current short-run “Minit Mystery,” in which the sexy part-alien Mysta Chimera is held captive by the sinister … well, they haven’t been identified, but they were apparently her partner back in her first story, when she was genetically engineered to believe she was erstwhile Dick Tracy daughter-in-law Moon Maid but that all turned out to be a big fake and she was just a gangster’s daughter who won a lookalike contest and then her body and mind were horribly altered with alien DNA as part of a scheme to steal Diet Smith’s Space Coupe. Anyhoo, I mostly bring this up because Mysta getting tied up clearly seems to be somebody’s “thing,” which is neither here nor there, but the addition of nightmarish blowtorch torture puts this right in classic Dick Tracy territory.

Daddy Daze, 4/14/20

Oh, this actually explains a lot about Angus, the precocious, seemingly super-powered Daddy Daze baby! He’s not a “baby” so much as a genetic experiment that aims to create something greater and more powerful than an everyday human, and his “parents” are actually the major shareholders in the mysterious corporation seeking to profit from this forbidden science. Once Angus gets to high school and his powers become manifest, they will get all the blame, in the sense that they’ll be tried for crimes against humanity.

Mary Worth, 4/14/20

Hahaha this is amazing. “Oh shit,” thinks Dawn, “I thought I was in love with Jared, but I forgot that Hugh was incredibly hot. What the fuck was I thinking?”

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Kevin and Kell, 4/9/20

Welp, it turns out that I started reading Kevin and Kell, a strip about horny furries who kill and eat each other, more than a year ago, but then almost immediately lost interest in it. But rest assured, gentle readers, I am always going to let you know when a comic strip that I have to assume appears in a certain number of family newspapers features gaily skipping animals festooning a maypole with long strings made up of the viscera of (I think we have to assume) sapient squirrels.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/20

I think she’s probably more incredulous about you trying to put the moves on your friend’s widow just a few weeks after he killed himself by driving off a cliff! I think it’s a pretty safe bet! I’m pretty incredulous about it myself!

Mary Worth, 4/9/20

I mean … do you have to tell him? You definitely haven’t told Hugo about Jared! Why do you feel like you have to start telling your various boyfriends the truth about things now?

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Mary Worth, 4/4/20

“But if you don’t know? Well, in that case, you definitely still need to keep that person around — after all, you don’t want to be alone, heaven forbid! Just be sure to fend off any marriage proposals, so you’ll be free to entertain the offers from other gentlemen, at funerals or while you’re on vacation and such. It’s an arrangement that will work great for everyone, except for the guy you’re stringing along, but if he was worthy of better treatment I guess you wouldn’t be stringing him along, would you?”

Mark Trail, 4/4/20

For more than 15 years now, comic strip artists have been stuck in an awkward place where they have to draw daily strips knowing that they’ll appear in almost all newspapers in black and white but will be colorized by other hands for the web. This can be a real problem when you’re trying to, say, depict people walking through a dark, shadowy forest, where the inky black of the shadows cast onto them contrasts with the colors chosen for their flesh and clothes, which make them appear fully lit. Still, I’m glad to see this all happen in today’s strip, as it transforms Kevin’s pathetic mewling into something sounds like a supervillain’s origin story:

“I know I’m just an orphan nobody wants to adopt … but when I have my revenge, I will make orphans of every man, woman, and child on earth!”

Dennis the Menace, 4/4/20

I admit I spend time on this blog making fun of comics that reuse old art, but here’s the thing: for some go-to- gags, they should do it. Honestly, what possible value is there to drawing yet another random visitor to the Mitchells’ living room for one of the “Dennis repeats something embarrassing his parents said” panels? Surely there’s literally dozens of them in the archives, so why not just dig one out and slap a new caption on it? I sincerely hope that’s what happened today, because it delights me to think of someone going through a bunch of old Dennis the Menace strips until they got to this drawing, and then they said to themselves, “Oh yeah, this is the one. This guy? This guy fucks.”