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Spider-Man, 5/30/18

If you’re going to have entire cinematic universe of stories dedicated to superheroes whose intellectual property rights are held by a specific #brand, I think one of the things that would be good to explore is how the media covers super-combat for the benefit of their mostly non-super-powered readership. Ideally, as I’ve noted before in this space, this exploration would take the form of a Netflix series called Bugle, of which I would be the executive producer, featuring a ragtag group of underpaid twentysomething reporters and bloggers whose lives are made miserable by their overbearing skinflint boss J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons, who we can hopefully get under contract to do at least six episodes a season) who occasionally yells at them to get more pictures of the Shocker up on the Bugle’s Snapchat or whatever. The big question, of course, would be how you’d do this without Peter Parker, who’s the best known Bugle employee but whose teen MCU arc doesn’t seem like it’d intersect with life as a stringer photographer anytime soon. My solution: there’s one episode where they use some of the blurry Spidey pics he’s posted to Twitter and promise to give him “exposure” and hint that maybe they’ll start paying him somewhere down the line, but when he can’t come up with pics of any other superheroes, they stop responding to his emails. You can’t afford to specialize in just one superhero and expect to get paid! It’s the era of doing more with less, journalism-wise! Get with the program, Peter!

Mary Worth, 5/30/18

I’m a guy who like karaoke, but I’m willing to say that a big part of its appeal is the you’re all in it together, you know? Like, if Wilbur is going to belting out Luke Bryan’s oeuvre, as a reward he should get to see Toby dancing “sexily” while she breathily makes her way through Ke$ha’s “Die Young,” or a stone-faced and extremely sober rendition of “Riders of the Storm” from Ian.

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Mark Trail, 5/29/18

“That must be why she likes your son, who certainly isn’t human, and probably isn’t a plant or a fungus. Not sure about that last possibility, though, I’m not a scientist!”

Beetle Bailey, 5/29/18

I love Cookie’s expression of hooded-eyed satisfaction in the second panel. “Heh heh, at last, years of having a bookshelf full of books I never open has paid off, as I finally got to unleash that absolutely sick bit of wordplay I’ve been saving up for just this moment.”

Mary Worth, 5/29/18

This will almost certainly turn out to be a parade of nobodies brought in to sing Wilbur’s praises, but it would be really funny, to me, if they’re just planning on luring him to a third location where they can execute him, gangland-style.

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Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/27/18

To be somewhat serious for a minute: when I joke about the grinding rural poverty in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which I do a lot, I hope I’m making it clear that my intention is make fun of the callous contrast between actual rural poverty, which is still very real and very grinding in the year 2018, and the weird “funny” play-acting version of rural poverty in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, much of the iconography of which was developed during the vogue of hillbilly humor that was at its peak when this strip’s action pivoted from the big city to Hootin’ Holler in 1934. The characters are for the most part relatively untroubled by their circumstances, and, in a tradition that goes back through Sanford and Son all the way to ancient Greek comedies, are often depicted as being wiser and more content than their more sophisticated and less impoverished contemporaries, when they occasionally encounter them. Every once in a while, though, in some of the incidental background gags of the strip, you get a glimpse of something really depressing, like the fact that the Smiths live in a single-room shack with different ad-hoc living spaces created by patched curtains hanging from the ceiling. Or today, where the “joke” of the throwaway panels is that the Smith home has a leaky roof and so on rainy days their children are wet and miserable, even when they’re inside. That’s not a joke at all! It’s actually incredibly sad!

Mary Worth, 5/27/18

[earlier that week, in Mary’s apartment, Ian and Toby are reading off of scripts Mary has provided]

TOBY [haltingly]: Congratulations. We love … reading your work.

IAN [extremely sarcastic]: Fabulous news, my friend. I especially like your “Success Stories.”

TOBY: And I…

MARY [interrupting]: No, Ian, it’s “Survival Stories,” not “Success Stories.” We have to make him believe you actually read it. Do you want him to throw himself off a cliff?

IAN: Honestly, I’m of two minds about that, Mary…

MARY: Zip it. You’re going through this charade or I post to the local Nextdoor everything you’ve confided in me over the years. Capisce?

[sullen silence]

MARY: OK, take it from the top. And it wouldn’t hurt to smile a little.

TOBY [way too loudly]: Congratulation! We love reading your work!