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Apartment 3-G, 3/13/15

Good news, everyone! Skyler got the part in the next James Bond movie! Remember Skyler, who hired Margo as a publicist after she already appeared in the last James Bond movie, opposite Margo’s ex-boyfriend? Nobody’s ever been cast as a Bond Girl two movies in a row, I’m pretty sure, so this is good news, and would be a real coup for whoever her publicist is! (Skyler’s publicist is a woman who is currently drifting through a baffling, grumpy dreamscape version of Manhattan, where you could encounter a high-profile movie star hanging out sans entourage in an all-night diner and then wander off just seconds after you arrive for no good reason.)

Family Circus, 3/13/15

The best part of this panel is how damn smug Big Daddy Keane looks. “Gosh, Billy, this card is an easy method to pay merchants everywhere! Looks like someone isn’t connected to the modern international banking infrastructure!”

Mary Worth, 3/13/15

The best part about this strip is Sean’s look of heavy-lidded disdain in panel two. “Wait, we’re taking who to the what now? But I’m enjoying my latest issue of Mysterious Twins Digest! Ugh, I knew I shouldn’t have married a woman who needs me to drive her everywhere.”

Hi and Lois, 3/13/15

The best part about this strip is how happily bombed Hi looks in panel three. “Ha ha, I know you’re only softening me up because you have something terrible to tell me, but I don’t care! God damn, I love being drunk!”

Pluggers, 3/13/15

Pluggers may be simple, down-home country folk, but it takes an advanced multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry to keep them alive.

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Mary Worth, 3/11/15

The Hanna-Sean-Amy-Gordon storyline (haha, just kidding, Gordon was not actually involved in any meaningful way) is finally over, though we can’t say for sure until someone digs it up and puts a stake through its sinister heart. But until then, let’s enjoy the tale of the first time Mary and Jeff met! This might be an enjoyable story to see in flashback, so naturally we’re watching the two of them exposition it to each other over fish- and vegetable-disks at the Bum Boat. I’m a big fan of Mary’s use of the phrase “former bigwig” here. “Obviously I could tell you were a nobody, Jeff, but how was I supposed to know that you used to be somebody? I didn’t see a tag, and you weren’t dressed the part, and you certainly don’t exude confidence or competence of any sort!”

Heathcliff, 3/11/15

The less said about this cartoon, which seems like one of the saddest attempts at combining the syndicated comics character Heathcliff with vaguely whimsical pop-cultural tropes to date, the better, but it does lead me to one of my current favorite obsessions, namely looking up dumb URLs to see if they’re available to purchase. Up until fairly recently, URLs either ended with a two-letter country code, like .ca or .uk, or a fairly limited set of generic codes, like .com, .org, or .gov. Then a few years back some new, much dumber top-level endings were introduced, like .biz and .info, and lately there’s just been a flood of truly moronic ones, one of which is .ninja. This is meant to appeal to serious scholars of the semi-legendary shinobi of Japan’s turbulent Sengoku period the sort of dips who think changing their job title from “web marketing assistant” to “social media ninja” makes them sound cool, but it’s worth noting that the domain name bait.ninja is available for only $14.99 a year, and while I’m not going to buy it, if somebody else wanted to and have it just redirect to this post, I certainly wouldn’t object. Also, and I’m just putting this out there, when you look to see if a domain name is available you get auto-generated suggestions of similar domains you might be interested in, and this is what I got when I checked on bait.ninja:

Spider-Man, 3/11/15

Apparently most of the incidents in this plot had been set up by Peter and Mary Jane to trick Mysterio? Who they didn’t even really know was involved for a lot of it, I don’t think? Nice try at tricking us into thinking these people are smart or capable of forethought, Newspaper Spider-Man.

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Dick Tracy, 3/6/15

Ever since Mike Curtis and Joe Stanton took over Dick Tracy a few years back, the gore factor has been diminished considerably. Still, you can’t take over a storied franchise like this and ignore core aspects of its brand, which include characters staring admiringly at a villain’s brains splattered all over the floor.

Mary Worth, 3/6/15

“Let’s walk into our apartment … together! At last, it’s mine! And I didn’t have to wait three years! I didn’t have to wait at all! Hoo ha ha! HOO ha ha! HOO HA HA!” [sinister laughter continues for an uncomfortably long time]