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Judge Parker, 10/6/24

You might recall my earlier irritation that both Sophie and Neddy were involved in family romance drama structurally similar enough that I thought maybe they were falling in with the same dramatic family? Well, it turns out not, but after Sophie experienced some family drama and rejected her initial suitor for his hunkier (?) older brother, we’re now entering a scenario where Neddy, attempting to repair her fiance’s family drama, is discovering that Things Are Not All They Seem, and also that said fiance’s older (?) brother is also hunkier (??). More on this story as events warrant! (So not very soon, honestly.)

Shoe, 10/6/24

You know, you’d think that after spending literally 20 years complaining about how the comic strip Shoe has more or less forgotten that all its characters are birds, I would’ve pretty much mentally explored all aspects of the Shoeniverse’s whole bird-person deal. But this strip made me realize that until today I had never contemplated an extremely key question: Are the Shoe bird-people characters the size of people, or the size of birds? Because a spider big enough to seem menacing to a bird is still scary, I guess, but significantly less scary than a spider big enough to menace a person (or a person-sized bird).

The Phantom, 10/6/24

Speaking of lore you’ve never thought much about, do you think of superheroes as having exactly one costume that they wear all the time (or at least all the time when they aren’t in their secret identity), or multiple instances of the costume, like a closet full of them, so they can clean them and reduce wear and tear? Today’s revelation that the Skull Cave has a “Costume Chamber” doesn’t explicitly answer this question, but it does imply that in an “only one costume” scenario, each Phantom begins his tenure by ritually stripping the outfit off the corpse of his predecessor, which honestly I wouldn’t put past them.

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The Phantom, 10/5/24

One of the more, uh, problematic aspects of the Phantom lore is that the Phantoms have been resident in Africa for 23 generations but have maintained their power over the superstitious natives by keeping contact with their ancestral Europe and bamboozling the poor locals with advanced Western science and technology. That’s why today’s strip, in which he refuses to believe that this robot could possibly be a robot and starts banging on the outside with a rock demanding that the guy inside come out, is pretty funny. On the other hand, the real Elon Musk had a big reveal of a humanoid robot that turned out to be a guy in a robot suit, and then later did a big reveal of another humanoid robot that turned out to have a guy just off screen operating it by remote control, so maybe I shouldn’t be quick to make fun.

Gasoline Alley, 10/5/24

By saying “the black one’s best” but also “the grey tabby’s mine”, little Ava Luna, or possibly Aubee or Sophie, who can tell, is submitting to the patriarchy’s dictates that male siblings should have first choice of everything. This isn’t the sort of girl-power pluck and gumption she showed back when she time travelled with the help of an evil talking doll!

Dennis the Menace, 10/5/24

Uh oh, it appears we’ve made an error over here at Dennis the Menace HQ! This was supposed to be the punchline for a panel showing Margaret and Dennis dancing. But then we realized that that would never happen, so we replaced it with a panel of some kids standing around and holding books while looking at Dennis. But then we never wrote a new punchline for it. Our bad!

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Dennis the Menace, 9/26/24

Here, in no particular order, is a list of possible menacing reasons why Dennis is wearing street clothes in this exchange when you’d expect him to be in a baseball uniform, some mutually exclusive and some not:

• Dennis has a general policy of refusing to wear a uniform while playing baseball due to the oppositional defiance disorder that his parents and coaches have never been able to overcome.
• Dennis has a general policy of refusing to wear a uniform while playing baseball because he understands that red overalls over a striped shirt are his #brand, which he is very keen to maintain and promote.
• Dennis isn’t even playing baseball today; he’s just wandered onto the field to harass the umpire.
• The creators of Dennis the Menace are not confident in their ability to draw the title character of their comic strip in a way that would be recognizable to the readers if he weren’t wearing his trademark red overalls over a striped shirt.
• The creators of Dennis the Menace do not have access to clip art of the title character of their comic strip in which he is not wearing his trademark red overalls over a striped shirt.

The Phantom, 9/26/24

A fun thing about the Phantom is that he dates from the very earliest days of superhero comics, so his outfit is your basic weird skintight body suit and cowl but, when it comes to a fight, his main “power” is the pair of pistols he keeps handy most of the time. Anyway, today the big purple guy has caught up with one of the out-of-control robots unleashed by fake Elon Musk’s crashed rocket, and he’s just going to straight-up shoot it to death, with bullets. Probably it’s not going to work and he’ll need to do something more clever, but it would be pretty funny if it did, right? “Well, Hero, Devil,” he’ll say to his faithful animal companions, “that problem is solved. Thank God for guns, the best friend a superhero can have!”