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Archive: Phantom

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Just because you can see the future doesn’t give you license to be so melodramatic, in my opinion

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The Phantom, 6/23/21

I know the Phantom has seen a lot in his decades as a superhero (and, by proxy, in his 20 previous incarnations) and has therefore earned the right to be a little blasé about things that would make the rest of us quiver with terror. Still, I gotta say that his facial expression in today’s strip is a little less a blind seer telling him “YOU DIG YOUR OWN GRAVE, O GHOST WHO WALKS” and a little more “gosh, I hadn’t considered bundling my home and auto insurance, thanks for the tip.”

Beetle Bailey, 6/23/21

Miss Buxley being Beetle’s girlfriend is a relatively recent development in this strip, and we’ve probably all thought that he doesn’t deserve her, but seeing that she’s wandered out into a field, wearing heels, in an attempt to keep Beetle from practicing a fairly important skill for a soldier, it’s pretty clear he really doesn’t deserve her and actually she might be somewhat misguided.

Family Circus, 6/23/21

He may not be the most skilled, but one of these tries he’s going to hit it and everyone will finally be able to wrap this up and go back inside. (I’m talking about Big Daddy Keane hitting Jeffy’s head, of course. Look how close he came! I believe in you, Bil, you can do it next time!)

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“Oh, whoops, I dropped my stethoscope. You’re probably wondering why I own one of these, huh?”

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Mary Worth, 4/29/21

There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief that goes into enjoying a comic strip like Mary Worth, and sometimes I can pull it off and sometimes I can’t. For instance, I absolutely refuse to believe that Drew has managed to become mildly Instagram famous without ever letting slip in one of his captions that he’s a doctor, and yet immediately upon being presented with his meal blurted out “It looks better than the hospital cafeteria food that I’m very familiar with because of all the time I spend in a hospital — and not as a patient! [wink wink]” That sandwich looks like shit, by the way, and also the side of slaw Ashlee so grandly announced is nowhere to be seen, so I’m assuming Northview’s cafeteria is of particularly low quality.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/29/21

If you know me, you know that few things exercise my deranged mind like trying to figure out the socioeconomic/political situation of Hootin’ Holler, so today I’m less interested in Uriah unicycling the mail all over the region than I am in the fact that Silas, who is not a government official but the proprietor of the town’s only store, is paying for his transportation. My current theory: the Post Office was violently ejected from the town decades ago, possibly in reaction to its attempt to impose the “number of the beast” in the form of zip codes. Silas, who needs to maintain a connection to the outside world in order to keep his store of manufactured goods stocked, is the only person still receiving mail, and he’s set Uriah up as his private delivery man, charging townsfolk outrageous markup over regular postage rates. For legal reasons, he refers to his delivery service as the “Newnited States Post Office.”

The Phantom, 4/29/21

I make fun of soap strips all the time when they’re inadvertently funny, so I feel obligated to point out when they’re successfully funny on purpose, like when Heloise begins a Heloise-centric storyline by describing her dad as “off somewhere punching a guy,” an incident I hope we never hear any more details on.

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Please, our children, they’re very dumb

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The Phantom, 2/12/21

Our tale of Luche Libre adventure is proceeding apace, with our Phantom-assisted luchador, having already busted up a drug lord’s compound, is now heading into Rhodia’s most notorious prison to free his friend. Today’s strip gives an insight into what gets the policemen who power this police state off: it’s Free Rider magazine, featuring full-color pictorials of hot, hot gals who aren’t afraid to exploit market failures in public goods! These sexpots use the roads and parks that your taxes pay for, and they don’t care who knows it!

Gil Thorp, 2/12/21

Hmm, I guess part of the deal with Doug Guthrie is that the cops love him and are willing to wink at his traffic (?) transgressions, because who doesn’t love a kid who loves cars, or maybe his dad is a cop, who can say. Unfortunately for this friendly policeman, “ease up” is a well-known Gil Thorp trigger phrase that could quickly lead to unspeakable violence. Barring a development along those lines, however, I would like to know a lot more about Tom Muench’s illicit parrot-smuggling operation.

Family Circus, 2/12/21

This sort of confusion of the domestic and political spheres is exactly why the Keane family always strongly opposed women’s suffrage in the first place! Won’t someone think of the children?