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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!”

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Hello everyone! I am back from my vacation! Did you miss me? Did you realize you liked Uncle Lumpy better? Did you not even notice any changes? Feel free to only answer those questions in ways that won’t hurt my feelings. Anyway, I do want to thank Uncle Lumpy for his fabulous fill-in duties, and thank everyone who donated to the annual fundraiser (said donors will be getting individual thanks from me, this week!).

Mary Worth, 9/22/24

I also want to give thanks to the usually cold and unfeeling universe and/or the vagaries of the King Features editorial calendar. It seems strangely common that truly wild Mary Worth action, like the legendary Operation H-Town warehouse shootout, happens when I’m on vacation. But this year, I’ve gotten home just in time for the truly incredible panel in which Estelle decides to murder her fiance, and probably a bunch of sick animals too. Can’t wait!!!!

The Phantom, 9/22/24

An extremely long-simmering plot in The Phantom is that at one point the Phantom had amnesia, and ended up enlisting under the name “John X” as a patrolman in the Jungle Patrol, the paramilitary unit he ordinarily leads from the shadows as the perpetually unseen “Unknown Commander”. Before too long he regained his memory and had to juggle both roles, which was increasingly more trouble than it was worth, as fun as it was to intermittently show up as John X and make all the patrolwomen extremely horny. So our hero has finally decided to wrap up his double life by having the Unknown Commander order John X off on what’s widely understood as a suicide mission. This has the added benefit of modeling for the patrolpersons he commands the idea that they’re expected to nobly sacrifice themselves for unclear ends at any time, which could make his life a lot more convenient even ignoring the whole thing where he has one less identity to juggle now.

Beetle Bailey, 9/22/24

The throwaway panels assure us that Beetle is aware that he is a member of the U.S. Armed Forces, but it’s fascinating that in subsequent panels he contemplates various increasingly fantastical transportation modes only in terms of the convenience they would offer him, and not the incredible tactical advantage they would grant his platoon in combat. I guess there’s a reason he’s never been promoted: he simply doesn’t have the mind for military leadership.

Mark Trail, 9/22/24

WOW, Mark Trail, you had an opportunity to depict a GRAPHIC vulture vomit scene in the Sunday full-color comics and you chickened out? For shame, for shame!