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The Phantom, 4/6/25

One thing I respect about the Phantom is that, for a strip that started out with a fairly dubious colonialist attitude, it now makes a good faith effort to imagine what life would be like realistically in Bangalla, a post-colonial African state that balances a modern capital inhabited by a Westernized elite with a large citizen body that still lives more traditional lifestyles. That’s why I’m intrigued by this new storyline, in which a group of Wambesi living in Mawitaan return home to [squints at last panel] [record scratch] THE UNGRAVED? Best case scenario, it’s some nightmare where corpses are strewn about the village; worst case scenario will be a zombie situation that will have me taking back all the stuff I just said about how far this strip has come.

Dustin and Beetle Bailey, 4/6/25

Ah, it’s time for some fun dream sequences starring two of the funnies’ most callow young people! The Dustin one is straightforward enough to parse — Dustin, who lives with the father who hates him, finds himself trapped on a tiny island with him, a horizon that he can never reach visible in every direction as his father keeps demanding he get a job just in time for another general economic collapse. Beetle Bailey is a bit sillier — ha ha, he’s sick of peeling potatoes, so he’s dreaming of Cookie as a giant angry potato! — but I have to admit that the potato-man seems more and more unsettling the more I look it. The way his body is all head, the way his arms apparently connect to his back, the way he waves around a knife that will be used to slice off the skin of his fellow potatoes and, ultimately, himself? … well, it’s an unsettling look into Beetle’s subconscious, I’ll just say that.

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Shoe, 4/2/25

You know, I was going to joke here about how the snuggie’s brief moment as a cultural sensation came and went in 2009, which I regret to inform everyone was literally 16 years ago, and I started squinting at the “2025” in the Perfesser’s word balloon to see if it had been altered from some earlier and more appropriate date, but then, I thought, you know what? Blankets with sleeves are pretty cool, honestly a lot cooler than anything we’ve developed since, technology-wise. Did you know you can get them with a little pocket for your remote control now? Why is that kind of innovation not being applied in the flying car field? It’s truly shameful.

The Phantom, 4/2/25

I do feel bad for Kadia, whose world as a cloistered rich girl was shattered when she learned that her family riches came from supervillainy. Still, you have to admit that “I was afraid to warn Kit … Kadia can lose her grip on reality and become unpredictable” is an extremely funny thing to think about a girl you’re trying to set your brother up with. Anyway, could her psychic trauma from being the daughter of a supervillain be healed by becoming the wife of a superhero? I’m not a “licensed therapist,” but this is a superhero comic, so almost certainly yes.

Mary Worth, 4/2/25

I’ve never really imagined that the Santa Royale culinary scene is vibrant, exactly, but I still find it pretty wild that Wilbur feels so short of options that he would voluntarily return to My Thai, the restaurant that was the site of one of his biggest humiliations, which is really saying something. I guess it’s possible that that he’s only at this moment realizing that accidentally-but-not-really spilling something on someone at dinner when you’re drunk and/or on whatever it is that has Belle’s eyes looking like that seems cool when you’re doing it, but when you’re sober and watching it happen, you realize it’s actually not very cool at all.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/2/25

“Wait, so you had … a job? …in England?”

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The Phantom, 3/20/25

The Phantom, it is my task to occasionally remind you, is actually a 22-generation long chain of fathers and sons who each take the role of the Ghost Who Walks in turn, who arrived in southern Africa from Europe back in [waves hands vaguely] the pirate era, and who have perpetuated themselves by continually sending away for European or European-descended brides. But one of the very long- and slow-running ongoing storylines in the strip is about how the current Phantom’s son Kit will probably be the first to break this chain of racial purity. He’s not going to marry one of the Bangallans that his family has lived among for centuries — let’s not go nuts — but will probably end up either with the local girl who’s mooning over him as he studies Phantom stuff (?) at a monastery in the Himalayas, or with Kadia Sahara, born the daughter of one of the Phantom’s longtime nemeses but now a foster daughter of the weird Walker clan. Anyway, the thing I like most about today’s strip is that container ship cruising by in the background as Kit’s sister Heloise, a Kadia partisan, boasts to her mother (via some kind of bespoke video messaging app, the screen branded with the Phantom’s famous skull mark) about the beach-based meet-cute she’s just arranged. The huge vessel reminds us that, despite all these superheroic breeding machinations, the quiet miracle of global commerce soldiers on.

Mary Worth, 3/20/25

Check out the contemplative way Dawn is regarding that apple in the second panel. Sure, she missed her musical duets with her dad while he was away; but now that she’s eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she realizes that inflicting Weston karaoke stylings on an innocent and unsuspecting public is wrong, and must be stopped for the good of mankind.

Pluggers, 3/20/25

Hi is experiencing a plugger-like loss of sex drive in middle age, but as his huge grin in panel two makes clear, he’s not mad about it at all! Remember when he was younger and got distracted by erotic feelings all the time? That ate up valuable time in which he could’ve been working on improving his short game! Thank god those days are behind him.