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The Phantom, 2/16/19

Tragically, the Nomad’s teen daughter would rather hurl herself off the roof of the Bangallan Consulate than live torn away from her family, which she now knows was a nest of terrorists all along. This will be doubly awkward for our heroes. It will make Heloise’s escape from the country, with the President in tow, all the more suspicious if her helicopter zooms away from the site of a public and gory suicide; plus, Kadia was a Bangallan flag rank officer, which means her next of kin is entitled to a generous military pension. Looks like the Nomad’s prison commissary account will be fully stocked!

Spider-Man, 2/16/19

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the action in Spider-Man! Killgrave had his full powers restored and was about to force Spider-Man and Luke Cage to kill one another, but fortunately MJ managed to completely disable his near-omnipotent voice by whacking him in the throat with a small piece of metal. And if you think it’s kind of unsatisfying that our superheroes were saved by a completely non-super-powered ally, don’t worry: she also did it entirely by dumb luck. Anyway, I assume Killgrave has been permanently defeated by this extremely mild throat injury, seeing as everyone is just kind of standing around chatting about it rather than attempting to, like, cover his mouth or tie him up or something.

Dick Tracy, 2/16/19

I honestly can’t work up much energy to appreciate or even recap the two or so storylines going on in Dick Tracy right now, but I have to admit that I’m intrigued by the apparently introduction of a new one, about a sportswriter … who stabs.

Mary Worth, 2/16/19

Just want to point out that Ian had a clear chance to say “No, Toby, of course I wasn’t having an emotional affair with Jannie” and he 100% did not take it! I mean, technically an emotional affair has to involve reciprocation, but still.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/16/19

Brayden is lucky he has that sweater to ward off the desert cold, but Rex? Rex just got to smugly correct someone by saying “That’s a common misconception,” and the glow from that will keep him warm for hours.

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The Phantom, 2/7/19

So I was roundly and correctly roasted last week for not being up on the Phantom lore and realizing that it’s Heloise who has a Great-Uncle Dave (a terrorism expert, natch), not Kadia. I may not know much about ancillary Phantom characters, but I do know about international diplomacy, enough to realize that giving teenagers cabinet positions and admiralships in order to spirit them out of the country and avoid talking to the police is pretty dodgy, and I also know enough about storytelling to know that it’s kind of weird to spend this much post-climax strip time talking about the mechanics of how President Luaga is spiriting Heloise and Kadia out of the country. Really, it’s only interesting to nerds who are curious about the details of Bangalla’s governance and external relations — and I cannot emphasize enough that I am very much one of those nerds. Why do you think President Luaga is doing this himself? Are these sorts of appointments exclusively made by the president in person, according to the Bangallan constitution? Or is Luaga just here on a lark because he’s kind of bored with the day to day of Bangallan governance, which, for the record, I as a nerd am also eager to learn more about?

Mary Worth, 2/7/19

I’m pretty sure that Mary Worth is the person that Toby spends the most time with, which is profoundly sad, for both of them really, but it’s clear here that at least it means she’s building up an immunity to Mary’s platitudes and has gotten to the point where she can now just ignore them altogether. “Don’t worry about how you appear. Just talk to him.” “When I do, the most important thing will be how I appear!” I’m not sure how long Mary will accept this state of affairs before she takes her meddling to the next level (hypnosis, binding court orders, etc.).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/19

You ever see one of those sentences that has been run through some kind of automatic translator and while grammatically correct makes no sense? In unrelated news, here’s today’s Rex Morgan, M.D.!

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The Phantom, 1/30/19

As an 83-year-old adventure comic set mostly in Africa, The Phantom has some, let’s say, confusing baggage in its world-building that gets papered over to varying degrees. Like, The Nomad, a longstanding Phantom nemesis and antagonist in the current storyline is a sinister terrorist whose real name is “Eric Sahara” and who looks like Mitt Romney, which is of course absurd, but they’ve tried to sort of make him more realistic by situating him in [squints at where Walker’s finger is pointing] North Africa; they also gave him a daughter named Kadia (not an Arabic name) and a wife named Imara (an Arabic name, but for men), and also … an Uncle Dave? Which is the funniest thing in the newspaper comics today by a mile. Dave Sahara, the terrorist’s uncle! Not a terrorist himself, but he knows a thing or two, that Dave.

Gil Thorp, 1/30/19

I don’t know if there’s a hard syndicate rule that prevents any teens in Gil Thorp from actually doing anything illegal or if the sacred responsibility to keep the strip pure is more of an unwritten thing, but it is funny to me how the teen antics mimic the sort of things that get actual teens in trouble, but don’t actually involve crimes. Like the time a sexting panic got triggered by a girl getting her picture taken wearing an extremely non-revealing cardboard bikini. Or, I guess, like the time that B/Robby Howry was dealing adderall, but it wasn’t actually adderall. Anyhoo, enjoy this posse of Milford teens almost but not quite getting involved in serious vandalism!