Post Content

The Phantom, 8/18/24

A fun running bit in The Phantom is that we sometimes see original Phantom creator Lee Falk going about his day in pre-war Manhattan, musing about whatever direction the Phantom storyline is going to go in next. This can cause minor issues when it comes to suspension of disbelief, since the Phantom clearly takes place in the 21st century; I buy that Falk could’ve dreamed up plutocrats with their own private rocket companies, though independent post-colonial African states seems a bit more of a stretch. However, I have a harder time believing that our comics scribe neither keeps copies of his own strips nor subscribes to the newspapers that print them and needs help remembering plot points from a few days ago. I guess we really lost something when we replaced friendly one-man newspaper stand businesses with the Internet, although the Internet would also be happy to show Lee Falk last week’s strip, if he asked.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/18/24

This is in fact a repeat of a mystery that ran back in June of 2022. However, it’s been redrawn and recolored and — crucially, to establish the much worse vibes — has had dialogue added to show that Slylock has decied to dispense with even the flimsy pretense of rule of law that Forest Kingdom cops operate under and is about to dish out a brutal extrajudicial beating on his shrew nemesis.

Post Content

Judge Parker, 7/16/24

Sorry to sound like, you know, a worrywart, but I think that if I had glimpsed what looked very much like my dead father wrapped in chains under water, I might … not spend my time relaying that information to my friend as if it were a mildly interesting dream I had? I dunno, I might call home at that point. “Abbey!” I’d say, if I were her. “What’s Sam up to? Seen him lately? I don’t suppose he’s working on any cases where he might get murdered and his corpse dropped into the Long Island Sound? You’d probably know something about that, if that were going on, right?” That’s what I’d do. I don’t want to tell Sophie how to live her life. But it just seems like maybe it’d head off some misunderstandings.

Mary Worth, 7/16/24

I very much love the symbolism of the second panel here. “Dear, I know engaging with your mother is emotionally painful,” Mary is saying, “but I urge you to grasp onto that thorny relationship with your bare hands, no matter how much it leads you to suffer! Me? I’m wearing gloves. I have no stake in any of this and it won’t affect me at all.”

The Phantom, 7/16/24

Hey, remember the rocket that fake Elon Musk launched a few weeks ago? Well, it crashed in Bangalla, and this cute robot rover guy was in it, and now he’s wandering around the Bangallan jungle. Don’t have much to say about it but I thought you’d like to see him. I just think he’s neat!

Post Content

Gasoline Alley, 6/11/24

So, the reason the electricity went out at Walt’s is that a big tree fell over and pulled down the power line running from the utility pole to the house, and now some guys from the power company have come out in the middle of the night to repair it. This is, obviously, annoying, and could easily be the most annoying thing that would happen to you in a given year, if your year was pretty good overall, but I do not think it could in any way be described as an “unbelievable ordeal.” It’s actually quite easy to believe! You think Walt and Gertie are going to describe it to other people and they’ll say “My God, you can’t be serious”? No, it’ll be more like “Oh wow, that sounds annoying. Nice that the power company came out to fix it in the middle of the night, though.”

Dick Tracy, 6/11/24

If we’re going to go through the trouble of continuing to make Dick Tracy comics, then I suppose part of that process has to be about exploring how Dick Tracy and his friends and foes would interact with modern-day stuff. I feel ambivalent about it, but I respect that they want to do it rather than just rehash golden age Dick Tracy stuff endlessly, and I have to say that I am marginally more intrigued to find out what Dick Tracy thinks about cryptocurrency than I was to find out what he thinks about furries.

Bizarro, 6/11/24

There are two things I love about this comic. The first is that the snowman outside the apartment has clearly spent a lot of time sculpting his snow-body into the flowing shape of a ethereal spectre, but is big enough to recognize that his friend’s cheap prop humor is more likely to win kudos than his own more subtle work. The second is that Bizarro has, in a bold refusal to adhere to conventions, chosen to do a joke about snowmen going to a Halloween party in the middle of the summer.

The Phantom, 6/11/24

A classic bit I do on my blog is to look at a day’s comic and say “Ha ha, surely the next development in this strip will be [something that is far too silly to ever happen in a comic strip]”, and a classic bit that the comics do in response is to produce a subsequent development that’s substantially sillier than I predicted. Anyway, I apologize for joking that “Space-Ox,” the private rocket company in the current Phantom storyline, is run by Elon Musk Ox (he’s just like Elon Musk, but also an ox). In fact, it’s run by Ian Mollusk (he’s just like Elon Musk, but also a snail).