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The Phantom, 4/11/08

As was no doubt easily predictable, I lost interest in the current Phantom storyline rather quickly after all the hilarious Jungle Patrol! catchphrases petered out. (Not that you shouldn’t be stocking up on Jungle Patrol-themed merchandise, mind you.) Basically, our lady cop and waitress have been attempting to capture a notorious arms dealer in an attempt to prove their mettle to the male chauvinist pigs who run the Jungle Patrol; throughout the process, the Ghost Who Is Helpful has been surreptitiously doing much of the heavy lifting in the bad-guy-neutralization department. Some might think that this is unfair affirmative action on the Big Purple Guy’s part to try to get some ladies into his elite law-enforcement outfit, but since everyone in The Phantom other than the Phantom is generally pretty incompetent, I’m guessing that secret help from the Unknown Commander is par for the course on Jungle Patrol missions.

In today’s final panel, though, we learn that these ladies may be a little bloodthirsty even by Jungle Patrol standards. Sure, it’s reasonable for them to return fire, but it does seem like they were just waiting for the chance, doesn’t it? Usually the Phantom lets the baddies off with a little chin music and a Skull Mark™ as a reminder to stay on the straight and narrow, but our Swiss death merchant here looks like he’ll be as full of holes as his nation’s namesake cheese in short order.

Speaking of gunplay, while our lady cop has obviously been through weapons training, when did the waitress learn to fire off handgun rounds with such steely precision? I would have liked to have seen a Rocky-style montage sequence in which she learned the various deadly arts.

Shoe, 4/11/08

“That, plus the transceiver I attached to the bottom of your car in the parking lot, means that we’ll be seein’ a lot of each other! Haw haw!”

Since the earliest days of this blog, I have made it clear that I cannot abide the “sexy” lady birds in this strip. I dunno, there’s something about the combination of beaks and feathers with some distinctly, er, mammalian characteristics that just utterly squicks me out. The attention that’s been lavished on the glimpse we get of this barfly’s lower back isn’t helping me, either.

Spider-Man, 4/11/08

Hey, look, Simon Krandis keeps a fistful of wadded up bribe money in his tuxedo jacket at all times. The man would have made a swell governor!

The final panel is simultaneously the most hilarious and the most fetishistically unsettling image the Spider-Man newspaper strip has produced in the last three years.

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Marvin, 3/14/08

Tough questions for today’s Marvin:

• Do people normally let their two-year-olds toddle around the house eating entire hamburgers, and presumably leaving a trail of ketchup and half-masticated bun in their wake?
• Isn’t Marvin’s interlocutor old enough that she should be talking for real, and thus be unable to conduct the thought-balloon-based telepathic conversations typical of Marvin’s infant society?
• For that matter, why does she need to open her mouth in panel one to thought-balloon at Marvin?
• Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Gil Thorp, 3/14/08

Woo-hoo, ladies! That’s how you celebrate a basketball win — with a full-on locker-room orgy, not whatever half-assed smirking is going on in Funky Winkerban. Lisa Wyche (or whoever the vaguely Tommie-faced gal at the far right of panel two is) looks particularly pleased to “celebrate” Milford’s “victory,” if you know what I mean.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/14/08

Ha ha, Rex just got back from his harrowing camping ordeal only to be repeatedly humiliated by his pre-kindergarten-aged daughter. Yesterday she forced him to admit that he was pretty much terrified throughout the whole thing; today she lets him know that his lies and bluster are and always have been painfully transparent. Proving that there’s no doubt about her maternity, at least, she fixes Rex with one of her mother’s patented Icy Stares Of Death™ in panel two, while June looks on approvingly.

Phantom, 3/14/08

So, we’ve got an arms dealer surrounded by heavily armed guards as he sells more weapons — presumably military grade — to some kind of green-clad paramilitary group, and our tough lady cop and waitress are going to break it up with — a handgun and a … stick … of some kind. Um. At least its a long stick. I guess “toughness” isn’t the only quality needed to join the Jungle Patrol; “suicidal insanity” also appears to be on the list.

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Family Circus, 2/24/08

O Sunday Family Circus, why do you insist on the being baffling and totally insane? These snowman scenarios grow increasingly deranged and disturbing as you move clockwise through the strip. “Snowy’s Kindergarden” is forgettable treacle; one might be tempted to gloss over the Symphony Hall entry with equal speed, except that upon closer inspection it appears that our be-headphoned conductor snowbeing may actually be inside the symphony hall? And if so, would there by any more disturbing moment for a professional concert musician than coming into work one day and finding a pile of snow on the floor and a ghastly simulacrum of your conductor grinning dumbly and listening to headphones?

From there, it gets worse. Obviously the melting snowman at the global warming talk is a horrifying nightmare; the way it’s cradling its head, desperately trying to keep it from falling off its rapidly shrinking neck and rolling across the floor, would be poignant if it weren’t so terrifying. And finally, we arrive at … OK, where is that? Does that building in the background have bars on the window? Is that snowman in prison? My God, it’s in prison, isn’t it? And that rolling ball in front of it is … what, exactly? The severed head of a prison snitch? The mind boggles?

If we want good, old-fashioned fun, we need to turn to people who know how to have a good time … pirates!

Panel from the Phantom, 2/24/08

WOO! PIRATE PARTY! Even when it’s about over, you can see they’re having a good time, because they’re still laughing it up! With their pirate antics! WOO! HA HA! Sunday’s strip got all Phantom-fisty and skull-marky after this point, but I just wanted to linger on the moment when the pirates were allowed to have their fun.