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Dick Tracy, 8/5/18

Today’s Dick Tracy is brought to you by the tourism board of Minot, North Dakota: the Magic City! Sadly, this nickname is not a testament to its rich heritage of sleight-of-hand artistry, but rather is a reference to the fact that it sprung up almost overnight in the 1880s, as if someone had waved a wand and intoned “Abracadabra!” The real reason was not because of any dark sorcery, of course, but because it was at one point the last stop on the Great Northern Railway as that line was being built across the U.S. The town’s railroading history makes it an appropriate location for this adventure, since Sawtooth escaped from his botched attempt to kill Dick Tracy by hopping on a freight train. According to Wikipedia, another nickname for Minot is “Little Chicago,” which makes sense as well because it’s where Dick Tracy, a lawless cop from Regular Sized Chicago, is going to gun down Sawtooth while he’s “attempting to escape,” Chicago-style.

Pluggers, 8/5/18

The obvious thing to point and laugh at here is of course “pluggers wouldn’t be caught dead spending time in some foreign country where the people probably don’t even speak English,” but let’s not sleep on the fact that our plugger couple is making their vacation plans based on whatever happened to show up unsolicited in their mailbox this morning. You can have your fancy digital marketing campaign with your carefully cultivated Instagram influencers; the way to a plugger’s heart, and wallet, remains direct mail.

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Spider-Man, 8/1/18

Wow, it used to be that all you had to do to be the sinister leader of criminal syndicate with a vice grip on Chinatown was be a vaguely racist stereotype and have an army of sexy swordsladies at your beck and call. But now it turns out that you also have to keep up on all the latest D-list celebrity gossip just so that you don’t accidentally chop off the head of the chump husband of some Broadway actress. The final panel is a sad and totally accurate assessment of the relative importance of journalists and people whose spouses occasionally appear in People.

Pluggers, 8/1/18

OK, see, Pluggers, we have a deal where you get to do your thing so long as the event you depict in your panel puts a little bit of a twist on the caption, and the key to this is that the caption has to be a commonly used phrase or concept for non-pluggers, and you show us the plugger spin on it. But today we’re being asked to believe that “upgrading your timepiece” is a thing? A thing anyone says? Maybe pluggers believe that this is a thing that nerds who wear smartwatches say? Hey, Pluggers: the caption to this one could’ve just been “A plugger smartwatch,” BOOM.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/1/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler’s only medical facility is infested with vermin!

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Family Circus, 7/27/18

Look, I get that whoever’s in charge of coloring the daily comics is probably overworked, underpaid, may not be fluent in English or familiar with any of the art form’s conventions, etc. But the Family Circus is iconic, so when you come at it with your little paint can fill tool in whatever off-brand Photoshop knockoff the contractor employing you illegally downloaded, you best come correct. It’s Billy who’s the blond, and you can tell the difference between him and Jeffy, who’s a redhead, because Jeffy’s hair is lumpy. One is left staring at this panel with the impression that Jeffy has dyed his hair to show his total dedication to the beach lifestyle he and PJ are constructing for themselves. They’re also building their beach out of sugar, so presumably this scene here takes place only moments before everyone flees in terror from an enormous swarm of bees.

Pluggers, 7/27/18

I don’t know what delights me about this more: the image, which shows a crazed plugger reverting back to his true animalistic self, or the caption, which summons up the image of a plugger trying to put his hair up in a bun and somehow getting greasy chunks of ground beef tangled up in it.