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The Phantom, 2/2/25

A fun thing about The Phantom (the comic strip) is that it’s one of the oldest superhero franchises, and the Phantom (the character) hasn’t really changed much since the strip launched during FDR’s first term, so he recognizably fits into the “superhero” slot in our collective understanding of the word but one of his primary “superpowers” is “shoots guns”. The current Sunday storyline is sort of a Phantom: Origins flashback, showing what the current Phantom’s Phantom ancestor was up to during the Moroccan invasion of the Songhai Empire in the 1590s. Turns out what he was up to was using his “shoots guns” superpower, even then! Hey kids, you want to see a guy get shot in the chest, right here in the newspaper? It’s OK, it’s, uh, old-timey.

Curtis, 2/2/25

Don’t panic, Curtis! All you have to do is create a Wikipedia page for “Toby Wilkins,” complete with plausible-looking citations, before Mrs. Nelson gets home tonight! Admittedly that doesn’t really sound like something that’d be in your skill set, now that I think about it. Seems to be more like a Barry thing to be honest. Should’ve been nicer to your brother, Curtis! I personally would not quickly whip up a bogus Wikipedia page to help a guy who calls me “troll” on the regular.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/2/25

Your nephew’s band? Is it a roots country band??? We haven’t seen any roots country action in this strip since November, I’m starting to panic

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Pardon My Planet, 1/30/25

There’s a joke at the core of this panel that is, if not good per se, at least perfectly serviceable — ha ha, her husband is a dick about her cooking so she’s going to poison him! — but it’s assembled in such a shambolic and confusing way that it actually loops all the way through “bad” to “fascinating.” I love the idea of the husband sitting at the dinner table, white-knuckle gripping his silverware and waiting patiently for his wife to prepare his meal, which he already assumes he’ll hate, because of the shows she watches on TV, but also he declines or perhaps refuses to turn around and look at the TV to see if it’s that show that gets his wife to make the food he hates. Add in the fact that the wife apparently needs advice from a literal witch, a woman skilled in chthonic folk magic and also green, to know that pouring liquid from a bottle labeled with a prominent skull and crossbones is what’s going to kill her husband. I dunno, I think if I had that on hand already, I could’ve guessed it’d be bad to use as salad dressing (or good, depending on your end goal) without the TV witch telling me. I’m just an “independent thinker” like that.

Rex Morgan, 1/30/25

Hey, remember back when Estelle in Mary Worth went on a series of internet dates, each more comically unpleasant than the last? Well, Rex Morgan tried to recapture that magic but instead of Summer’s dates being “fun” bad, they were “boring” bad. Classic Rex Morgan! Anyway, as we all know, Estelle ended up in Wilbur’s sweaty arms at the end of the process, but apparently Rex Morgan is pitching as an alternative to the app scene going to a bar and hooking up with your daughter’s English teacher, who’s been harboring many a sexual thought about you since you came to a parent-teacher conference two years ago that you barely remember, what a coincidence, he definitely wasn’t sitting outside the restaurant watching your internet date unravel and plotting his next move.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/22/25

So with Kelly out of the house, Summer has been whining about being bored and lonely to everyone she knows, and by “everyone she knows” I mean her daughter and her two coworkers and that’s it, which is very clearly part of the problem. The way the whining went is that she would say “What if I got back into the dating scene! Ha ha! Wouldn’t that be crazy” and other people were like “Uh you know there are lots of other things you could do outside the house, right” and Summer was like “What I’m hearing is that you think I should find a man, for sex.” Anyway, I’m loving the footnote in panel two, assuring us that Summer’s first pass at finding a sex partner isn’t really ending with the guy having a stroke right there at the table and Summer just sighing heavily rather than attempting to find medical help for him. He’s just boring!

Slylock Fox, 1/22/25

Both these panels take place as part of the awful Event that saw animals abruptly become sapient and our human world violently transformed into the animal-dominated realm of Slylock and his Forest Kingdom apparatus of oppression. In the first panel, the wolf, still puzzled by his newfound knowledge of the world, is merely aping the predatory stories he’s discovered in human fairy tales about animals; in the second, the wolf is angry at the humiliation heaped upon the animal characters in those books and has decided to elaborately act out one of those stories but change the ending in an act of bloody revenge. It’s a subtle change but I trust you are discerning enough to pick up on the different vibes. In both panels, that’s a real human femur leaning up against the bed, licked clean, as evidence of the carnage that’s already occurred and an indication of more to come.