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Spider-Man, 3/16/19

I’ve finally recovered emotionally enough to share some terrible news with you, which is that the current run of Newspaper Spider-Man is ending a week from today. Apparently King Features will be running some “classic” Newspaper Spider-Man strips from the ’70s, which I will definitely cover here because from what I’ve seen of them Spidey is even more of a dick than he is in his current incarnation, but I will definitely mourn the end of my beloved feeble, whiny superhero.

The note from King and Marvel said “We’ll be back soon with great new stories and art to explore even more corners of the Marvel Universe for you and your readers to enjoy. We’ll be announcing more about these new adventures in the very near future, so keep your Spidey senses tuned in!” It absolutely makes sense that Marvel wants to use the toehold they have in newspapers to further promote their various intellectual properties, although how anyone could possibly miss the MCU without literally blinding themselves and living in a cave is beyond me. It will be interesting to see how they do that in newspaper form; my only request is that it be laughably bad.

Meanwhile, how will this iteration of the Spiderverse be wrapped up next week? My hope is that the Parkers travel to Australia, where Peter is bitten by one of the non-radioactive but extremely large and very poisonous spiders they have down there, and then dies. We’ll all drop a brick in his honor!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/16/19

Apparently Rex Morgan, M.D, is considered more likable than Spider-Man, because his strip got a new creative team and new lease on life a couple of years ago. One thing I miss from the Woody Wilson days is how people would just give the Morgans stuff for doing relatively basic stuff like telling an unnaturally calm tween that probably the pilot knows what he’s doing during an emergency landing. So I’m pretty jazzed about this upcoming clothes gifting sequence, which I hope takes the form of a montage like the one from Pretty Woman, or maybe ZZ Top will magically appear to guide his sartorial choices.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/14/19

For a long time, one of my literary pet peeves was when someone spells “trooper” the way panel one does here; in the sense of the phrase as Rex means it, it’s supposed to be “trouper,” as in an acting troupe, and the implication is supposed to be more of an actor’s “the show must go on come what may” than soldierly doggedness. But it’s something I’ve eased up on of late, given that troupe and troop are doublets, the same French word borrowed into English twice three centuries apart, and anyway it’s not like the two senses are that far apart. Anyway, I think we can all agree that throughout this process, Brayden has shown neither a warrior’s courage nor a performer’s flair, so he deserves neither spelling.

Six Chix, 3/14/19

Do you suppose the diagonal squiggly line down the middle of this is supposed to be a panel marker, indicating that our protagonist is devouring all of this stale candy minutes after her dialogue, or the edge of a thought bubble, indicating that she fantasizes doing the same? Either way, I think I think it falls short of the set-up’s potential: we should see her dumping all this chocolate down her gullet right in front of her interlocutors, and we would rightly laud her as a hero for it.

Dennis the Menace, 3/14/19

Mr. Wilson alone dares to speak the shocking truth of the comic-strip reality all of these characters share: no matter how much time passes, they will never age or change, their essential Dennis-ness and Alice-ness and Mr. Wilson-ness and so on set in stone forever. Notice that they don’t even bother putting candles on Dennis’s cake. Dennis … will always be Dennis.

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Family Circus, 3/11/19

Look, I long ago gave up on trying to figure out how exactly the process operates behind the scenes of long-running legacy comic strips, so I’m not sure why we got two Family Circus panels in the last three years with different art but essentially the same joke. Is this just a case of someone unconsciously coming up with the same joke twice and then redrawing a Dolly-praying-before-bed panel, or, perhaps more likely, pulling out a different entry from the presumably fairly sizable collection of Dolly-praying-before-bed panels? Or are the two panels meant to be companion pieces? Back in 2016, Dolly said the pledge because she couldn’t think of any “new” prayers. Today, she couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps the most important in the Christian canon, because all the space in her mind dedicated to devotional rituals is now occupied by nationalistic display. Truly, the Keane Kompound is under seige!

Dick Tracy, 3/11/19

The joke here is that Joe Sampson, the detective who came to town last week with lurid tales of gym teach murder, is Dick’s daughter Bonnie’s ex. But if you didn’t know that, you might think that Dick is just furious that Bonnie isn’t hanging on his every word. “Bonnie? How dare you be distracted, a man is talking.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/11/19

Hootin’ Holler is grindingly poor, with an economy revolving around subsistence farming, moonshining, and chicken theft, and it’s an open question as to how the various outsiders who come into town to serve professional roles eke out a living. Parson Tuttle makes it work with relentless and unapologetic grifting, but Doc Pritchart has it easier: his practice is just a front for nonstop Medicaid fraud.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/19

“That would mean someone might want to spend enough time with me to have a sexual relationship some day, and, really: have you gotten a handle on my personality over the past few hours? I don’t think that’s in the cards.”

Slylock Fox, 3/11/19

“Ha ha, it’s a baby! A baby was born on board! Pretty wild, huh? Now everyone calm down and let’s figure out which one of us has to drown. Should it be the baby?”