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Dennis the Menace, 11/30/16

I’m a little concerned about why Henry looks so very miserable in this panel. I’m wavering between “He secretly can’t get enough of Dennis’s humiliations of various adults and is profoundly sad that without his glasses he can’t make out the expression on this optometrist’s face” and “Dennis is cracking wise to cut the tension after the optometrist just sucker-punched Henry for no reason.”

Hi and Lois, 11/30/16

Somewhere deep in the HQ of Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, a cigar-chomping executive is growling angrily at various cowering hacks. “Boys,” he says, “we used to own the comic-strip baby thing. Everyone loves Trixie, and she gets a solid 20% of the jokes in Hi and Lois. But have you seen this?” He waves multiple printouts of Marvin strips aggressively. “This little bastard is the only baby in his family. And he just makes poop jokes nonstop. I thought people loved Trixie’s sweet relationship with sunbeam.” He sighs heavily. “But I guess it’s a new world now.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/30/16

Wait, Sarah is taking the bus now? Like a common poor? I know it’s awkward being dependent on violent gangsters to transport your child to and from her elite private school, but it seems like some extremely hasty decisions have been made here.

Mary Worth, 11/30/16

The best part about today’s Mary Worth is that Zak thinks this date is going great.

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Dick Tracy, 11/29/16

You have to give the new-ish Dick Tracy creative team credit for bringing the strip into something that’s semi-recognizable as the modern era. I mean, the strip’s trademark bit of gee-whiz futuristic tech is now on sale and really something of a niche market, which I’m not sure if that makes their job easier or harder! Anyway, today’s strip shows that Neo-Chicago’s Major Crimes Unit is really getting with the times; they’re less likely to get information by building long-term trusting relationships with street-level informants or via brutal beatdowns of suspected criminals, and instead are just trolling Instagram for pictures of people who seem reluctant to be photographed. Thank God Dick, at least, reacts in his usual inscrutable and incorrect fashion. “This is great. I want you to have the boys in the photo darkroom print up a blown-up version of this — obviously there’s no other way to get a better look. But that’ll take hours, so let’s the two of us head down to the zoo and start shooting first and asking questions later. Hopefully that blown-up photo will count as ‘probable cause,’ retroactively.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/29/16

I was going to go into a riff about Sarah making fun of her one-year-old brother for not having any friends, but then I realized that Sarah doesn’t appear to have any friends either, especially now that the Morgans have abruptly cut off contact with her mobster patroness. Like, who would Sarah have at her fantasy birthday party with the clown and the bounce house and so forth? Would she invite the kid who made fun of her paintings, just so she could keep him on the other side of a velvet rope and make him watch her frolic, by herself?

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Judge Parker, 11/28/16

The characters in Judge Parker, who have spent the last few decades as the unquestioned lords and masters of all they survey, with people just handing them money and power for no good reason, have now been abruptly brought low by a series of tragic events. Frankly, we’ve all been so focused on Neddy’s factory disaster and Sophie’s kidnapping that we’ve neglected another damsel in distress: April, Judge Parker Junior’s CIA assassin wife, who actually vanished before the change of writers, after being sent to do One Last Job in Belgrade.

Anyway, Randy’s been pretty broken up about it, obviously, and today’s strip reminds us of a reality of the newly grim Parkerburg: our heroes are so emotionally bereft as to be incapacitated, but they’re still in charge, which means that vital decisions are going unmade. Look at that huge stack of paperwork! Randy hasn’t heard a case in weeks, which means probably there are some people in jail who have no idea if they’ll ever get to trial, or maybe some businesses in limbo because lawsuits they’re involved in can’t move forward. Is Randy a criminal or civil judge? Who even knows? The point is, he’s sad about his wife, and the rest of you people will have to wait.

Curtis, 11/28/16

Curtis’s dad is giving his son a crash course on what life is like in this fallen world, where a constant stream of resources are needed to extend the lives of anything, from an advertising agency to an apartment building to a human body. Of course, all this effort still won’t stave off your inevitable death, but that’s a story for another day!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/28/16

“Shhh, June, no. I know what you’re thinking, but it isn’t true. Sarah isn’t the way she is because you worked when she was a baby. She’s that way because we summoned her into existence via unholy, forbidden science! I swear to you we have the procedure refined now!”