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Hi and Lois, 12/16/14

I’ve never been entirely clear on how we’re supposed to understand the Thurstons’ class position relative to the Flagstons. I mean, they live in identical houses next door to each other and Hi and Thirsty work in the same office but Thirsty and Irma’s lives just always seem a little shabbier, somehow. Anyway, I own a number of thrift-store clothing items and feel that nobody should be ashamed of shopping at such places, so I’m pretty resentful about Lois’s super-smug facial expression in panel two. “Haha, guess you wouldn’t have to wear my grubby hand-me-downs like a poor person if your husband weren’t a drunk, eh, Irma? We’re ostensibly best friends!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/14

Oh my God, you guys, Rex Morgan is finally following through on a plot it set up literally five and a half years ago: Becka’s husband Peter worked with a sexy nutritionist, and Becka was jealous! Her suspicions were apparently fully justified despite Peter’s attempt to convince her otherwise. So see, she never particularly cared about academic independence over at the old community college or whatever the dumb faculty intrigue plot was about; she just had her heart broken! Also, in case you’re not reading along at home, Becka is telling all this to June as a way of explaining why she’s quitting her job at the clinic. A good thing to do when you’re emotionally devastated and restructuring your financial life after separating from your spouse is to give up your main source of income!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/16/14

Let’s say that, years ago you named someone in your comic “Funky Winkerbean,” to denote the happy-go-lucky nature of the character and the strip. It was the ’70s, so maybe drugs were involved. I’m not gonna judge! And then say that over the decades your strip became a charnel house of sadness and your character became a bloated, angry jerk. I think it’d probably be a bad idea to have anyone in the strip refer to him by a nickname like, for instance, “The Funk Man.” It’d just make everyone think about the name more, you know? You don’t want people thinking about the name.

Mark Trail, 12/16/14

“Say, Justin, this gives me an idea: what if you still built your titanium mine near the swamp, but then once you got the titanium out of the ground, you just admired it for a bit and then put it back? That’s a reasonable centrist compromise we could all agree on!”

Momma, 12/16/14

So Santa is an immortal magical being whose lifespan lies outside of time as we know it, and Momma is … roughly forty years younger than him? Sounds about right.

Heathcliff, 12/16/14

I like that, even in the iconography of his terrifying cult of personality, Heathcliff looks pretty bored.

Six Chix, 12/16/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because her mother died from melting, and they’re never going to hear from her again!

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Gasoline Alley, 12/9/14

YES YES YES THE BELOVED “MILDLY RUDE SALESMAN WITH A PENCIL MUSTACHE” GUY FROM THE SKEEZIX RETURNS A DVD PLAYER STORYLINE IS BACK, BABY! That’s how you know we’re in for some high-quality verbal jousts over the next three to seven weeks. Today we get some important background on this character’s motivation: his “Marx brothers” reference is a veiled description of his political orientation. He’s not a dick to his customers just for fun, but rather as part of the long political struggle of class against class that Marx described so presciently. I see big things for this guy when the revolution comes.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/9/14

After an absence from the strip that bears his name that lasted literally decades, Barney Google has made a number of trips to Hootin’ Holler over the past few years, bringing news of strange big-city mores to the isolated inhabitants there. For instance, today we learn that the horse modeling industry is, perhaps unsurprisingly, rife with horsefuckers! Look at these two creeps laughing it up at poor Spark Plug’s distress. “You don’t understand! Being a horse-model was my lifelong dream … and in one brief moment it became a nightmare.”

Spider-Man, 12/9/14

Wow, that’s a pretty rude way to talk to your film’s high-profile leading lady, Rory! You might wonder how he gets away with that kind of sass. Well, it’s simple: he’s got the only combo flattop/mullet/rat-tail in the business. You don’t fire that haircut. You just don’t.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/9/14

Having successfully convinced Rex that Sarah is the one foretold in prophecy, Rene is now talking Rex into allowing Kelly to continue on as her lackey, as long as she submits to the stringent conditions that any acolyte must accept. Rex is clearly intrigued. “Hmm, a teenage girl consecrating her body and mind to purity and swearing to lie down her own worthless life in order to protect my daughter? Tell me more!”

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The Phantom, 11/30/14

Give the present-day iteration of the Phantom some credit: for a superhero adventure comic, it actually tries to do a decent job of depicting post-colonial Africa, with Bangalla a kind of idealized South Africa, black-ruled but with a sizable white minority and a diverse array of indigenous ethnic groups, all living more or less in harmony. Still, the core conceit still carries a lot of uncomfortable colonial racial baggage from the strip’s 1930s origin: the hero protecting this African land is a white man — and, more to the point, the 21st in a series of white men who, despite living in Africa since the 1500s, have all apparently voyaged elsewhere to find wives, so as to continue to produce blonde-haired, blue-eyed progeny. Anyway, this coming Sunday Phantom adventure will take our hero and his kids to … Iceland! A country so homogeneously Nordic that it’s a genetic case study! Presumably Kit is just teasing his children with the prospect of adventure, when in fact they’re going to be assigned their future Norse spouses, in accordance with Phantom Law.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/30/14

Rex Morgan, M.D., became Sarah Morgan Uses Her Special Mind Powers To Become The All-Ruling God-Empress Of Earth And Destroyer Of Men so gradually that most people didn’t notice, but in retrospect this strip was seen as an important signal of the coming transition.

Spider-Man, 11/30/14

Peter ignores his wife as she engages in something that interests her, makes a clumsy request for sex, then glumly reflects that showing the bare minimum of emotional support a spouse ought to be able to expect might result in his literal death. Every time I think we’ve hit Peak Newspaper Spider-Man, I am pleasantly surprised anew.