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Dick Tracy, 12/20/23

So Dick and X. Libris’s sword fight ended with X. tumbling to her death from a spiral staircase, which was in a library full of her beloved books, so I guess we’ll count this is as an ironic comeuppance? It’s marginal but I’m feeling generous about it. What I’m not feeling generous about is that the strip is spending this whole week making sure we understand the emotional repercussions of her life of crime, which, BORING. This is a strip where people used to get eaten alive by rats, we don’t care about, like, ruined businesses or whatever else this Hayes Code-ass epilogue wants us to think about. Those cops don’t really care either. Look at those numb facial expressions. “Yeah, it’s called a ‘warrant,’ I guess? I’d never heard of one either. Anyway, your business is ruined.”

Mark Trail, 12/20/23

Haven’t kept you up on what’s happening in Mark Trail for a while, and what’s happening is this guy’s trying to get rid of a bat infestation and is spurning Cherry’s offer of PPE so he’s gonna die of rabies. Rabies! He’ll be foaming at the mouth and screaming and Cherry is going to have put him down as an act of mercy with a shotgun blast to the head. It’ll be as exciting as any boat explosion, and twice as messy.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/20/23

IS RENE STILL IN THE HOTEL??? HE MIGHT BE!!! STAY TUNED FOR FURTHER RENE-HOTEL NEXUS DEVELOPMENTS!!!!!!!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/13/23

The real victim of this whole big late-plot Mirakle Method plagiarism reveal will not be Rene, who will manage to weasel out of serious consequences via some method that is as unlikely as it is uninteresting, but rather Mud, who feels that the Mirakle Method has genuinely helped him become a better person and is barely hanging on by a thread as it becomes increasingly clear that Buzzy and Rene are in full grift mode. I predict he’ll either relapse and engage in a run of antisocial behavior that will make pretending to shit himself onstage look Nobel Peace Prize-worthy, or he’ll transfer his fanatical and violent allegiance to an extremely puzzled Mr. Ollman, who’ll have to try to remember if any of his enemies are still alive

Hagar the Horrible, 12/13/23

Sure, Hagar the Horrible makes the late Carolingian period seem fun, what with all the violence, but have you considered the drawbacks, like the lack of robust financial institutions?

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Bizarro, 12/6/23

A fun fact is that while “Frankenstein,” in the sense of a story about creature sewn together from corpses and reanimated via forbidden science with unexpected results, is in the public domain, Frankenstein’s monster, in the sense of the green-skinned corpse guy with a flat head and bolts in his neck, is the intellectual property of Universal Studios, for whom that design was created in 1931. I really had it in my mind that the flat top of the head was meant to indicate that the skull had been sliced open to drop a brain into it, but I can’t find any citation to that now; however, the Wikipedia article for Frankenstein’s monster does have the unsettling note that “Jack P. Pierce … based the monster’s face and iconic flat head shape on a drawing Pierce’s daughter (whom Pierce feared to be psychic) had drawn from a dream.” Anyway, today’s strip raises a lot more questions than it answers: are the Monster and his Bride having sex, reproductively, and are their corpse-mangled qualities passed down to their offspring via some Lamarckian mechanism? Or did the pair conspire to reproduce the sins of their creator, assembling in their own image a son from scavenged corpse parts, continuing the hideous cycle? Also, is the kid’s full name “Frankenstein’s Monster Junior,” and does he get mad if people just call him or his father “Frankenstein?” I honestly care about all this much more than his potential head injury situation.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/6/23

This week’s Rex Morgan is really just dragging out a plotline we had all hoped would be done by now, but honestly I’ve been enjoying a lot of the facial expressions so I’ll give it a pass. Today, Mr. Ollman (get it? he’s an “old man”????) has hit the end of his patience with this entire conversation, as his face in panel three makes very clear. “Look, doc, I came here because I need my prostate checked out and I heard you weren’t gonna give me a lot of pushback when I asked for a painkiller prescription. I stopped making new acquaintances 15 years ago, and I certainly don’t want to hear anything about some Italian I’m supposed to know, got it?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/6/23

It seems to me that you should be rewarding a budding young musician for time spent honing and practicing his craft in whatever way works best for; demanding a new song in exchange for each cookie feels like it’s encouraging quantity over quality, just my take.

Gasoline Alley, 12/6/23

Rufus’s dick has burst out of his elf costume, right? That’s what’s going on here? He’s hanging hog? That’s what’s going to get the beloved comic strip Gasoline Alley cancelled after all these years? Rufus with his dick out?