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Dick Tracy, 5/30/20

[I take an extremely deep breath so that I can wrap up the current boring-ass storyline in one run-on sentence] So Shaky got arrested but then later got bailed out by this woman who’s going to be playing Breathless Mahoney in a movie and I guess is a relative of the real Breathless Mahoney, who was lovers with the original Shaky, and even though Shaky has a perfectly nice girlfriend, I guess he and Breathless Jr. here are gonna do it? It hasn’t been an “interesting” journey to this point by any means, but when a woman in the newspaper comics asks one of Dick Tracy’s freakish villains “So, you’re basically a human vibrator, right?” I feel honor-bound to report it to you.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/20

Man, I’m so steamed over Beetle calling Killer his “buddy” — I can’t cite any specific strips or anything but my strong impression is that they tolerate one another but have no real strong feelings about each other either for good or ill — that I can’t even focus on the fact that Sarge has started pitting the men under his command against one another in sport combat, for his amusement.

Shoe, 5/30/20

I don’t … think that would work? I’m really pretty sure that wouldn’t work.

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Mary Worth, 5/22/20

I had sort of been hoping that Mary Worth would never do a coronavirus pandemic plot, that it would just remain my happy place forever when the worst thing we had to worry about was how many mai tais Wilbur’s had, but now that Mary and Dawn are moving on from “Cheating’s fine, honestly, most of the time there isn’t really any hard feelings” to “You know who the real heroes are? Doctors, and nurses, and whatever it is Jared does, I’m not clear on it exactly but he definitely wears scrubs and works at the hospital,” I worry that we’re headed in that direction. I’ll allow it only if Jared succumbs to COVID, allowing Dawn to weep bereft pandemic tears for months.

Shoe, 5/22/20

Despite how long I’ve written about comics, there are still parts of the creative process I don’t understand. In Shoe, for instance, what factors determine the punchlines that get Goggle Eyes of Horror and the ones that get Heavy Lids and Undereye Bags of Despair?

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Shoe, 4/28/20

Was Cats a box-office failure? Very much so. In fact, it’s one of the most prominent movie flops in recent memory! So it’s actually a good movie to pick for this joke … or it would be, if the joke weren’t about a dog hating it. C’mon, man! Is the joke about how a dog ID’d Cats as a financial failure because he’s a bomb-sniffing dog, or is it about a movie-reviewing dog who hated the movie Cats because he’s a dog who, like all stereotypical dogs, hates cats? YOUR JOKE IS OVERLOADED WITH SIGNIFIERS, damn it!

Crock, 4/28/20

This is comic written by someone who’s heard of books, and seen people on TV interacting with and talking about them, but has never actually read one.

The Lockhorns, 4/28/20

Pretty sure Leroy’s dying? Let’s be honest: it’s a blessing, for everyone concerned.