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Shoe, 11/19/16

Wait, if Punxsutawney Phil really had Secret Groundhog Powers letting him know about the coming rise in global temperatures, wouldn’t he have bought some nice little place in Canada, miles away from the ocean? No, I think this is evidence that the whole Groundhog Day business is corrupt, and Phil is retiring with his ill-gotten gains from Big Winter.

Spider-Man, 11/19/16

I see two ways this storyline can go. MJ might use her break from acting and her vast wealth earned from Broadway stardom to take her and Peter on a lovely two-week vacation somewhere nice, where he spends his time sulking about the fact that his wife makes more than him until he’s forced by circumstances to fight crime, at which point he starts sulking about that. Or she could just wax rhapsodic about the repairs! She already looks pretty dreamy about it in the final panel, to be honest. “The roof! Oh, Peter, they’re going to fix the roof!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/19/16

Welp, this Rex Morgan plot wrapped very quickly and without much conflict or action, and thank goodness! Who needs that kind of overstimulation from the funny pages? Certainly not me! Anyway, I appreciate our victorious cop putting a dramatic pause before saying downtown in panel three. Really lets us know that this whole things is wrapping up, right? If you want to imagine that the action freeze-frames and then Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” starts blaring out, I think that would add to the experience.

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Marvin, 11/15/16

Yeah, uh, so, I didn’t mention it yesterday, but yesterday’s Marvin included Jeff’s mom telling him that his father was … back from the dead? I think my initial questions would be more general than Jeff’s, along the lines of “What?” and “How?” and “How are you dealing with this emotionally?” and “What kind of back-from-the-dead scenario are we talking about here, like a ghost, or a zombie, or a vampire, or a Frankenstein’s monster, or what?” But I don’t want to tell other people how to feel their feelings, so if Jeff wants to be all “His corpse, what was in my father’s coffin if not his CORPSE,” I support his emotional journey.

Mark Trail, 11/15/16

Oh, man, it looks like we misjudged that mean scary boar from a couple of weeks ago! He wasn’t mean or scary at all; he was just trying to get the hell off this exploding island, just like Mark and Abbey are. Too bad his species never developed boats, helicopters, emergency radios, or Coast Guards! Sucks to be him!

Mary Worth, 11/15/16

Welp, unlike Iris, Dawn definitely does not give a shit that Wilbur is leaving town for a year. “Sounds great! I’m loving life! This just gives me more opportunities to lounge around the house in my pinstriped pajamas and eat cookies! Hey, more cookies for me while you’re gone, you know? [cookie-eating noises]”

Shoe, 11/15/16

Do you think the bird-men of Shoe view festooning oneself with simulated mammalian hair — and leaving oneself open to the parasites specific to it — with particular disgust? That might explain why the Perfesser has blown right past the usual Goggle Eyes Of Horror straight into the Manic Grin Of Desperately Trying To Make A Joke Of This.

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Shoe, 11/14/16

A fun thing about living in the modern age is that it’s extremely easy to see an odd turn of phrase and find out where it came from. In this case, you can quickly work your way backwards and see the first definition of “farce” that Google gives you:

So, you learn a couple of things here. One, this joke was clearly constructed by the thought process of “Hmm, we need a phrase that means ‘farce’ to go in the first panel to set up the punchline. I guess I’ll just look up the definition!” And two, the writer clearly found the offered definition not quite adequate. “Hmm, buffoonery, horseplay, uh huh, uh huh, that’s all good … wait a minute, what about the puns? It’s not a farce without the puns, by god!”

Dick Tracy, 11/14/16

The late, lamented Congresswoman Bellowthon might’ve thought that her plan to put space aliens in internment camps would be a sure-fire vote-getter among the American people at large. But it’s meeting opposition from a wide variety of people, ranging from authoritarian police officers with Lunarian relatives to weirdly dapper gangsters. It’s the pageant of democracy in action, except for the part where the Congresswoman was murdered!