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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!

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Curtis, 11/13/16

I’m going to start out by saying something nice about a comic, for once! Say what you will about Curtis, but, unlike a lot of the strips I talk about on this blog, it never phones it in. The gag here is one we’ve seen a lot in the strip, but I really enjoy watching the little details of Curtis assembling his three-sandwich stack over the course of this conversation, up to and including him licking mayo off his knife, like you do (or at least like I do). The realism is a nice setup for him to dash off in the final panel, leaving a cartoonish cloud of sandwich debris in his wake.

Dennis the Menace, 11/13/16

It’s weird that everyone’s acting like this is Joey’s brand new baby sister despite the fact that she’s clearly at least 18 months old, right? Of course, her eyes are a terrifying, milky, pupil-less blue, so she’s also clearly a space alien or a demon from hell. Presumably she hatched from a leathery egg twenty minutes ago and has used her awful mental powers to convince the children that she’s always been here and that her nightmarish agenda for our planet is “wonderful” and “so cool.”

Spider-Man, 11/13/16

So when earlier this week we learned that Spidey had webbed a camera to the ceiling of Egghead’s den, I assumed that the writers were working with a vague memory that he had set a camera up at some point earlier in the storyline but had forgotten that in fact that camera was in a tree out in the front yard. But, nope! Turns out that in fact Spidey just ran outside and got said camera moments after JJJ bonked Egghead unconscious. This is hilarious in and of itself, but it’s even more hilarious that experienced newspaperman Jameson is just now putting together how suspicious that all is. I’m looking forward to how this plays out, what with the NEXT narration box giving Spider-Man the exact opposite of standard good advice.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/13/16

This is definitely one of Slylock’s most giggle-worthy mysteries to date, from the crime itself — do we want to live in a world where it’s illegal to mess with dandyish beavers by forcing them to watch televised chess? — to the puzzle’s solution. Look, Count Weirdly is weird! It’s right there in the name! Maybe he likes to eat his soup with a fork. Maybe that’s why it’s taken him 15 minutes to eat a single bowl of broth!

Shoe, 11/13/16

Wow, I’m not sure what strip I expected to see discussing the corrosive effects of corporate capitalism on the human soul today, but it sure wasn’t Shoe!