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Judge Parker, 9/4/15

Marie, the Spencer-Drivers’ sassy maid, is quickly becoming my favorite character in this strip, what with her apparent love of telling the main characters exactly why their ludicrous schemes will fail, and her swoopy eyebrows giving her the exactly correct expression of anger-driven glee. Neddy looks mildly concerned over the chaos she’s going to accidentally unleash on her still-under-constructions offices next week, though probably she’s mostly thinking about how the angry proles will turn on each other, literally beating each other to death in a competition for some of the last manufacturing jobs in the area, and then she’ll have to figure out how to get poor person blood out of all the fabric she’s hopefully remembered to buy.

Six Chix, 9/4/15

There’s a lot to unpack in this insane cartoon. Like, I had to actually Google “are giraffe spots unique” to figure out the joke. Then there’s the fact that the psychologist (?) is a giraffe but also labelled “VET”, as if sapient giraffes would use the term for their own indigenous medical practitioners. Mostly, though, I just want to point out that our de-spotted giraffe patient has limbs that all look way too much like dicks for my comfort.

Shoe, 9/4/15

I love that the usual patented Shoe Goggle Eyes of Horror have been replaced here with Goggle Eyes of Transcendent Rage. “Wait, what? You’re mocking your sacred duty under democracy to understand the platforms of candidates for public office? In my restaurant? Oh, hell no.”

Spider-Man, 9/4/15

Man, Peter Parker really cares about admiralty law and maritime sovereignty. “BOO! GET BACK TO US WHEN ATLANTIS RATIFIES THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA!”

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Dick Tracy, 6/23/15

So, the recently cancelled Little Orphan Annie comic strip was distributed by Tribune Media Services, which also distributes Dick Tracy, which allowed last year’s fake time-travel crossover story to happen. And now apparently Annie is just going to straight-up become a supporting Dick Tracy character, which is a positive thing you can bring up when one of your hippie friends starts complaining about out-of-control media consolidation. See, you thought this beloved Depression-era scamp was going to be gone from newspapers forever, and who brought her back? Obama? Nope, it was our friends at the various private equity firms that ended up owning the Tribune Company after its protracted bankruptcy proceedings were finally resolved! Let’s give a big hand to Angelo, Gordon & Co., Oaktree Capital Management, and other lesser stakeholders for giving this kind of creative corporate synergy a home for a while, until they abruptly shut down all unprofitable content-production operations entirely in 2017.

Anyway, let’s make the time we have left with the characters count with maximum insanity, shall we? Seems Annie and her friend, Dick Tracy’s half-moon-person granddaughter Honeymoon, are starting to go through puberty, and will have to deal with bullies in their own way, which I sincerely hope involves equal parts deadly moon powers and hired thugs paid for by Warbucks money.

Mary Worth, 6/23/15

“Ha ha, yep, we both know what really matters in life! It’s love or whatever. Say, Terry, you haven’t thought about running for Congress, have you? Running for Congress and letting me take a bullet for you? Come on I really really need this”

Six Chix, 6/23/15

Wait, is the joke that random people just show up at country weddings who don’t know the bride and groom, or that the country is haunted by bipedal, sapient cows? See, this is why I refuse to go anywhere that doesn’t have a high enough population density to support Thai food delivery.

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Six Chix, 6/14/15

It seems that, while the tradition of paying children as they lose their baby teeth dates back to medieval times, the concept of an actual Tooth Fairy only dates to the early 20th century. I assumed based on this cartoon that the modern sanitized version had its origin in some terrifying German fairy tale involving a forest-sprite who came to the desperately poor at night and offered to give them food or sustenance if they agreed to let her wrench their teeth out of their jaw. Most versions of the Tooth Fairy legend (including the one in this very comic last month) have her as being very small, so presumably this is a normal human woman with a pair of fairy wings she bought at Party City and a sadistic hatred of the homeless.

Judge Parker, 6/14/15

Good new! Supercilious master of structural engineering Hank Tolling turns out to be a local boy! That means that, under the terms by which the Spencerberg region was enfeoffed to its ruling family, Neddy can kill or marry him at her whim, which will make it much easier for her to resolve their disputes.