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Dustin, 1/8/19

It may not have been obvious from the Dustins I’ve showcased here but the gimmick of Dustin is that Dustin is a 23-year-old college graduate who has moved back in with his parents and is having Failure To Launch problems. As a Gen-Xer, I am a neutral party in the raging war between Baby Boomers and Millennials, and I hereby declare that Dustin is really shitty in its treatment of young people! Like surely there is humor to be mined from this conflict of worldviews but instead we get things like today, “Ha ha, youths can’t hold down a job because they just spontaneously fall asleep all the time! Meanwhile, the ADULTS who MADE THIS COUNTRY WHAT IT IS TODAY are going to enjoy some LEGITIMATE HIGHBROW CULTURE.”

Gil Thorp, 1/8/19

I appreciate it when bit players in the comics really give it their all in the one or two panels they appear. It’s subtle, but I’m particularly enjoying the “ain’t I a stinker?” realness being served up by the employee of [squints] S-Kybomi Outdoor Media Solutions here. This may be the Best Performance By A Working-Class Guest Character In A Continuity Comic since 2014’s iconic “Man In Hat Who Doesn’t Care About Doc Ock’s Runaway Tentacles Enjoys Sandwich.”

Six Chix, 1/8/19

As we all know, you can take an expensive vacation to Paris, go to the Louvre, get lost in the Louvre, get annoyed by the Louvre, realize that you could do a comic about your experience at the Louvre, get paid to do that comic, and then write the entire cost of your trip off on your taxes. But can you write the cost of a trip to Paris off on your taxes if you just make fun a comic doing that? We’ll see what my accountant says! Fingers crossed!

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Dick Tracy, 12/15/18

Oh, hey, we’re back to the plot about Vitamin Flintheart and his heavily pregnant bride-to-be. In today’s installment, a stagehand at the play Vitamin is in (where he’s playing himself, natch, this is a strip that never misses a chance to collapse into meta-narrative in an attempt to impress you with how famous its characters are), makes a crass advance on Kandikane, leading Vitamin to loom over him with implied violence. In case you were tired of the extremely not sexy storyline about faxing and invoices, he’s a storyline that’s extremely not sexy but in, like, an entirely different way.

Gil Thorp, 12/15/18

Oh wow, I know panel one is supposed be a “cinematic,” foreshortened look down on our mysterious billboard renter, but it … doesn’t really work well, at all. He looks like a gibbon. A gibbon in glasses. It’s bad, man. Somebody should’ve stopped this.

Also, since the question is “Is Mediocre Good Enough,” to really knock ’em over with the answer, the answer has to be “yes!” Which will allow Gil and this year’s wacky crew of basketball players (seen in panel two engaging in extremely inscrutable antics) to muddle through yet another .550 season unmolested.

Six Chix, 12/15/18

The point of a strip like this is to contrast the wholesome book-acquisition in panel two with what we initially assumed to be her much darker quest, but I’m not really buying it. C’mon lady, you gotta sell it. What are you willing to do to get what you need? Are you willing to kill?

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Sam and Silo, 12/7/18

I still don’t really have a handle on what Sam and Silo’s whole “deal” is. Is it a comic about a robe-wearing cowboy (?) who hangs out with nuns, or is it a comic about a generic white-collar guy who eats soup in diners? Why does the generic white-collar guy not eat soup by lifting his spoon to his mouth, like a normal person, but instead lowers his entire body down to meet it? Is “lowering his body” even what he’s doing here? Is his head retracting into his torso, like a turtle? Hopefully I’ll be able to bring you answers to these questions as this situation develops.

Crock, 12/7/18

You probably think that legacy strips like Crock are comfortable just running in their grooves, never really breaking new ground or exploring their cast of characters. But the joke’s on you, because today, more than six years after the strip promised to stop publishing, we learn that beloved character [checks Wikipedia] “Maggot” isn’t just the camp’s resident latrine digger: he’s also a cannibal, and one who’s tired of eating ordinary men and women and now hungers for celebrity flesh.

Mark Trail, 12/7/18

So it turns out Raul did not fall to his death, but instead crashed through this nice couple’s skylight and, apparently, into their dinner? Normally I can’t get enough of extreme closeups on the faces of these bug-eyed caricatures, but I’m assuming Raul is sprawled out on the dining room table, covered in delicious, piping hot cochinita pibil, sopa de lima, and other delicacies of the Yucatan, and I want to see the carnage, darn it.

Six Chix, 12/7/18

Fun fact: women absolutely do not wear strapless tube top rompers to yoga, as doing any kind of inversions would lead to embarrassing wardrobe malfunction situations. Also, snowpeople would be much more diligent about ascertaining the temperature of rooms before they enter, as prolonged exposure to heat causes them to die in agony.

Blondie, 12/7/18

“Boy, people seem to like Twitter! I guess they got games on there like they do on Facebook, huh?” –someone who has spent a lot of time playing games on Facebook and has literally never used Twitter once