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Mary Worth, 11/18/18

I feel like an underappreciated aspect of the two-week-long victory lap Mary’s been doing at the end of this storyline is how she keeps talking about how getting Mr. Wynter a new dog has really transformed him, because of course when we first met him he had a dog, Bella, and was real grouch. So it’s not just that he needed canine companionship to open up emotionally, it’s that he needed the right dog. Mary Worth definitely killed Bella, is what I’m saying.

Six Chix, 11/18/18

Say, have you ever gone to an art museum and wanted someplace to stash your coat, or been glad to have a convenient lunch spot so you could spend the whole day there, or needed to use the bathroom? Well congratulations, turns out you’re a real philistine, I hope you understand what an art-hating monster you are

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Six Chix, 11/9/18

Normally, as you know, I do not come to praise the art in Six Chix. But I actually sort of like the depiction of the facial expression on the right here? Like it’s not what you’d call … technically skilled but I do think the crinkly smile captures the emotion that they’re trying to sell us. “Ha ha, yeah, I do sometimes do that! Ya gotta love life’s little foibles!”

Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/18

Actually, I think the pedant Hagar is hitting on/scamming out of liquor is a better example of the same thing. I love how he’s chinless in a way that if drawn realistically would be grotesque but here is kinda cute, and the way you draw a crooked frown on him is just by giving him a crooked upper lip dangling over the space where his lower jaw should be.

Spider-Man, 11/9/18

There’s a lot going on here, sartorially. Like, I know it’s kind of a trope for this strip by this point, but how comfortable can Peter’s spider-suit (the proportional suit … of a spider) really be? Would he really leave it on while lounging casually around the house, making phone calls? And then there’s MJ, who, if I’m following the sequence here correctly, was sound asleep in her hotel room in her sexy underwear, butt protruding gently towards the TV, when Peter called. But let’s not let this distract us from the important thing, which is that Peter called MJ to fess up that he accidentally destroyed the theater/their livelihood, and then she tells him she heard about it “collapsing” without mentioning his involvement, so he immediately changes the subject.

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Dick Tracy, 11/5/18

There’s a lot that seems amiss to the history here, in the Neo-Chicago Parallel Universe. “Miller” is a very common Jewish surname, and talk of escaping the “poverty of the ghetto” seems to point further in that direction. But then we have talk of the “local Russian community,” which definitely isn’t the same thing as the local Jewish community, though I guess it could’ve been a term used for a neighborhood of Russian Jews in particular. I remember my grandmother, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, telling me in fairly snooty terms about how uncouth some of her soon-to-be in-laws, who were Russian Jews, were, so there were definitely divisions within those communities, though while we’re at it Russian Jews would’ve for the most part come from a small shtetl in the countryside; it was Jews from elsewhere in Eastern Europe who lived in ghettos in big cities. Anyway, I guess I’m dancing around the real problem here, which is that panel two seems to imply that the Millers made the grueling overland trip from Russia to America over the frozen Bering Strait.

Six Chix, 11/5/18

Fun fact: Under British law, there’s two uses of the title “princess”: One is if you’re a daughter or a granddaughter of the sovereign, or a granddaughter of the heir to the throne, in which case the correct form of address is “Princess Charlotte of Cambridge”; the other is if you’re married to a prince, in which case the correct form of address is “Diana, Princess of Wales” or the like. Kate Middleton is considered a princess but takes her husband’s title so her formal address is “Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge,” and the only reason I know all this is that the people who edit Wikipedia pages about royalty fuckin’ love correcting people on this point with a special passion, especially when it comes to Princess Diana Diana, Princess of Wales, who they transparently despise. It’s also worth noting that Queen Elizabeth’s husband was born a prince of Greece but renounced his foreign royal titles upon getting engaged, and then wasn’t granted by special dispensation the right to be called “Prince Philip” until Elizabeth had been Queen for five years. I’m not sure what my point is here except that this comic strip is wrong even beyond the fact that any comic strip taken up entirely by pinkish diagrams of internal organs can be rightfully called “wrong.”

Mary Worth, 11/5/18

I’m actually kind of glad that this Mary Worth is going to face the fact that emotionally traumatized animals can be really rewarding to rescue but aren’t just plug-and-play instant perfect pets and need special care to really bring into their own. Anyway, that sure looks like a nice rug Saul has in his living room! It would be a shame if somebody anxiety-peed all over it, repeatedly.