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Spider-Man, 5/30/17

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a cruel double standard when it comes to Newspaper Spider-Man. On the one hand, I cheerfully mock the strip’s treatment of the superheroic combat one expects to be the staple of the superhero genre, which is extremely infrequent and underwhelming when it actually happens. On the other, I actually don’t care that much about actual superheroic combat, which is why Newspaper Spider-Man is definitely my favorite superhero genre work of all time. I love it because it allows me plenty of room to follow my own personal obsessions, like the Daily Bugle’s place in the modern media landscape, and now the geopolitical situation of Subterranea! I am thrilled to learn more about how the Mole Man lost his position as ruler — did he flee a violent revolution one step ahead of the guillotine? Was there a peaceful grass-roots political movement that eventually rendered the Mole Man’s position untenable? Did he make the mistake of sharing power with an elected Parliament, which eventually voted depose him and declare Subterranea a Republic? And — why has he ended up in Los Angeles? Did the US offer him asylum in return for decades of rule marked by extremely friendly relations with ExxonMobil and a blind eye to literally Subterranean CIA black sites? Or is he just too gross for even Saudi Arabia to take in?

Six Chix, 5/30/17

Six Chix is, for better or worse, a gag-a-day comic. Each strip is a self-contained little world, and I feel like the “joke” here is too big for just one punchline out of nowhere. You really need to explore a theme like this — namely, that for two unlucky seniors a lifelong marital commitment has turned into a terrible prison in which each serves as the other’s jailor — over years using longstanding characters. It has to be earned, damn it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/30/17

Fellas, maybe don’t laugh so vigorously and tongue-lollingly! it’s all fun and games until someone gets fatally hexed.

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Spider-Man, 5/26/17

I’m not usually in the business of determining when things are racist or not, but I have to deem giving a black cop the line “Mole man or soul man” at least somewhat … questionable. But fortunately the strip quickly pivots away from race to class, as we learn that the police, far from being impartial arbiters of the law, are at the beck and call of the elite: these officers, against their better judgement, apparently have no choice but to set this violent, stick-weilding maniac free at the whim of some rich movie star.

Six Chix, 5/26/17

I actually kind of love that this cartoon is set in some boring white-collar office. They’re not spies or government agents or anything like that, just ordinary people driven to paranoid insanity by the realities of modern life.

Shoe, 5/26/17

“Plus, I’m a bird! I don’t have any hair to speak of! Now just trim my plumage like I asked.”

Family Circus, 5/26/17

Haha, it’s funny because Dolly doesn’t fully understand her own anatomy! Yes, that’s definitely what’s going on here. Surely “Dolly” isn’t a swarm of alien insects, testing the tensile limits of the human flesh-suit they’re using to infiltrate our society. That would be repulsive, and horrifying.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/10/17

Snuffy Smith and Pluggers might, broadly speaking, both be lumped together as depicting non-coastal, lower-to-lower-middle-class “real American” experiences that most media neglects. However, there are big differences between the two projects that reveal this categorization to be superficial. The most obvious is that Pluggers is inhabited by chimeric beast-people, while Snuffy Smith presents us with human beings, albeit lumpy, potato-nosed ones. But more importantly, Pluggers is created based on suggestions actually from the ordinary non-elite folk it depicts, whereas Snuffy Smith has always been an exercise in rural poverty caricature, ever since the day the Barney Google creative team decided to get in on the Depression-era vogue for hillbilly jokes and never look back.

Anyway, the strip’s essentially inauthentic origin story, combined with its trapped-in-amber quality, results in characters that didn’t showcase rural poor people with much fidelity in the ’30s and certainly doesn’t depict anything even vaguely resembling their lives today. I realize that, as a coastal elitist living a mere 10-minute drive (without traffic) from Hollywood itself (8 minutes, if you count East Hollywood), I may not be the person most equipped to make that judgement, but I’m pretty sure it’s spot on. I do think I’m the right person to comment on what I guess is supposed to be some smug city slicker who’s wandered into Hootin’ Holler and can’t understand why sushi isn’t sold in every store, as it is in his beloved metropolis. Here’s my take on this chinbearded, cuff-jeaned (?), “G”-hat-wearing (???) Japanese cuisine aficionado: he’s bad. Finally, equal time in this strip for unrecognizable urban stereotypes!

Blondie, 5/10/17

There is probably no sadder person in the world than Guy Who Corrects Current Writers Of A Longrunning Legacy Strip About Their Strip’s Own Continuity, and yet I am compelled to say: it is well known that Dagwood sleeps every weekday morning until the last possible minute, dashing out to the door and barely making his carpool, often trampling his poor mailman in the process. It therefore makes no sense that he has time for a leisurely and apparently daily breakfast at Lou’s! He’s barely making it to work as it is! Although I guess it adds a meta-layer to this strip: like Lou, the Blondie creative team been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to tell this joke, and will jump at any chance to do so.

Six Chix, 5/10/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because normally a horse would be giving you a ride, not the other way around! Also, horses are incredibly bad planners. How did you think you were getting home when you left for work this morning, horse? How did you get here in the first place? Just wearing glasses doesn’t make you smart!

Hi and Lois, 5/10/17

Trixie, of course, hasn’t grown at all since this strip debuted 63 years ago. This is one of the saddest punchlines I’ve ever seen!