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Spider-Man, 9/12/16

Ugh, you guys, I know this isn’t a fun thing to hear me whine about first thing in the week, but Spidey’s use of “tariff” bothers me so much here. A tariff is a tax on imports or exports, and I’m pretty sure J. Jonah Jameson doesn’t pay every month to import his sweet penthouse in from whatever low-labor-cost country penthouses are made in now, devastating Ohio’s traditional penthouse-manufacturing industry. I guess he pays either rent or a mortgage and Spidey didn’t know Jonah’s real-estate situation so decided to come up with … another word that means paying for things?

I’m not bothered at all by JJJ’s choice to sleep with a shotgun leaning up against the side of his bed, as this seems like a particularly hilarious and ineffective method of self-defense. I certainly hope that he wakes up in surprise and just starts firing every which way at an extremely tiny target that he can’t possibly hit, sending shotgun shell after shotgun shell into what appear to be the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse.

Slylock Fox, 9/12/16

I’m not saying it’s OK to just go around stomping on other creature’s carefully tended flower beds — far from it! But I do think this is a good opportunity for all the herbivorous inhabitants of post-animalpocalypse Earth to acknowledge that they have it pretty good compared to their ancestors. Imagine a world where the biggest complaint a rabbit would have about a wolf is that the wolf crushed her flowers (instead of, say, eating her) and then her reaction is to call in a fox who proceeds to use ratiocination to solve the crime (instead of, say, eating her).

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Family Circus, 8/7/16

“Excellent,” thinks Mommy. “While they still instinctively resist the regimentation the school year places onto their lives, their spirits have been so thoroughly broken that they can no longer conceive of life without it, so they reproduce it, cargo-cult fashion, when not required to actually report to the classroom. Look, little PJ is already eager for structure and discipline, before he’s even gone to school! They’re definitely ready for their status as emotionally numbed drones.”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/7/16

How dare Count Weirdly pull some obscure ice cube trickery to cover his tracks? That monster! Meanwhile, Sly and Max have gained access to Weirdly’s property with a search warrant that appears to just be a piece of paper with “SEARCH WARRANT” written on it.

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Slylock Fox, 8/1/16

There’s a huge missed opportunity here in that the strip doesn’t provide us with the name of this completely adorable pig band! Some suggestions:

• Pig Floyd
• The Piggles
• Pig Direction
• Radioham
• One Pigrection
• Taylor Ham Swift
• Carlos Pigtana ft. Pig Thomas

Anyway, Sly and Max’s facial expressions here are 100% great. They thought they were down with that hip new music that the kids like, but it turns out that they very much are not.

Dick Tracy, 8/1/16

Speaking of the stuff the kids like, our crime-fighting squares in Dick Tracy are taking a casual video call with Dethany, an adorable goth, and seem to be having an OK time with it! Rikki Mortis is named “Rikki Mortis” and is in a relationship with “Abner Kadaver,” a guy who sleeps in a coffin and looks like a skeleton and has done a bunch of murders, so I don’t know where Dethany gets off on her gother-than-thou attitude here.

Spider-Man, 8/1/16

“Like bugs on a bagel” sounds like a phrase that someone would come up with if they had to make up a New York City catchphrase on very short notice and had never actually visited New York City. “Uh, what do they have in New York, uh, uh … bagels! They love bagels over there. And everything’s infested with vermin, right?”