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Dick Tracy, 10/16/23

Dick Tracy loves gadgets, of course, but I assume he’s bored and vaguely disgusted with fancy “forensics,” because they allows detectives to learn information about criminals with zero investigatory violence to speak of. But his face in panel three looks truly deranged, like a lot of horrible things are falling into place for him. “Fluids, eh? You’re telling me this fancy detecting machine needs bodily fluids from suspects in order to work? I bet I know how I can get some.”

Slylock Fox, 10/16/23

Today, as Cassandra attempts to liberate a plundered piece of cultural heritage and return it to the few remaining Egyptian humans left after the animalpocalypse, I find myself contemplating Slylock’s customized “Fox-Flyer” helicopter. Is it truly “his,” as the caption refers to it, meaning that he’s a private contractor who owns his own equipment, insisting on high fees from the Forest Kingdom’s treasury in order to provide the law enforcement capacity that the state lacks? Or is he a public servant with enough clout that he demands the government pay for a series of whimsically fox-themed devices that enhance his personal brand? Either way, it seems he has more in common with his supposed enemy Count Weirdly than he would care to admit.

Hi and Lois, 10/16/23

This is great. The whole Flagston family is angry and sad! That’s the joke!

The Lockhorns, 10/16/23

You guys, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you: THE LOCKHORNS ARE MILLENNIALS

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Mary Worth, 9/3/23

For those who haven’t been keeping up with Mary Worth in the aftermath of the Saul-Eve engagement, what happened was that Mary ran into them down at the jewelry store, and she was like “Is that a wedding ring?” and they were like “Yeah, we’re getting married!” and she was like “Can I come?” and they were like “Uh, yeah, sure.” It’s very funny when someone invites yourself to your wedding and you feel like you’re not allowed to say no for whatever reason, but it’s extremely funny when someone does it when you were planning a wedding with no actual guests. You think it’s just going to be you, your beloved, and Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for some reason, but nope, here comes Mary! She’s gotta be involved somehow!

The Phantom, 9/3/23

Today’s Phantom is great and I frankly think more legacy strips should, when they run into narrative trouble, just do a strip where they have the strip’s creator, who’s been dead for 25 years, try to come up with the next plot twist. Bonus if you depict them working in what appears to be the office of a private investigator in a 1940’s film noir.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 9/3/23

Man, you know things are getting dark when even cultural elites like Sir Hound are saying things like “Those humans are getting to be a real problem … one that requires a solution. A final solution, if you will.”

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Mary Worth, 8/28/23

Big news: in the presence of their beloved dogs, Saul and Eve have agreed to marry one another! Since their last attempts at matrimony involved a hated arranged marriage that ended with Saul’s dead wife buried in an undersized grave and Eve’s dog taking a bullet to protect her from her abusive husband, respectively, this trip to the altar can only go better for both of them. Saul’s the luckiest man in Santa Royale, or at least luckier than Tommy, Wilbur, or Dr. Jeff.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/23

The form of adoption that became common in the 19th and 20th century west, in which infants would be taken in by strangers and any connection to their birth family severed, is, historically speaking, an aberration; the vagaries of mortality meant that adoption has always occurred, of course, but much more commonly it involved orphaned or abandoned children being taken in by kinfolk or neighbors in the community (and in most pre-industrial settlements, those amounted to the same thing). One assumes that’s the process by which Snuffy and Loweezy’s have come to be the guardians of their nephew Jughaid, but his exact relationship to them is unclear — I’m not even sure if it’s ever established whether one of his parents was Snuffy’s sibling or Loweezy. At any rate, one wonders if Jughaid remembers his birth family, or if his adoptive parents ever think of their departed relations and hope they’re doing right by them in the way they’re raising the boy. Panel two here suggests that Loweezy, at least, is worried that they very much are not.

Slylock Fox, 8/28/23

Hmm, Slylock sets free the suspect identified by a forensics expert and instead just arrests the guy he had already decided was guilty? This one’s a little on the nose, in my opinion.