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Spider-Man, 7/15/18

I have, of course, persistently refused to go out of my way to learn any of the lore behind the various superheroes who dominate our pop culture and the international economy today, which is just as well because with all the reboots and so forth the characters’ pasts are ever-changing anyway, but my understanding is that Peter Parker got into the stringer newspaper photography game not because of any burning desire to be a journalist but because he knew the Bugle’s management was obsessed with running pictures of Spider-Man and he was uniquely positioned to sell them said pictures and so it was a way for him to make money without doing too much extra work. The desire to not do too much extra work is of course one of Newspaper Spider-Man’s defining characteristics, so it really fits in well in this iteration of the Spidey multiverse; being a stringer photographer for a daily paper also pays very, very little, which fits in nicely with Newspaper Spider-Man’s overall stupidity as well. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not really buying Peter’s moral dilemma here! The idea that Peter has gotten a taste of journalistic fame and now he wants more is only marginally more believable than the idea that he cares about the Iron Fist’s privacy or whatever! I reiterate an idea I put forth over a decade ago: Peter should just use his spider-powers to take pictures of celebrities and sell them to TMZ or the like. The moral stakes are lower all around, and presumably the gig will be so lucrative that he’ll eventually stop fighting crime altogether.

Gasoline Alley, 7/15/18

I don’t know that I would start my Sunday comic with a warning to the reader that, though they may think they’re safe from baffling and enraging faux-rustic wordplay, the next few panels are about to prove them very, very very wrong. But I’m not the guy currently in charge of the century-old Gasoline Alley intellectual property, I guess!

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Spider-Man, 7/14/18

Yesterday’s Newspaper Spider-Man provided the kind of pulse-pounding drama we’ve come to expect from Newspaper Spider-Man, which is to say that it featured Peter Parker, whose powers are beyond those of ordinary human beings, dozing off on the couch. But it wasn’t just a one-off gag! No, it was to set up today’s strip, in which Robbie calls Peter with a hot tip about the Iron Fist. Isn’t it more dramatic that the phone call through which this hot tip was conveyed woke Peter up??? I mean, marginally, I guess. There are other ways it could’ve been done, though. Maybe Robbie could’ve spun around dramatically in his chair right before he said “Iron Fist”? Just spitballin’ here.

Mary Worth, 7/14/18

Ah, yes, the seemingly unstoppable Tommy-Brandy Romance Express is hitting its first hairpin turn: Brandy is emotionally scarred by a bad dad whose problems sound a litte too much like Tommy’s until-really-quite-recently-active problems! And, as he’s a true acolyte of Mary Worth, Tommy is deploying her patented techniques for dealing with a painful past, and is just urging Brandy to just not remember anything bad her dad did, so, problem solved! Now all he has to do is will her with his mind into never asking anything about his own past, so that she’ll be satisfied with the idea of him as someone who spontaneously appeared as an adult in the supermarket where they work together, and everything should be smooth sailing!

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Spider-Man, 7/9/18

How would rumors like that spread, anyway? “Listen, there may or may not be this one guy, dunno who, and he fights a hypothetical sect called The Hand! They’re famous for keeping their activities, identity, and their very existence completely secret: nobody’s ever heard of them, and everybody knows it! Maybe this guy fights them with his hand? No way to tell! Don’t hold me to any of this, OK? Pass it on!”

Mary Worth, 7/9/18

Hey, you two, I have nothing but respect for your respective sobrieties; Tommy, you have apparently turned your life around yet again, way to go. But before you go getting all boldface, accept that maybe not every waitress is on fire for details of your personal journeys? Think of “Just order your damn drink” as a thirteenth step or something.

Judge Parker, 7/9/18

(Sigh)

No, Neddy, they didn’t — they asked where you were. Ronnie Huerta invented that whole drug thing after the fact. Are you on drugs or something?

Haha Sam is shopping online for a matching lamp. Maybe the strip is so deeply invested in desk lamps because the lawyers don’t have any actual work to put on their desks?

Crankshaft, 7/9/18

♫ Love is the drug got a hook in Ralph! ♬

The only real question is how soon this ends badly.

— Uncle Lumpy