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Curtis, 8/27/17

One of the things I truly appreciate about Curtis is its eternal return to its timeless tropes, like how Curtis doesn’t want to go back to school, or, in this case, how Curtis is ritually humiliated every year as he tries on back-to-school pants. These recurring gags, pegged as they are to the academic calendar, emphasize the fact that Curtis is trapped in amber in eternal comic book time: if he was going into sixth grade in the first of those strips I linked to above, he ought to be starting his third year of grad school now! But no, he and his mother are still shopping for those same back-to-school jeans. And yet: the world has changed. Parents as likely to buy jeans for their kids on Amazon or at Wal-Mart as they are to go to a traditional department store. More and more, malls are empty wastelands. And yet some things stay constant: though the cast of characters staring at his underwear change, the sense of sexual panic that Curtis can barely understand is still overpowering, and will last, dreamlike, forever.

Spider-Man, 8/27/17

I am genuinely tickled by the idea that Spider-Man really thought he had a handle on things here, keeping all eight tentacles at bay, eight tentacles he could deal with, before being blindsided by the dectopus’s secret ninth and tenth appendages. I’m also genuinely tickled that Tyrannus is content to watch this whole battle play out on TV. Truly, Spider-Man has met the foe he deserves.

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Spider-Man, 8/20/17

One of the great running gags of superhero comics is that it should be much, much easier for in-universe characters to figure out a superhero’s secret identity than it ever turns out to be. There are a host of reasons why the “secret” is always obvious — they’re never in the same place at the same time, their voices are identical, people look more or less the same whether they’re wearing glasses or not, etc. — but in our current case, it’s because Spider-Man and Peter Parker are pretty much the exact same kind of dick. Like, if my wizened aunt was about to finally wed her longtime beau and a giant tentacle erupted form the earth to attack the wedding party, I might be more inclined to shout “run!” or “oh no!” rather than “whoa, déjà vu much???” But that’s just how Peter Parker and Spider-Man play it.

Meanwhile, speaking of dicks, I had assumed last week that Tyrannus was shushing his army of fetish-gimps as they prepared to board some form of burrowing transport and head for the earth’s surface for wedding-ruining and subsequent conquest. But nope, it turns out this is all being down remotely, and he just wanted an audience as he gloated and pulled the big lever marked “TENTACLE.”

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/20/17

This throwaway-panel scene from Hootin’ Holler reminds all of us flatlanders that we should appreciate our infrastructure privilege.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/13/17

Oh my God, somehow I just now remembered that June and Rex’s pal/former household employee Heather is agonizing over the fact that her agèd, Alzheimer’s-afflicted millionaire husband is in no shape to father the baby she’s always wanted! When last we heard from her, more than a year and a half ago, June was broadly hinting that Heather knows how sex works so Heather should probably just do sex with someone and get pregnant that way. I largely forgot about this because it was a plotline from the substantially wackier Woody Wilson era of the strip, and most of those got dropped when Terry Beatty took over writing duties on the strip. But now! An adorable little baby has just fallen right into June’s lap, and surely she won’t neglect to reward Heather for her years of faithful service. The only question is: will June actually tell her desperate childhood friend that she’ll be fobbing her orphaned son off onto a gold-digging white-collar criminal who lives with her agitated and demented husband in a drafty castle in England somewhere? Or will she just wait for her friend to drop dead and then put little Johnny in the mail?

Family Circus, 8/13/17

You know, the Keane house is really a character in today’s strip! Specifically, it’s like some huge, sedentary beast, its maw open and ready to feed, and Big Daddy Keane is responsible for its excretory processes.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/13/17

“Tearin’ off chunks of my flesh to devour, and I’m still capable of feelin’ everythin’! It’s a nightmare from which there’d be no escape!”

Spider-Man, 8/13/17

So, just to emphasize here: an immortal supervillain is leading an army of awful subterranean monsters to the Earth’s surface … to ruin a wedding, and the monsters have to be quiet, because otherwise they’ll wake up his wife, who loves weddings. I take back every mean thing I ever said about Newspaper Spider-Man. This is literally the greatest comic ever made.