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Crankshaft, 7/27/17

Much of the “humor” of Crankshaft, arises from the title character saying English words or phrases that do not actually mean what he intends them to mean, of course, but I admit to being genuinely baffled by why he’s grumpily lobbing the phrase “old-timers” at this intergenerational sex awkwardness. My best guess is that he’s mocking his daughter and son-in-law for fondly remembering a youth in which some light boob-touching in a movie theater was considered an highly anticipated erotic act, since he now uses the family computer and his copious free time to mainline the most depraved pornography humankind has ever produced.

Beetle Bailey, 7/27/17

Shoutout to this nurse for being an ally to his female comrade who was hounded out of her duties by Killer’s nonstop sexual harassment. That’s the face of a man who’s definitely going to be upping the frequency of some invasive but necessary medical examinations.

Spider-Man, 7/27/17

God help me, the second panel of today’s Newspaper Spider-Man filled me with pure unalloyed joy. The best part is that Spidey stage-whispering while peeking around a corner to get Mole-Man’s attention out here in the empty hall for no particular reason, but I also enjoy the fact that my dude has convinced everyone start calling him “Melvin” but Peter knows that, while in his absurd Spidey persona, he needs to call him “Mole-Man,” in order to keep this whole outlandish superheroics farce going.

Six Chix, 7/27/17

[Begins writing an angry 3,000-world screed about Federal Railroad Administration regs and union contract stipulations about staffing on commuter trains, to be sent to the editor of every single newspaper that runs Six Chix]

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Spider-Man, 7/22/17

Ah, Newspaper Spider-Man, always striving to be “hip” and “with it” but always falling just a bit behind! I’m sure over at Newspaper Spider-Man HQ it feels very of the moment to have MJ’s studio publicist svengali barking about a major blogger waiting, but since I’m a major blogger myself, let me assure you that blogging is pretty much over, and has been since about 2011. The new hotness is “influencers,” which is a code word for social media stars with 500,000 Instagram followers or 4,000,000 pageviews on each and every one of their YouTube makeup tutorials or whatever. Newspaper reporting has been over and done with for a lot longer than blogging, obviously, so a more accurate scene would just be this publicist talking about how he’s got three influencers waiting, and since they’re all millennials (or, what’s the thing after millennials? Gen-Z? UGH) their attention spans are notoriously short.

Dennis the Menace, 7/22/17

I love the knowing smiles that Henry and Alice are flashing here. I’m not sure what secret they’re sharing — that Henry is a terrible liar? that in the white-collar professional world, business and pleasure mingle on the golf course, helping consolidate the wealth of the upper class? that this “business trip” is an opportunity for them both to rendezvous with their secondary partners before reuniting and reaffirming their loving bond within the a context of consensual polyamory? — but whatever it is, it holds menace in the sense that it means that the world isn’t as simple as Dennis believes.

Slylock Fox, 7/22/17

Hey, kids! Remember Grimace, the beloved character from the McDonaldland commercials? Well, he’s dead now. He got bit by a snake and he died.

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Spider-Man, 7/20/17

It’s true that whatever media conglomerate owns the film rights to the Marvella franchise botched the initial rollout. What with the notoriously troubled production of the first movie in the series, the studio naturally decided to dump it straight to DVD — but surprisingly strong sales got people excited enough to do a theatrical release for Marvella 2. But for a big rollout like that to succeed, you need a huge marketing machine. So yes, MJ is going to have to do publicity not just in San Francisco but also Denver. The studio has just that much riding on the success of this film. Don’t be surprised if they try to jam in an appearance in Phoenix on this junket too. No expense will be spared!

Speaking of sparing no expense, one of the fun things about living LA is that it’s incredibly expensive but it’s also full of transplants from New York, an even more expensive place, who assure you that $2,000 a month for an unassuming two-bedroom bungalow in a marginally sketchy neighborhood is “a real bargain, you’d pay twice that much for a studio in Manhattan and you wouldn’t even have a yard.” So yeah, I can see that planning a SoCal wedding might seem like a bargain if your frame of reference is the tri-state area, but neither Aunt May nor Mole-Man have any family in the region (his being enslaved by the foul Tyrannus miles beneath the Earth’s crust and hers being, uh, Peter and MJ), so they might want to look further afield. I hear Denver is nice!

Family Circus, 7/20/17

The Family Circus, being largely pieced together from decades-old art, preserves an earlier America where we were much less paranoid about safety, especially when it came to children. For instance, in a post-Harambe world, would anyone let a kid climb on a short fence separated from a potentially dangerous elephant by just a few feet of level grass and another, equally short fence? They might, if that kid were Billy, and they got to know him for a few minutes.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/20/17

Haha, whoops, sorry to rain on Rex’s nerd dreams, but li’l John Carter was named after something actually cool. I assume Rex will be angrily muttering that Margie is a “fake geek girl” under his breath for the remainder of her visit.