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Archive: Spider-Man

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Snopes-worthy Sunday

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Rhymes With Orange, 5/14/17

I was originally puzzled by what appears to be the 17th century New England setting for this panel, but apparently the reputed African origins of the “it takes a village” proverb are a bunch of hooey, so colonial Massachusetts is as likely a place as anywhere else for this joke to play out. Anyway, kid, let me remind you that mouthing off to your elders is an extremely good way to get condemned to death for witchcraft.

Mary Worth, 5/14/17

Today’s Mary Worth just recaps the last few daily strips, so in a sense it doesn’t provide anything new, but in a larger, more important sense, it provides something incredible: this strip, which has featured dubiously sourced quotes from Albert Camus and St. Augustine in the past, now offers us an epigram from Mr. T. God bless this perfect day!

Spider-Man, 5/14/17

OK, Mole-Man, you’ve been dragging out a whole series of “final glimpses” of your beloved, for real. Still, I offer you today’s final panel to enjoy, in which our lovestruck villain clings to the back of a limosine with the relative limosine-clinging power of a mole.

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Crimes against nature aren’t in Dick’s jurisdiction

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Pluggers, 5/11/17

I kind of admit I’m not … entirely sure what’s going on here? Like, it doesn’t matter whether you like iced tea or lemonade (THE ONLY TWO ACCEPTABLE DRINKS, and don’t try mixing them together to form the abomination that is an “Arnold Palmer”), and it doesn’t matter if you’re fundamentally an optimist or a pessimist if you’ve got … friends? I approve of friendship, of course, but I don’t understand why it needs all these false binaries as a setup. I also am a little unsettled by the anxiety behind the “just happy to have a glass.” Maybe this is why the plugger dog-man is sitting on an overturned bucket instead of a chair, because he had to sell all his chairs, and he only has his bucket and two glasses left. Remember, Pluggerville’s pawn shop is the most depressing place on earth!

Dick Tracy, 5/11/17

So it turns out the Margies’ CosplayCon scam involved a fake robbery to grab the cash prize for best costume, yawn. Anyway, with that out of the way, they’ve really kicked it up a notch for their next crime: digging up the corpses of prominent comics artists and reanimating them, using forbidden science! It’s a little on the nose for new-look Dick Tracy, but I’m on board.

Spider-Man, 5/11/12

Say, were you wondering how this week’s super-powered combat played out??? ANSWER: a guy hit another guy in the shin with “some kinda stick” and then ran away. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!!!

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The worst kind of criminal: the strange and/or weird kind

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Mark Trail, 5/9/17

Each of these law enforcement officers is all man, of course: you can tell by their rugged features and aggressively retreating hairlines. But it seems they’re the last bastion of traditional American can-do masculinity in this sadly enfeebled police force. They should be out there rounding up known scumbags and maybe busting a head or two in the interrogation room in order to track down these kidnappers, but instead they’re sitting around the office waiting for the fancy college-boy “analysts” to pinpoint what’s “weird” about the criminals’ “body language” like they work at Us Magazine, for Pete’s sake! Hurry it up in there, brainiacs, Mark can’t keep up his soothing baritone monologue for much longer!

Spider-Man, 5/9/17

Oh, man, remember the greatest Newspaper Spider-Man storyline of all time, when Aunt May wanted to marry the Mole-Man and Spidey tried various techniques to thwart their love but eventually the nuptials had to be called off because Aunt May developed Spelunker’s Lung and couldn’t serve as queen of her beloved’s cave-kingdom? Welp, it looks like Mole-Man has finally decided he needs to see his ex again, if only to know that she’s happy, and since Aunt May has no Instagram for him to stalk, he’s got to do the logical thing: follow her to Los Angeles, keeping a low profile by dressing like a dwarfish pimp, and stare at her longingly through the window of a restaurant that’s recently rebranded itself to cash in on La La Land fever. Sadly, one of LA’s omnipresent Beefy Restaurant Security Guys is going to escalate this situation into an unnecessary mole-fracas.

Beetle Bailey, 5/9/17

I’m not sure who exactly this joke is for. Is it meant to prompt legacy comics trufans into knowing grins as they think to themselves “Ah, yes, Beetle Bailey and Lois Flagston are siblings, one of the comics’ lesser-known trivia items”? Is there a Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC company-wide policy on occasionally reminding readers of this, so as to lay the groundwork for the Bailey-Flagston Cinematic Universe franchise they’re very much hoping to sell to a major studio? All I know is that this postal worker is justifiably horrified to learn about the abuse and bullying that are sadly rife in our armed forces.