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Spider-Man, 11/16/16

You know that normally I’d be very in favor of a punchline panel in Newspaper Spider-Man where our heroes mope wordlessly. But as a transit rider and advocate, I must protest against a train ride being used as visual equivalent of a sad trombone. Especially in the New York City region! Why, Peter and Scott will be back home in Queens while Jonah and Hank are still stuck on the Long Island Expressway, Jonah shouting furiously at his driver and other cars while Hank scrunches down in his seat and pretends not to notice.

It’s also obviously way too soon for the first Daily Bugle under J. Jonah Jameson’s new regime to have come out, so I assume the banner headline in the paper Scott is reading is over a story about how New York is now for the first time in years entirely free of Ant-Men. Gonna be an awkward correction at the bottom of page C-12 tomorrow!

Crock, 11/16/16

It does take some warming up to, but Wadsworth is laying out his people’s philosophy in a nutshell. Vultures don’t believe in fairies or make believe. They believe in each other, and their own ability to make this world a better place for themselves and their families. They believe they’re capable of anything, even getting money when their baby teeth fall out despite the fact that they don’t have any teeth.

Pluggers, 11/16/16

One of the longstanding mysteries of Pluggers can be summed up pretty simply: what is a plugger, exactly? Today’s strip I think encapsulates it nicely: a plugger is someone young enough that they still know people who move and old enough that they know a lot of people who are dying, and also someone who hasn’t figured out that you can put addresses into your computer now.

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Curtis, 11/13/16

I’m going to start out by saying something nice about a comic, for once! Say what you will about Curtis, but, unlike a lot of the strips I talk about on this blog, it never phones it in. The gag here is one we’ve seen a lot in the strip, but I really enjoy watching the little details of Curtis assembling his three-sandwich stack over the course of this conversation, up to and including him licking mayo off his knife, like you do (or at least like I do). The realism is a nice setup for him to dash off in the final panel, leaving a cartoonish cloud of sandwich debris in his wake.

Dennis the Menace, 11/13/16

It’s weird that everyone’s acting like this is Joey’s brand new baby sister despite the fact that she’s clearly at least 18 months old, right? Of course, her eyes are a terrifying, milky, pupil-less blue, so she’s also clearly a space alien or a demon from hell. Presumably she hatched from a leathery egg twenty minutes ago and has used her awful mental powers to convince the children that she’s always been here and that her nightmarish agenda for our planet is “wonderful” and “so cool.”

Spider-Man, 11/13/16

So when earlier this week we learned that Spidey had webbed a camera to the ceiling of Egghead’s den, I assumed that the writers were working with a vague memory that he had set a camera up at some point earlier in the storyline but had forgotten that in fact that camera was in a tree out in the front yard. But, nope! Turns out that in fact Spidey just ran outside and got said camera moments after JJJ bonked Egghead unconscious. This is hilarious in and of itself, but it’s even more hilarious that experienced newspaperman Jameson is just now putting together how suspicious that all is. I’m looking forward to how this plays out, what with the NEXT narration box giving Spider-Man the exact opposite of standard good advice.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/13/16

This is definitely one of Slylock’s most giggle-worthy mysteries to date, from the crime itself — do we want to live in a world where it’s illegal to mess with dandyish beavers by forcing them to watch televised chess? — to the puzzle’s solution. Look, Count Weirdly is weird! It’s right there in the name! Maybe he likes to eat his soup with a fork. Maybe that’s why it’s taken him 15 minutes to eat a single bowl of broth!

Shoe, 11/13/16

Wow, I’m not sure what strip I expected to see discussing the corrosive effects of corporate capitalism on the human soul today, but it sure wasn’t Shoe!

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/10/16

Well, it looks like someone at Hagar the Horrible likes to stoke my fascination with where the Hagarverse falls on the timeline of the Christianization of Scandinavia. Fun fact: the ritual slaughter of horses and eating of horsemeat was deeply ingrained into Germanic pagan ritual, so much so that the Vatican banned the practice in the 8th century as a means to promote Christianity; this is the origin of the modern-day Western taboo on eating horse. Anyway, Helga and the waiter look appalled by Hagar’s discovery, but Hagar himself is more quizzical than anything else. Maybe he’s cautiously feeling out the possibility that this restaurant is a secret hideout for crypto-pagans — and he’s interested in joining them in returning to the Old Ways, where you celebrated blót to gain fertility and good health, and then got to eat some tasty horse.

Shoe, 11/10/16

I love the weird, fossilized cultural nuggets and attitudes you can find embedded in the structural material used to build comic strip punchlines. How ancient is the use of “Wayne Newton” as a signifier for “very bad music,” do you think? Honestly, I would’ve gone with “Justin Bieber,” which is still a solid five years out of date but might tickle the irritation that the old people who read comic strips harbor for anything that’s happened in pop culture since they turned 45.

Meanwhile, I want a lot more information about these two condemned criminals, the Falcon and Guzzwanker. “Guzzwanker and the Falcon” has a better ring to it in my opinion, but maybe they aren’t a criminal duo but just happen to be scheduled for execution on the same day. Guzzwanker is a mild-mannered accountant who, if he hadn’t slipped up and left fingerprints on the murder weapon, nobody would’ve suspected of killing his parents to speed his inheritance. The Falcon, meanwhile, is a notorious international terrorist, and also an actual falcon.

Spider-Man, 11/10/16

“Maybe we’ll never get you convicted for murder, Starr … [one panel of dialogue that distracts you from how this sentence started] … and all four of us heard you confess to murder, so we will definitely get you convicted for it!” God, I hope that camera is still recording. The whole world needs concrete evidence of what dipshits these guys are! And, uh, evidence that Egghead is a murderer, I guess.

Mark Trail, 11/10/16

Ahhh yes, the helicopter explosion will be continuing indefinitely, just as I requested. That’s the stuff we need in these troubled times. That’s the stuff.