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Spider-Man, 9/12/16

Ugh, you guys, I know this isn’t a fun thing to hear me whine about first thing in the week, but Spidey’s use of “tariff” bothers me so much here. A tariff is a tax on imports or exports, and I’m pretty sure J. Jonah Jameson doesn’t pay every month to import his sweet penthouse in from whatever low-labor-cost country penthouses are made in now, devastating Ohio’s traditional penthouse-manufacturing industry. I guess he pays either rent or a mortgage and Spidey didn’t know Jonah’s real-estate situation so decided to come up with … another word that means paying for things?

I’m not bothered at all by JJJ’s choice to sleep with a shotgun leaning up against the side of his bed, as this seems like a particularly hilarious and ineffective method of self-defense. I certainly hope that he wakes up in surprise and just starts firing every which way at an extremely tiny target that he can’t possibly hit, sending shotgun shell after shotgun shell into what appear to be the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse.

Slylock Fox, 9/12/16

I’m not saying it’s OK to just go around stomping on other creature’s carefully tended flower beds — far from it! But I do think this is a good opportunity for all the herbivorous inhabitants of post-animalpocalypse Earth to acknowledge that they have it pretty good compared to their ancestors. Imagine a world where the biggest complaint a rabbit would have about a wolf is that the wolf crushed her flowers (instead of, say, eating her) and then her reaction is to call in a fox who proceeds to use ratiocination to solve the crime (instead of, say, eating her).

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Spider-Man, 9/10/16

Spider-Man barely seems to care about the supervillains he battles with half the time, and he certainly isn’t emotionally invested in his job as a freelance photographer. So what’s his real motivation, then? Maybe it’s to find a true friend, someone who he can open up to, and take some of the pressure of emotional labor off of his wife, who barely tolerates him most of the time. For a tantalizing moment, it seemed like Scott could be that friend: after all, his insistence on stripping away the artifice of the superhero lifestyle seemed to lead to today’s first panel, in which he asks our hero about something real in his life. But, haha, nope, turns out that was just to distract Spidey so that he could get to the top of the building faster. Looks like yet another would-be pal is going to be paralyzed by spider-venom and left a hollowed-out husk after the delicious nutrients in his interior have been sucked out!

Six Chix, 9/10/16

I understand the motivation behind this, lady, but I’m not sure how comfortable you’re going to be in thirty years showing your own children lovingly hand-inked drawings of their father’s dick.

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Gil Thorp, 9/5/16

The calendar most of the world uses today is a direct descendent of the one developed by the ancient Romans, but there have been a lot of modifications along the way. For instance, in the days of the Roman Republic, the calendar year was only 355 days long; the Romans knew this was too short, but weren’t exactly sure how long the year was. Twenty-two extra days were supposed to be added into February when necessary, but there was a catch: the Pontifex Maximus, who held Rome’s highest priesthood, decided if the calendar had become misaligned enough from the seasons to make the extra days necessary, and the Pontifex Maximus was always a member of Rome’s political elite. Since a politician’s term of office was the same as the calendar year, a Pontifex Maximus might be prone to add the extra days if he or his allies were in power, or not add them if that would shorten the terms of his enemies. This caused the calendar to become wildly divergent from the natural rhythm of the seasons. Eventually Julius Caesar, who was Pontifex Maximus himself, managed to become absolute dictator of the state, and, based on Greek and Egyptian science, established the 365-day-plus-one-leap-day-every-four-years calendar that we mostly follow today; the situation had gotten so bad that, in order to realign everything, the year of the reboot was preceded by a year that was 445 days long!

This is a long way of saying that, sure, maybe you think that today’s Labor Day, traditionally marking the end of the summer, and that thus we should be moving into Milford’s school year and football season. But nope, that baseball-season plot that we all were pretty sure dragged out over the summer? That was just a really long spring, according to our politco-religious elite (i.e., the creators and distributors of Gil Thorp). Now summer’s here! A summer of beach-centric hijinks! Previous summers gave us Kaz-punching wackiness and Marty Moon getting grifted and senile pro wrestling hijinx, so I’m very much looking forward to whatever we get in the summer of 2016, which, just to make clear, is not over at all, but actually just getting started.

Spider-Man, 9/5/16

Good to see that Ant-Man Scott is still determined to reject the tired superhero tradition of “secret identities”, and plans to blow Spider-Man’s cover, right here on the subway! Anyway, today we learn that Scott is either such a thorough reader of TMZ that he can recognize the nobody husbands of C-level stage and film actresses, or he’s one of the eighteen followers of the sad, abandoned Instagram JJ Jameson made Peter set up during a manic episode that ensued when he learned what Instagram was.

Family Circus, 9/5/16

“Think about it, Mommy, it makes sense. For one thing, Daddy has friends.”