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Spider-Man, 5/30/17

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a cruel double standard when it comes to Newspaper Spider-Man. On the one hand, I cheerfully mock the strip’s treatment of the superheroic combat one expects to be the staple of the superhero genre, which is extremely infrequent and underwhelming when it actually happens. On the other, I actually don’t care that much about actual superheroic combat, which is why Newspaper Spider-Man is definitely my favorite superhero genre work of all time. I love it because it allows me plenty of room to follow my own personal obsessions, like the Daily Bugle’s place in the modern media landscape, and now the geopolitical situation of Subterranea! I am thrilled to learn more about how the Mole Man lost his position as ruler — did he flee a violent revolution one step ahead of the guillotine? Was there a peaceful grass-roots political movement that eventually rendered the Mole Man’s position untenable? Did he make the mistake of sharing power with an elected Parliament, which eventually voted depose him and declare Subterranea a Republic? And — why has he ended up in Los Angeles? Did the US offer him asylum in return for decades of rule marked by extremely friendly relations with ExxonMobil and a blind eye to literally Subterranean CIA black sites? Or is he just too gross for even Saudi Arabia to take in?

Six Chix, 5/30/17

Six Chix is, for better or worse, a gag-a-day comic. Each strip is a self-contained little world, and I feel like the “joke” here is too big for just one punchline out of nowhere. You really need to explore a theme like this — namely, that for two unlucky seniors a lifelong marital commitment has turned into a terrible prison in which each serves as the other’s jailor — over years using longstanding characters. It has to be earned, damn it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/30/17

Fellas, maybe don’t laugh so vigorously and tongue-lollingly! it’s all fun and games until someone gets fatally hexed.

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Blondie and Beetle Bailey, 5/29/17

Memorial Day is supposed to be dedicated to honoring those who died in the service to the United States. As it originally developed in the 1860s, this was generally understood to mean specifically those who died defending the Union in the Civil War, which is why it wasn’t observed in the South until after World War I, but in recent decades the “killed” part is more and more frequently elided until now people mostly treat it as an extra Veterans Day, where you’re supposed to be nice to people in the military generally, like Dag and Blondie are to their neighbor who has a wildly differing anatomy than they do. I can’t decide if Beetle Bailey’s refusal to mention Memorial Day at all is better or worse than Blondie’s take. Perhaps they want to acknowledge that, since Camp Swampy seems to exist in a division of the military completely isolated from any combat activities, none of the characters even know anyone killed in battle, so a Memorial Day strip would be inappropriate.

Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 5/29/17

But no matter who we supported during the War of Northern Aggression, we can all agree about one thing when it comes to Memorial Day: grilling is fun! Almost as much fun as contemplating the tangled chronology of the Funkyverse strips, something said strips seem determined to force me to do no matter how little I want to! Today’s strips really bring home the comic book time nature of the Funkyverse’s chronology. If one of us living in the ordinary space-time continuum mentioned “something that happened every year, ten years ago” it would sound like nonsense, but it fits in with the nature of Funky-reality: Funky Winkerbean takes place a decade after Crankshaft, and both strips cycle through the calendar but never actually move forward into the future. The implication that those Centerville explosions stopped around ten years ago is truly chilling, because it means that Crankshaft himself is always on the verge of dying, but his cruel creator will never let him cross over to the other side of the veil.

Crock, 5/29/17

I know that most of us read the colorized comics online these days, but keep in mind that the daily strips are still created with a black-and-white newspaper medium in mind. That means that the original artist punted an important decision to the syndicate coloring staffer today: are we to understand these implements to be made of camel flesh, and thus the same color as the rest of this beast, as the lack of any line at their bases might indicate? Or should they be thought of as metal blades that have burst forth through the camel’s skin and muscle? While the colorist has clearly gone the second route, I’m disappointed that he didn’t follow that idea to its logical conclusion and add copious amounts of blood.

Pluggers, 5/29/17

Pluggers are of course nightmarish man-animal chimeras who realize that they are abominations against God’s law, so obviously they go out of their way to avoid looking at themselves. (I was originally going to write “Ha ha! Pluggers hate their bodies and are full of self-loathing,” which is of course the actual joke of this panel, but then I got too sad.)

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Dennis the Menace, 5/28/17

If we’re going to cast Dennis as an Old Testament King, there are a lot of opportunities for menacing and I’m sad to see them being ignored. You know what makes you a true menace? When you see a naked lady on a roof and you get so horny for her that you seduce her and then when you get her pregnant you arrange to have her husband killed while he’s away fighting the war that you started, that’s what. We don’t even get to see him cut Mr. Wilson’s head off, for pete’s sake!

Crock, 5/28/17

In today’s Crock, an outpost of the brutal colonial regime is about to be overrun by freedom fighters, and so the French officers within need to destroy all their documentation, to erase evidence of their awful crimes against humanity.