Post Content

Mark Trail, 12/21/17

Ooops, it looks like our mysterious Orientalist caricature didn’t want to buy Dirty’s dirty (literally dirty, since they’d been up his butt, probably) diamonds, and is only willing to hand over a modest four-figure sum from his Enormous Safe of Cash and Gold Bars for Dirty’s trouble. Too bad Dirty seems to have an very large knife tucked into his belt, right near his butt, where he likes to store things, apparently? The upcoming vicious stabbing is going to be a valuable lesson to all of us about doing business with a guy who really, really insists that people call him “Dirty.” When someone shows you who they are — by, for instance, using a nickname that implies that they’re shady or criminal or bad in some way — you should believe them, you know?

Shoe, 12/21/17

I was going to make joke here along the lines of “Because Washington is on Earth, and your telescope is pointed towards the sky,” but then I thought — are these guys on Earth? Or are they on Planet Bird or whatever? Is this tech-wizard bird-man, despite the Perfesser’s dismissal, keenly observing the seat of American power through his telescope with envious eyes, his intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic, and slowly and surely drawing his plans against us?

Post Content

Spider-Man, 12/20/17

Let’s ignore the super-fisticuffs here for a moment and marvel at the moment where real serendipitous scientific progress is being made! When we last got a good look at the number that gator did on Dr. Connors, his pants had a huge hole in the leg, revealing his gashed thigh-flesh. But now it appears his pants have healed themselves, leaving just a fading scar where the material has somehow knitted itself back together. Could it be that Dr. Connors has been wasting his time with bioengineering potions and should instead focus on the “smart clothing” that can merge with and cybernetically enhance the human body?

Meanwhile, I know that playing around with the borders of comics panels for visual effect has a long and honorable history, but I’m pretty sure what’s going on between panels two and three isn’t so much “Let’s tweak longstanding visual storytelling conventions to create striking imagery that changes how readers perceive the narrative” as “oh crap I drew that guy’s body too far to the right and his head isn’t going to fit here, uh, uh, uh”

Mary Worth, 12/20/17

Holy shit, Wilbur really is going into a full-on paranoid breakdown in regards to Iris’s wealthy new boytoy. “My ex-girlfriend, whom I hold in high regard and desperately want to reconnect with, has a filthy drug-addict son and her new boyfriend is probably a criminal because she’s got no morals or loyalty. What a bitch! God I love her, the traitor!”

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 12/19/17

Welp, it’s getting towards the end of the football season and Milford appears to be not making the playdowns, so finally Gil and Kaz can dedicate themselves full-time to taking down Rick Soto’s weird Uncle Gary, who won’t bow to their coachy bullshit about how great football is. Or, well, I guess they’ll dedicate themselves to it tomorrow, since Kaz’s girlfriend is “on her computer all day” (at her job, at the small business she owns) and she knows how to work one of those devil machines, unlike Gil and Kaz who are just staring dumbly at a Microsoft Word document where Gil has typed “WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THIS GUY?” in Comic Sans.

Mary Worth, 12/19/17

Oh, man, I am very much here for Wilbur’s extremely rapid descent into madness as he goes from a cheerful, confident guy asking his ex out to dinner to an unhinged stalker without even stopping at the /r/incel subreddit to get radicalized first. Anyway, my favorite part today, as Wilbur lurks in Charterstone’s weird Dutch angle landscaping, is how he thinks Zak is too well-groomed to be friends with his beloved’s junkie son. He’s a real catch!

Hi and Lois, 12/19/17

The issue of sexual harassment and assault in professional settings has really come to the fore this year, and I think it’s great the Hi and Lois is going to address it head-on with a week’s worth of strips where Thirsty gets tased at Foofram Industries’ holiday party.

Marvin, 12/19/17

Remember: every forced-whimsical Marvin strip about a dumb elephant Santa thing is a Marvin strip that isn’t about shitting!