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Funky Winkerbean, 10/19/17

Oh, well, looks like those stone-faced characters just wanted to track Darin down so they could send him free classic comics covers! Don’t worry, it’s not all fun, though: he only gets them because beloved comics artist Phil Holt dropped dead. You remember Phil Holt, right? He was a stand-in for real-life comics legend Jack Kirby who was reduced to penury and forced to work as a caricaturist at children’s parties, where Darin met him by chance and they talked for maybe five minutes! Anyway, apparently that brief conversation was the most validation Holt received in his twilight years, so he left his only valuable possessions to Darin in his will, which not only has cast a pall of melancholy over everything but also appears to be about to drive a wedge of jealousy between Darin and Mopey Pete.

Dennis the Menace, 10/19/17

An underrated way to menace: just sit absolutely still and watch your target try to obscure his own impotence in a cloud of misplaced nostalgia.

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Dick Tracy, 10/18/17

Awww, yeah, the Space Coupe is back! And maybe with it some of the batshit energy of the 1970s Dick Tracy — no more of this “fake Abe Lincoln audio recording” crap that was the focus of the recent storyline. I’m not sure if there are multiple Space Coupes or if this is the same one where villains from three years ago suffocated to death. Maybe this blue dude is some space alien who found their corpses and decided to joy ride their spaceship back to its planet of origin for a little light interplanetary conquest. Looks like he’s already discovered one of Earth’s finest products already: delicious tobacco! Like all spacecraft built in the ’70s, the Space Coupe came equipped with a designated Camel Containment Unit, to ensure that the mildness levels in the astronauts’ T-Zones didn’t drop to unhealthy levels.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/18/17

Man, that’s … not was doxxing is? Doxxing is when someone who was previously anonymous or pseudonymous online has their real identity revealed, or when you post personal contact information for someone who doesn’t want it posted. Posting fake news articles about someone is … well, it probably has some other dumb fake Internet word for it, but “doxxing” isn’t it. The future is stupider than anyone could’ve possibly predicted.

Marvin, 10/18/17

Look, we spend a lot of time dwelling on the poop jokes in Marvin, but there’s something else important about the strip to keep in mind, which is that over the past decade or so it’s expanded beyond the core Miller family to add new characters (grandparents, talking pets, grandparents’ talking pets), all of whom, without exception, are embedded in a mutual web of loathing for everyone who’s ever appeared in the strip.

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Gil Thorp, 10/17/17

[unspoken, but shown to be true in the final panel] “…or, I could tell you, but then you’ll realize that it’s just four incredibly banal and nonspecific sentences that carry no real information and would be extremely dull to you and your listeners. I care about you, Marty, I really do. I don’t want your show to be cancelled. I know that giving you this faux-aggressive response is better for you than actually answering your question. I’m doing this for you, and the saddest thing is that I can never tell you and you can never know.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/17/17

Oh, so you think comics art forgery is boring, huh? What about, uh, fake news? Yeah, fake news! Really ripped from the headlines, huh? The real headlines! Plus, cyberbullying! This storyline is totally extremely relevant now!!!