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Dick Tracy, 2/21/17

Ugh, OK, fine, Dick didn’t just shoot the Brush in the face, like I thought yesterday. But on the bright side, if you’re just tuning in and don’t know what the deal is with his freaky hair, you might think he just got his face blown off?

Rex Morgan, 2/21/17

Hey, let’s get re-invested in what’s going on in Rex Morgan, M.D.! [sees today’s strip is about an old man settling in to take a nap on a plane] Let’s get re-invested in what’s going on in Rex Morgan, M.D., in, like, a month or two, maybe!

Spider-Man, 2/21/17

Rocket’s been walking around on his hind legs this whole time, so strictly speaking it seems pretty clear that Ronan, the Accuser doesn’t know what a quadruped is, actually.

Mary Worth, 2/21/17

Oh, man, Mary’s going to take Iris on a magical journey to show what the world will be like if she and Zak had never met. It’ll be like It’s A Wonderful Life! Alternate-universe Santa Royale will be pretty much the same, of course; the main difference is that alternate-universe Iris still won’t know what an orgasm is.

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Blondie, 2/20/17

The Singularity is a sci-fi idea that’s bled over into futurist circles (or maybe vice-versa, I can’t remember). Basically, it’s a prediction based on the increasing rate of technological change: someone who lived in, say 100,000 BC would feel right at home in 10,000 BC, and even someone from 200 AD would be able to understand the world of 1200 AD pretty easily. But around the time of the industrial revolution, new technologies started emerging and changing society fast enough that we could see their impacts within a human lifetime, and the rate of change is increasing in disorienting ways. The Singularity is the moment when the graph spikes to infinity, when tech changes so quickly that it’s impossible for us today to understand what our society on the other side of it would look like. Maybe our minds will transcend our physical existence, or maybe we’ll be wiped out by the superintelligent machines we create. A lot of critics have poked holes in the theory, calling it “the rapture of the nerds,” and I tend to agree with them, but you can really see the underlying mechanism at work in this strip. You can tell that the idea is “it’s fun to have children tell jokes about new-fangled technology,” and the writer thinks mass emails are a new-fangled technology. Simple, right? Just nobody tell him that no eight-year-old has ever used email in their life. They’re all on … YikYak now? Is that right? Kids love YikYak?

Family Circus, 2/20/17

I guess the joke here is that … sometimes driver’s license photos are out of date? Like, probably Thel’s was taken before any of her kids were born? And they think that’s funny? Honestly the real lesson here is that these poor children, cloistered behind the barbed-wire-topped walls of the Keane Kompound, are desperately starved for any form of entertainment.

Dick Tracy, 2/20/17

Last week as Dick and the Spirit got ready to head into battle, our masked guest star demurred when Dick offered him a gun. Bad choice, Spirit! You’re over there spending all this energy wresting a bad guy to the ground while Dick just up and shot the Brush in the face!

Marvin, 2/20/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Marvin is smug about sitting out in the snow with a diaper full of frozen urine! Jokes on you, kid: notice how we don’t see your parents anywhere? That’s because they’ve left you out there in the cold, to die!

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Dennis the Menace, 2/19/17

OK, so, the logical reading of this strip, up until the punchline, is that Dennis and Alice went to the bookstore, bought a book to correct Ruff’s bad behavior, then returned home to discover evidence of said bad behavior. But in the final panel, we learn that the book was already in the house, which means that between the second and third panels of the middle row, the two of them brought the book home, left it there, then went somewhere else, then came back again. Right? That’s the only way this sequence makes sense? Unless Ruff chewed the book to bits off panel, as Dennis held it in his hand! The dog’s gone mad, I say! Mad with rage! He won’t stop until he destroys everything his family owns!

Beetle Bailey, 2/19/17

Say what you will about General Halftrack’s leadership qualities, but in the last panel in the second row and first in the third row he proves his skill in dealing with the press by cheerfully answering the questions he wants to answer, not the ones actually asked. The punchline leaves him hanging on his greatest challenge yet.