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Dick Tracy, 3/1/17

Dick Tracy started running in 1931, and The Spirit in 1940, which means that, at these characters’ origins, the early 20th century era of enthusiastic trust-busting was still within living memory, an era marked by this sort of political iconography:

What I’m trying to say is, in taking on this criminal “Supotoc” corporation, Dick and the Spirit may be rejecting the modern neoliberal Borkian approach to antitrust law and will instead be tackling monopolies the old fashioned way: with firearms.

Gil Thorp, 3/1/17

OK, my prediction is that probably what’s happening here is that Aaron’s mom has a crappy low-paying job with no insurance so they can only intermittently afford the prescription medication he needs to stay 100%. Maybe he has ADHD? That would be charmingly ironic, considering that molly and Adderall are both amphetamines.

Still, the funnier possibility is that Aaron is just straight-up into recreational drugs, despite his previous denial. It would really bear out the old Sherlock Holmes adage, “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, maybe go back and check if you only think something’s ‘impossible’ because you asked a suspect whether he was guilty and he said ‘no’ and then you did no follow-up investigation.”

Shoe, 3/1/17

Hey man, I have to come up with funny material for this website each and every day, and I get that sometimes you’re tapped out. So when your dentist offers up a perfectly serviceable joke mid-cleaning, you don’t sit around fretting about, “Oh, my characters are all anthropomorphic birds, they don’t have teeth, this doesn’t make sense.” You use that shit, man. You use it and you don’t look back.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/28/17

Hmm, it looks like we’re going to be seeing Loweezy and Elviney trade irregularly metered rhyming lines on the subject of Loweezy’s diet over the next few days! I’m looking forward to them becoming increasingly desperate for rhymes the week drags on. “Do you think the diet’ll keep the’ pounds off in the future, Lo?” “I’ll get in trouble with th’ preacher for this, but I’m gonna turn to witchcraft and do some scryin’!”

Hi and Lois, 2/28/17

Meanwhile, Hi and Lois continues with its quest to show us the soul-crushing emptiness of modern white-collar suburban life. Yesterday the strip tackled work; today, it tackles sex, as Hi attempts to weave romance into his overburdened family schedule, much to everyone else’s disgust.

Phantom, 2/28/17

So the current Phantom storyline involves Orson, this beardy dude, who doesn’t think the Phantom is real, trying to convince the Bangallan government to put out a stamp about the Phantom legend, which stamp will probably be bought up by a small group of international collectors and make a tidy sum for the Bangallan treasury and be completely ignored by the world at large. And so the Phantom has … brutalized and kidnapped Orson? And revealed himself as actually existing? To stop the stamp from being produced? I’m pretty sure the Ghost-Who-Walks is also the Ghost-Who-Seriously-Overrates-The-Influence-Of-Stamps and also the Ghost-Who’s-Never-Heard-Of-The-Streisand-Effect.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/27/17

Oh, man, it looks like the ongoing Hagar the Horrible exploration of the Norse transition from paganism to Christianity just got simultaneously more philosophical and more real. Because when you stop believing in a pantheon of fallible deities who fight amongst themselves and start worshipping an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnibenevolent creator God, you quickly run into the problem of theodicy: why do bad things happen to good people? How can a God capable of perfect action be displeased with, or even hostile towards, His own creations? We can see that some of the vikings are having an easier time reconciling these contradictions than others.

Hi and Lois 2/27/17

At the other end of the Walker-Browne Cinematic Universe’s timeline, our heroes are grappling with a decidedly more modern problem: an economic system that crushes the lives of its laborers so thoroughly that all they can do in their off time is more work. Any God is invisible to them behind so many layers of capitalist apparatus.

Mark Trail, 2/27/17

Look, Cherry, Mark was just thinking about wolves last week, OK??? He just … is it wrong for a guy to sit around spending his spare time thinking about wolves? And for one species of howling canid to prompt a pop-culture reference to another, closely related species????? Jeez, leave Mark alone, Cherry! (Real talk: Mark seems to be having some problems, and he better get his headspace in order before he becomes “Dirty”‘s prey.)

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/27/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because … Loweezy is losing weight because she’s clinically depressed? That … that’s not funny at all, actually.