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Six Chix, 12/9/16

You know I’m in favor of any nationally syndicated newspaper comic strip that includes the caption “GALLERY OF HORROR,” but this is pretty shoddy work right here no matter how you look at it. I mean, climate change will melt snowpersons, I guess, although so would the good old fashioned change of the seasons. And holding a lit cigarette up to a snowbeing might cause them to melt around the point of contact, or, if we’re assuming some sort of advanced snownatomical structures, maybe they’d melt from the inside out as they drew hot air into their snow-lungs, in particularly gruesome fashion. But waiting in line? Waiting in line? This is … relevant because … I mean it’s supposed to mean … damn it! All I wanted was a comic where snowpeople recoiled in horror from an avant-garde art exposition called “GALLERY OF HORROR” that depicted gruesome ways they might die, and I can’t even enjoy it because the deaths don’t make any damn sense! Damn you, Six Chix! I believed in you!

Dick Tracy, 12/9/16

I’ve already proclaimed my love for this storyline, but I need to go on the record as heartily endorsing the ending, hearkening back to “classic” (i.e., pre-2011) Dick Tracy with a truly ironic death. Selfy’s selfie obsession wasn’t as played up over the course of his story as perhaps it should’ve been, but him getting trampled mid-selfie by a water buffalo who presumably enraged by reading one too many dumb thinkpieces about millennials and their participation trophies was a nice touch.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/9/16

Wait, so … are cell phones good or bad??? I need clarity on this point, guys!

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Crankshaft, 12/8/16

OK, look: I’d like to tell you that I found this Crankshaft joke about an old man with ass problems working as a mall Santa to make ends meet distasteful and unacceptable, but I’m gonna be real: my only complaint is that he doesn’t spell it “rhoid rage,” which would be both more accurate and much funnier.

Mary Worth, 12/8/16

So Mary Worth is fine with bedding a man 20 years your junior but counsels against revenge-fucking? Truly, this is solid, sensible advice for the modern age!

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Dennis the Menace and Family Circus, 12/7/16

Happy Pearl Harbor Day, everybody, a day that will live in infamy, a day that went mostly ignored in the comics today, even though many of the old-man characters in various strips are anachronistically supposed to be World War II vets, something even Crankshaft is too young for, honestly. Anyway, these two panels taken together pose the question: what’s really menacing in this life? Is it Dennis’s wild and aggressive accusation that Mr. Wilson, a decorated war hero, was secretly in league with Tojo and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere? Or is something more banal and yet ultimately more terrifying: that even the most dramatic and momentous events in human history can fade, in the course of just a single lifetime, into a misty half-memory that someone like Jeffy will only vaguely have a grasp on?

Dick Tracy, 12/7/16

The fact that the main villain in this Dick Tracy storyline’s name was “Selfy” and that he was obsessed with taking selfies was one of a jumble of ideas that were entertaining even when they didn’t quite gel with each other. It mostly got dropped over time, but it’s fun to bring it back in the end here, as Selfy attempts to take a murder-selfie that turns out to not be quite murder-y enough.

The Phantom, 12/7/16

Fool! The Phantom doesn’t pay high prices for cable or satellite service! He’s already got Internet access in the Skull Cave, and gets his TV via over-the-top streaming services of varying legality! He’s not held down by your rules! He’s … the Ghost-Who-Cuts-The-Cord!