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Judge Parker, 8/30/16

It’s been years since puberty transformed Sophie from a data-obsessing pantsuit-wearing tween genius into a mean girl super-cheerleader. But while she’s been curating her affect for maximum acceptability in school, her core identity — rational, calculating, steel-willed — remains intact. Her plan to win Derek’s heart has been carefully crafted from the beginning. Wars interest her. And today, she’s going to self-talk her way out of a wrecked car. “This is not how you bleed, Sophie. This is not how you die. This may be how Honey Ballinger dies, though. Just move that shoulder belt a few inches to upwards, so it her throat rests right on it with all her weight … she won’t even feel a thing…”

Dick Tracy, 8/30/16

Liberal whiners in the U.S. are always extolling European health care systems, but real American Dick Tracy is here to show us the reality. If he had suffered his injuries in America, right now he’d be in a gleaming new for-profit hospital, but he’s in Switzerland, so he’s getting the best care they have on offer, which is in the home office of some dude who isn’t assertive enough to get rid of his houseguests.

Family Circus, 8/30/16

Wow, so I guess we’re getting a whole week of this, huh? You know, most comics are going broke, and Garfield has never been anything but a marketing vehicle, but I’m kind of surprised that the Family Circus is the first syndicated comic to offer native advertising.

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Family Circus, 8/29/16

Wow, shoutout to the Family Circus for a punchline that’s actually a darndest thing a kid might say, in the year 2016! So, whaddya think the original caption for this panel was, before that phone was added in, since 90% of Family Circus panels consist of recycled art? I’m guessing something along the line of “Ooooh! Watch your feet, Grandma! We feed Kittycat too well and now she’s too lazy to catch mice. The house is infested with vermin!”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/29/16

Welp, it’s not early onset Alzheimer’s after all — it’s football-induced chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Devastating, slowly degenerative, and topical? That’s the Funkyverse way!

Dennis the Menace, 8/29/16

Hmm, Dennis seems to implying that dreams can exist within dreams, and thus calling into question the very nature of our lived existence: is everything we think we understand about our lives just a transitory phenomenon as we sleep, our body in some unknowably different universe that we’ve forgotten until we wake? Definitely some solid menacing action.

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Mary Worth, 8/28/16

Sorry I’ve sort of let coverage of the latest Tommy the Substance Abuser arc slip a little bit; that’s because it’s been less “Tommy lies around shirtless” and more “Sad Iris gets pie and advice from Mary.” And Mary’s advice is this: have you considered mothering your child? If he’s screwing up, or falling into a downward spiral of addiction, is it possible that it’s something you did, or failed to do? Mary really is a good advice columnist. Amateurs try to shame women who are full-time students or workers for neglecting their minor children; it takes a true master to try that on someone who’s kid is, like, 28 years old, at minimum.

The Phantom, 8/28/16

The Phantom runs separate storylines during the week and on Sunday, and the current Sunday plot, which I haven’t discussed here, involves the intertwined Chicago and Chinese mobs, representatives of whom arrived in Bangalla via plane crash. Someone over at Phantom central seems to have a hate-on for the People’s Republic of China for some reason, maybe because of their failure to uphold human rights! [gets to last panel of today’s strip, shifts in chair uncomfortably]

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/16

The parson is right to be worried! One more accidental pregnancy this weekend, and he’s in danger of infringing on the intellectual property of Polygram Filmed Entertainment, and those guys play rough.