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Comment of the Week

Is Dr. Jeff's 'again’ meant to indicate that he's already (willfully?) forgotten what Mary's told him, or does it display his belief that Wilbur's life is a karmic circle of disasters that are superficially varied but basically the same thing happening to him over and over?

—Pozzo
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I covered the football in a fast-acting poison, and the antidote is…

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Spider-Man, 10/13/16

Superhero comic trufans (of which I am not one, but I hear things) know that each iteration of a long-running beloved character, in different continuities across various media platforms, has slight variations when it comes to the nature of their powers. What, then, can we say about Newspaper Spider-Man when it comes to his famous spider-sense? We know it can’t warn him about some pretty important things he might like to know about, like that he’s about to be hit in the back of the head with a club or a brick. So what is it good for? Well, keep in mind that Newspaper Spider-Man is both a risible dolt and keenly sensitive to anything he might perceive as humiliation (earning less than his wife, a famous actress, for instance). And so, today, it’s finally coming out that Spidey and Ant-Man have been captured because Peter knew Egghead was out to catch Scott, and then went and tracked him down anyway. He knows that everyone’s gonna start yelling at him soon, and he deserves it, and his spider-sense is going nuts.

Gil Thorp, 10/13/16

Traditionally, soap opera strips end on a cliff-hanger every day to keep readers hooked. Unfortunately, it’s harder and harder to work this magic on young people, what with their Snapchats and so forth, so now Gil Thorp is experimenting by ending strips dramatically in mid-sentence.

Pluggers, 10/13/16

Pluggers have so many emotions and nobody they feel safe expressing them to :(

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Does having mental powers count as “bearing arms” under the Second Amendment?

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Dick Tracy, 10/12/16

Shoutout to this Dick Tracy storyline for getting me more emotionally involved in the strip than I have been in years, if by “emotionally involved” you mean “researching U.S. nationality law and/or Dick Tracy’s byzantine backstory,” which I most certainly do! So, is Honeymoon Tracy an illegal alien? Well, she was born in outer space, but her father was an American and her parents were married at the time of her birth, so it seems clear that she was born a U.S. citizen, and attempting to revoke that citizenship based on her Lunarian descent would probably fall afoul of the Constitutional ban on ex post facto laws, to say nothing of the equal protection clause. Sorry, Rep. Bellowthon! You’d really do better with the vigilante angle. Why not investigate vigilantism in Neo-Chicago? You’d probably take down the whole rotten police force in the process!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/12/16

You know, I joked about what a relief the Morgans’ document-signing montage was, but the non-montaged unpacking that followed has been a perfect example of why it was so sorely needed. FUN FACT WE LEANRED TODAY: did you guys know that the Morgans have four separate grades of dishes??? So interesting!!!!!!!! Seriously, these details better have some payoff later to justify this dullness (suggestion: haunted dishes).

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/12/16

“Ya can just let th’ leaves cover ya, until you disappear!! Nobody can see ya, and ya cain’t see nobody!! Eventually death takes ya peacefully, the way ya always dream’d of!!”

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“Just wobble a little bit … that’s it … not too much … yeah, that’s the stuff”

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The Phantom, 10/11/16

You know what you should be calling your dad about, Heloise? The fact that he’s paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition at this fancy pants private high school (risking exposure by selling bits and pieces of his ancient artifact collection on the black market to get the cash needed to do so) and you’re sitting here bored in a giant lecture hall. What’s the student-teacher ratio at this place, anyway? And is the teacher really just gesturing at a six-foot-tall PowerPoint slide that consists entire of three lines of text? Text written in some extremely basic font? What is that, Adrianna? Gross!

Mark Trail, 10/11/16

Hey, remember seven months ago, when Mark urged his shapely female companion to overcome her sense of anxiety and cross a rickety natural bridge? At the time, I claimed that since this was Mark we’re talking about there couldn’t be anything sexual to it, but I’m starting to think that we’ve at last discovered what turns this weirdo on.

Blondie, 10/11/16

I can’t stop looking at the phrase “I didn’t realize you were into shining shoes!” and thinking about how strange and hilarious it is. Honestly, this is exactly the sort of awkward thing that I would blurt out to a child in a desperate attempt to relate to them. I’ve said it before, but Dagwood could save himself a lot of mental energy and frustration just by changing the locks on his doors.