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Dick Tracy, 1/27/17

As I always note with increasing nostalgia, ever since the switchup of creative teams in 2011, Dick Tracy plots rarely end in insanely violent and gory death anymore. But Joe Staton and Mike Curtis do have a knack for unearthing the most horrifyingly deformed villains from the strip’s decades-long history and fitting their traditional look into today’s more modern art style. “The Brush,” whose head is completely hairless except for a drooping reverse mullet covering his entire face, is a particularly vivid example of this, and it says a lot about our society’s tolerance that someone so profoundly unsettling looking can find work in the landscaping industry.

According to the Dick Tracy Wiki, the original Brush was a scam artist who claimed that radioactive fallout from A-bomb tests had caused his condition, when he was actually just wearing a face-wig (face-merkin?). After raising a bunch of sympathy money in a preview of modern GoFundMes, his scheme fell apart and he fled to the countryside one step ahead of Dick Tracy, only to die when the dynamite trailer he was hiding out in got struck by lightning (!!!!!!!!). So I’m not sure what relationship this dude has with the one who was blown to bits in an act of a particularly vengeful God, but if this storyline is half as bonkers as that one, I am very much looking forward to it.

Phantom, 1/27/17

Sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the current Phantom storyline, which, no lie, has involved a guy determined to get the Phantom on a Bangallan stamp. Anyway, the second panel is a great example of why the big purple guy is so philately-worthy: he’s punched this criminal so hard in the jaw that the dude’s head has partially phased out of our dimension, allowing it to become hopelessly embedded in the bars of his prison cell in a queasy-making, Escher-esque mess.

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Mary Worth, 1/26/17

Guys! Did you know that millennials symbolize a sexual pair-bond with matching tattoos? And did you know that millennials refer to a tattoo as “an ink”, with “inks” being the plural? This is all 100% true, I am a millennial expert, please have me on your cultural affairs television program.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/26/17

Have you ever wondered what it would look if the “second coming” of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ did not involve him returning to Earth to judge the living and the dead, as many believe will happen, but instead just took the form of him appearing as a walk-on character in the syndicated comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith? Well now you know!

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Marvin, 1/25/17

This comic about how Mavin’s dad Jeff is getting lavishly praised for using his well-outfitted kitchen to create palatable food is a little undermined by the fact that the food depicted is one of the most disgusting entrees I’ve ever seen in the comics, and I read Mary Worth daily. “I can’t believe you made this!” exclaims Jeff’s mother-in-law, and it’s true, it’s hard to believe that anyone would present a writhing mass of sheet-white tentacles topped with a viscous blob of ink-black goo to his family and expect them to eat it. “And you didn’t even burn anything!” his father-in-law adds, perhaps unaware that this awful feast absorbs all heat energy without getting any warmer, because it was forged in the infinitely hot bowels of hell.

Anyway, the “punchline” here is that Jeff, a man, has managed to produce an unburnt meal, in contrast with the typical efforts of his wife, Jenny, a woman. As a result, Jeff will take on family cooking duties from now on, since he’s clearly better suited for them will hold this over Jenny in their long-running marital oneupmanship, forever.

Gil Thorp, 1/25/17

Oops, it only took a day to solve the mystery: Aaron Aargard is terribly inconsistent because his mother (?) won’t come see him play, because she has the vapors or something. It’s enough to drive anyone into the welcoming arms of electronic dance music, and maybe drugs!