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Spider-Man, 5/10/06

Folks, if you’re tired from “Spider-Man is lame” posts from me, you should write angry letters to Stan Lee and demand that Spider-Man STOP BEING SO GODDAMN LAME. For those of you keeping track at home, the last time Spidey actually tangled with anything remotely resembling a supervillain was nearly a year ago, when he fought the Rhino. Since then, he battled a greedy but entirely human doctor out to patent his blood, which included a distasteful a sequence in which he briefly assumed the identity of “Gown Man”; and spent all of 2006 so far attempting to recapture his spider-suit (the relative suit of a spider!) from a suicidal loser, in the process taking on the sneer-worthy “Justice Guy” persona.

On Sunday, the strip’s teaser promised that at long last we’d be seeing a new nemesis for Spidey: the Panthress! Who of course is actually just a role played by Mary Jane’s sexy older costar. Presumably Spider-Man will have to battle her in some yawn-inducing manner that doesn’t involve web-slinging, wall-crawling, or kicking ass in any way, shape, or form. In fact, he’ll probably find some laughable reason to infiltrate the set under a new identity: Production Assistant Lad!

Jumble, 5/10/06

So the Jumble has strippers in it now? Huh. This is either a sign of “We’re desperate for readers and this is how low we’ll stoop” or “Nobody reads this anymore so we’re just going to put in zoo porn and see what happens.”

The presence of the grinning sailors — in full uniform — is a nice touch. I think it’s charming that the Navy keeps the old school white-bell-bottoms-and-black-cravat-and-little-hat get-ups in active service. I used to live in the San Francisco area, and during Fleet Week the whole town would be crawling with those guys, and they looked like they had walked right out of a World War II movie. It was the gayest thing I’ve ever seen, and I lived in San Francisco for nearly six years.

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For Better Or For Worse, 5/9/06

YAHHHH! ZOMBIE SEX! THE WALKING DEAD, THEY WILL MAKE LOVE TO ONE ANOTHER! NOOOOOOOOO!

Gil Thorp, 5/9/06

Damn, Coach, you got served! I love the fact that she closes the door just so she can deliver her cutting commentary through it. In fact, I’m loving Mrs. Raptor and her bizarre hair more and more every time she appears. Maybe if we all start writing in letters of appreciation about her, she’ll get her own strip, called Millicent Raptor Will Crush Your Soul.

Curtis, 5/9/06

Gunther … Rose Petal … Curtis … I hate to interrupt this little domestic drama, but your abuse of quotation marks today has attracted the attention of someone. What’s that you say, Finger-Quotin’ Margo?

Let that be a lesson to you!

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Dick Tracy, 5/8/06

Um, just in case you were wondering, Dick Tracy is like TOTALLY NUTS now. How much do I love the thinly veiled Osama bin Laden character in panel one, who is wearing what appears to be a blindfold across his nose, presumably so that he doesn’t breathe in the stink of the Great Satan over his enormous cell phone? I love him a lot, that’s how much. A commentor said that they thought that “Al Kinda” (that’s the fellow apparently holding a much smaller and more modern cell phone with his foot in panel two) was an Arab caricature, but I don’t see it; he looks to me more like the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan. (The thought of a zombie Reagan working for Muslim terrorists is so delightfully bizarre that I shudder just to think of it.) The leftmost guy in panel three may look like an ethnic caricature, but he’s actually recurring character B.O. Plenty; I can provide an explanation neither for his name or his hat, just as I cannot explain the rightmost person in that panel, who I think is supposed to be either a woman or a man in the least convincing drag in the history of cross dressing. Either way, I’m beginning to believe that Dick Tracy demonstrates some of the loopy, deranged majesty as Gil Thorp, though not at the same manic pace.

Meanwhile, in Mary Worth: Don’t turn your back on her, Lou! She’s about to deploy her Power Palm!