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Judge Parker, 10/6/22

Oh, were you excited about Sam’s old partner Steve making a triumphant return to the strip? Well, too bad, it’s been less than three weeks since he showed up and he’s already been brutally murdered by the crooked cops or the meth gangs or the crooked cops and the meth gangs working together, who can say. At least this means that Gloria, who was a very longtime beloved character in the strip until she quit her job as Sam’s secretary to skip town with Steve, might need to come crawling back to Sam for a job now that she’s tragically widowed! She’ll probably spend all her time being dramatically sad, which fits in with the current vibe of the strip, and also with the fact that Sam won’t be able to pay her very much.

Dick Tracy, 10/6/22

If you needed a single strip to explain current vibe of modern-day Dick Tracy, you can do worse than this one, in which a typical Tracy-style mutant gangster gets enlisted in a scheme to help his nephew land a part in a stage play about old-timey comic strips.

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Slylock Fox, 10/5/22

I’m very tickled by the fact that a mystery comic strip for kids (it’s right there in the title! Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids! surely many kids are reading the daily paper for its furry-based mystery content, right?) would have a question that includes the word “monogamous” in it. I feel like this is going to lead to a certain amount of vocabulary questioning that in most cases will go fine but might give rise to a few children awkwardly learning that their parents are swingers. Anyway, you know who isn’t monogamous? This octopus! Look at her gathering up all these engagement rings, as she plans to propose to each and every member of her polycule.

The Phantom, 10/5/22

Look, I understand that as this nation’s foremost comics blogger I carry a host of obligations to you, my readers, and one of those is letting you know when the flaming skeleton appears in The Phantom. Well, there he is! I’m under no obligation to explain to you what the hell is going on, so just enjoy the out of context skeleton, slowly skeleton-walking his way to through the jungle, presumably to interact with one of the other characters, eventually.

Pluggers, 10/5/22

Wow, that freezer sure is packed full with identical boxes! I guess it doesn’t take much to make a plugger happy, but it sure takes a lot of it.

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Gil Thorp, 10/4/22

Oh, isn’t that nice, the Thorps are being hosted by Kaz and his girlfriend [record scratch] Rachel????? Huge news! Kaz had been dating Kelly since at least 2007 and the two of them were still doing Christmas cards together in 2020. But they were always something of a mismatched pair, what with Kelly’s highbrow interest in indie music and foreign cinema. Maybe that’s what drove them apart, or maybe the pandemic finally finished what the internet started and Kelly had to close down her travel agency and flee town to escape her creditors. But obviously a hunk like Kaz isn’t going to stay single for long, and he and Rachel really got to spend a lot of time “sheltering in place” during the quarantine [wink wink wink].

Mary Worth, 10/4/22

Oh wow it turns out Zak’s favorite childhood dish was actually prepared for him not by his family but by his babysitter? Who maybe, it turns out, was the one who really raised him? This probably won’t be discovered to have anything to do with his taste in significantly older romantic partners, at all!