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Dick Tracy, 11/17/22

Look, I know, we’re never getting back to the glory days of “guy in gimp suit gets eaten alive by rats,” but you have to admit that we’re coming pretty close with a Dick Tracy villain named “Steelface,” whose whole thing is that he has a steel plate in his face that’s magnetic, and you’d think that he’d be know about situations where such an arrangment would be dangerous, like, say, getting into an MRI machine, and also you’d think the medical techs would ask questions like, “Say, you don’t have a steel plate under that bandage, do you?”, but it turns out nope on both counts and now he’s going to get his skull ripped apart by the MRI machine’s powerful magnets. He only ended up at this hospital because he hit his head fleeing from a police raid on his stolen car operation, so we can basically credit this grisly death to the cops, or at least that’s what they’ll be telling themselves while they stand around watching the poor hospital night shift guy scraping what’s left of Steelface’s face off the inside of the MRI machine with a putty knife.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/17/22

If you were really at a concert like this and a performer made this kind of announcement, everyone in the audience would chuckle knowingly and understand that “ice cream” and “tummyache” were code for “drugs and/or alcohol” and “unconscious.” Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where literally everything is exactly as it seems on the surface, all the time.

Hi and Lois, 11/17/22

Sure, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has somehow managed to survive and even thrive in a declining newspaper industry as their readership ages, but I’m hoping that this comic means they’re about to go all-in on crypto at the worst possible time.

Crankshaft, 11/17/22

Look, not every Crankshaft has to be a big “event,” you know? Sometimes it can be something quiet and delightful, like Crankshaft falling face-first up a flight of stairs.

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Gil Thorp, 11/16/22

It’s been a while since I’ve kept you up to date on the various plot threads in Gil Thorp, a strip that appears to be on a breakneck pace to cover all the Teen Issues before comics and/or teens are declared illegal, but the important thing to know here is that (a) Milford High held a hyper-realistic mass shooter drill, presumably with help from an overly enthusiastic theater department, that left Keri sobbing uncontrollably in front of their peers, and (b) a hitherto unseen Milford student named Allyson is one of three hitherto unseen Milford students who have died of a drug overdose this semester, so naturally these threads come together with a fistfight at a funeral. I’ve noticed what struck me as a fairly deliberate choice to show Keri sporting chunky rings across four fingers this whole semester and I’m quite pleased to have seen this little detail pay off so violently! Anyway, I deem this as the greatest Newspaper Comic Strip Funeral Fight (Continuity Strip Division) since the Great Rex Morgan Coffinside Strangulation of 2012.

Crock, 11/16/22

Man, sometimes you have to admire it when a newspaper comic strip manages to slip a grammatically correct but semantically absurd “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” type sentence in there. “The government gave my cousin Kyle a great buy on his farm” sure is a sequence of words, all right! Did you manage to parse out what they meant? Did you successfully interpret them to potentially mean that Kyle still owned the farm, but the government was able to do things like bury toxic waste there? I myself did not.

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Blondie, 11/15/22

I love this comic, which is quite clearly the product of a person who has never encountered protests or union organizing (here collapsed into a generic “picket”) outside seeing them briefly on cable news framed in a vaguely negative way, and has no idea why they happen or how they work. Yes, definitely people are recruited into the abstract idea of a picket, and only when they turn down the opportunity to participate as if they were a teen in an afterschool special who just said no to drugs are they wooed with information on what the picket is actually about. That explains the “A ‘Nappy’ Makes Me ‘Happy”’ lady, who apparently thought she was going to a protest for equal rights for diaper fetishists.

Hi and Lois, 11/15/12

It was a particularly rough day at the office — so rough that Mr. Foofram had to use the time-reversing technology from Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet to extract a few extra hours of work from Hi, meaning he’s coming home older than he should be. Lois has told him that he needs to complain to the Department of Labor about this, as Foofram isn’t paying him overtime, but he won’t stand up for himself!