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Folks, it’s the comment …….. of the week!

“Notice how Mrs. Wilson is on her cell phone keeping up to date with the times by scrolling through TikTok, Instagra,m and Reddit — where the young hip kids get their news. While old fuddy daddy Mr. Wilson is still reading dying print media. The subtext is clear. The meteor is only coming for technological dinosaurs like Ole Mr. Wilson. The smarter savvier mammals will survive. Mrs. Wilson gets this. That’s why in the last panel she is laughing at the slow death of her walnut brained husband.” –Joe Momma

Folks, it’s the hilarious …… runners up!

“Mr. Wilson looks pretty defensive about their Flintstone costumes. When was the last time you wore a new outfit, Dennis? Huh? Huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Go home, Dennis. You stink.” –made of wince

“I’m intrigued by Mrs. Wilson’s eye-roll when Mr. Wilson launches into the meteor explanation. ‘Oh, here we go again with the popular consensus view of the K-Pg extinction event,’ she thinks. ‘I’ve explained the role of Deccan Traps volcanism a hundred times, but George always has to focus on the drama.’” –Peanut Gallery

“Slylock is a plainclothes detective, but he’s decided ‘plainclothes’ means ‘wearing a Sherlock Holmes costume.’”–Rita Lake

“The screech is not from tires or brakes; it is from Mary realizing a meddle is being stolen from her. I imagine it’s like the sound the Nazguls make.” –Professor Well Actually

“Toby has been surprised by a truck turning onto a two-lane state road with few intersections and no visual obstructions. That’s quite a feat for someone not actively looking at their phone.” –TheDiva

“Slylock Fox’s eyes narrowed, his agile mind calculating the precise amount of force to apply to Shady Shrew’s damage points to inflict maximum pain while leaving the criminal cruelly alive. Max, well-familiar with that face, got the ambulance on standby.” –Dr. Larry Erhardt

“I really dislike the artwork in Gil Thorp but I do like that first panel. ‘I was making money for my future, while you? You decided to be a hamburger. Great choice, loser.’” –BeckoningChasm

“I feel like this is actually a great multi-level joke. On the surface, Sarge is saying ‘Ha ha, here’s a mundane task involving a bucket!’ but on a deeper level he’s saying ‘Did you think you were going to die one day? No, those kinds of lists are for people with finite, changing lives. Yours stretches out to infinity but will remain unchanged for as long as you exist. This is your bucket, my friend, for now and forever.’” –pugfuggly

“We’re in this post-pandemic ‘return to normal’ phase right now, and it’s oddly comforting to see someone spitting on an employee in a public place.” –Joe Blevins

“And thus begins a storyline that’s bizarre even for Dick Tracy. Starbucks, fearing its local monopoly is threatened by Bean Howz, a second coffee shop opened by the owner of Howz You Bean?, sends in criminals to spit out the coffee and also, from the look of things, to be the only customers.” –Spunky The Wonder Squid

“Nobody with any sense of shame would display an acquaintance’s award in their home as if they earned it themself, so I’m looking forward to seeing the custom trophy case Les buys for this.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“When do you suppose the Hagar brain trust really felt they had nailed the identity of the hulking Irishman? Did the enormous shamrock pinned to his tunic seal the deal? The shock of red hair peeking out from underneath the leprechaun hat? Or was it the river of vomit cascading down his front that best said ‘Son of the Emerald Isle’?” –Vice President John Adams

“Absolutely no one who has met this man calls him Coffyhead. Asshole, Prick, Goddamn Jerk, Fuckhead McDoucheface, That Utter Piece of Shit, and many more names, yes. But I cannot believe for one moment anyone calls him Coffyhead.” –jroggs

“Your doting parents named you ‘Coffyhead,’ my dude, not ‘Coffeehead.’ With that moniker, you are contractually obligated to be a ride-or-die fan of the 1973 Blaxploitation film Coffy, starring Pam Grier and Booker Bradshaw. This is not to say you can’t also enjoy and be choosy about coffee — you can! — but please take care to apply your violent passion to the correct obsession. Apologize to this poor barista, drop a few bucks in the tip jar, and go watch your favorite movie in peace.” –els

“The villains are a bowtie-wearing coffee snob and a guy who obnoxiously insists on wearing a t-shirt when it’s snowing. I guess we’ve firmly settled that yes, Dick Tracy takes place in Chicago. Can’t wait to hear their Tarantino-esque pop culture driving conversation about the Mountain Goats playing the Old Town School.” –Dan

“Little did Grossie know that the only way to eliminate wrinkles in human skin is to remove folds, and the only way to remove folds was to remove her third dimension. But that was all right; having two dimensions was an improvement over the way she’s usually written.” –Voshkod

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Dick Tracy, 3/18/22

Coffyhead claimed that the coffee over at Bean Howz was “stale,” but I think the truth is that, like any addict, his need for coffee stimulation is only getting more intense over time. The stuff for normies that coffee shops sell has to meet the standards of the local health department, and that won’t cut it for him anymore. He’s got to go meet his street-corner “connection,” a guy who’s got a black-market espresso machine set up at Fletcher and Main that does things to a coffee bean that science cannot fully explain and definitely can’t recommend.

Crock, 3/18/22

For a long time, the go-to irritating but correct move when discussing the Cinematic Wollstonecraft-Shelleyverse has been to huffily reply “Actually Frankenstein was the doctor, you’re referring to Frankenstein’s monster” when anyone calls a shambling assembly of corpse parts reanimated by forbidden science “a Frankenstein.” But we’ve been doing this so long that it’s thoroughly played out. I’m urging my fellow pedants to move on to a new focus of correction: pointing out that the Bride, as iconically performed by Elsa Lanchester, was costumed and made up to be strange looking, but was not intended to be seen as “ugly” the way Boris Karloff was as the Monster, and was in fact quite striking and attractive. Therefore, jokes like the one in today’s Crock are based on a false premise. Please join me in this new movement!

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Hagar the Horrible and Hi and Lois, 3/17/22

Most people would say that the Irish Potato Famine is the worst tragedy that has befallen the Emerald Isle; an extremely not-fun fact is that the population of the island of Ireland is still 20% short of where it was in 1848. Mostly forgotten, but no doubt similarly traumatic, were the waves of Viking attacks that battered Ireland for much of the 9th and 10th century, leading to widespread death, destruction of cultural heritage, and even the establishment of short-lived Norse kingdoms that disrupted Irish political life. And sure, nobody ever accused Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC of being “woke,” but it’s truly offensive on St. Patrick’s Day for Hagar the Horrible to do a joke about some Vikings making an object of fun out of a furious and disheveled looking Gael, whose tavern they have presumably forcibly commandeered. More subtle anti-Hibernian sentiment can be found in Hi and Lois, where Hi’s drunken neighbor seems to be claiming an Irish identity, despite the fact that his name, which literally means “Stone of Thor,” is pure Norse. For shame, sir! For shame!

Curtis, 3/17/22

There was a great essay I read recently about the omnipresence of the “trauma plot” in modern storytelling, in which there’s basically a Big Reveal about a character’s Painful Past that Explains Everything about why they’re Like This. The essay specifically takes on the new movie version of Death On The Nile, in which it’s revealed (and, uh, spoilers I guess) that Poirot has (a) turned to detective work and (b) grown a silly mustache because of his suffering in the trenches during World War I, whereas Christie’s original detective watches and learns about people and what they do because that’s the sort of thing he enjoys, which is one element of what we used to call “having a personality” but doesn’t create a dramatic back story per se. This is a long way of me saying that one of the things I’ve always loved about Curtis is its cheerful sitcom sameness. Curtis perceives his dad as cheap because the family is lower-middle-class and Curtis’s ideas for how much money he as an 11-year-old should be given are unrealistic! I don’t want to know about how Greg’s beloved grandmother used to smoke and now he can’t quit because the smell reminds him of the times they stayed at her house after his dad got evicted again! I swear, if we learn a single thing about Derrick and “Onion”‘s sad home life I’m going to be furious.

Family Circus, 3/17/22

One of the conceits of the Family Circus is that Big Daddy Keane is simultaneously the patriarch of the family within the strip and also the artist and writer of the strip itself, which is why the strip occasionally gives him “time off” and “Billy (age 7)” fills in. I guess the fact that half the kids (where are the other two?) have been dumped at his mother’s means that he’s on vacation, which tracks with the complete lack of jokes this week. Like, the last couple days were just about the kids being really annoying to their grandmother’s downstairs neighbors, because they don’t understand the concept of apartment buildings? Anyway, I don’t think there’s a joke today either, but Grandma and the maintenance man are definitely fuckin’, that seems pretty obvious and the kids are right to say it.

Dick Tracy, 3/17/22

In the first draft of my commentary on yesterday’s Dick Tracy, I speculated that the villain’s name would be “Tastebud,” which I decided was too on the nose even for Dick Tracy and changed to “Tayste Budd” before I posted it. I apologize for failing to keep up with just how extremely on the nose Dick Tracy actually is.