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Crankshaft, 9/7/20

HOT TV RECOMMENDATION FROM JOSH: I have been enjoying Trapped, an Icelandic mystery show set in a remote, isolated small town. It’s available to stream on Amazon Prime and watching it in Icelandic with English subtitles triggered a Remembrance of Things Past-style flashback to one of the many books I had as a kid in a genre that basically could be described as “Do You Have An Extremely Dorky Kid And Wikipedia Hasn’t Been Invented Yet? Here’s A Phonebook Sized Book Full Of Interesting Facts Without Really Anything By Way Of Organization,” which had a section on the Icelandic language, which is basically still Old Norse. It stayed archaic for so long because Iceland was historically so isolated, but as the modern age dawned, the country made a conscious effort to keep neologisms out of the language, using native words for new concepts instead; the example given in the book is the word for telephone, sími, which is based on a Norse word for thread, referring to telephone wires. This is funny to me in Trapped because people talk about phones all the time, and of course exclusively use the word to refer to cell phones, which use no thread at all! Anyway, this is just to say that I was enjoying some fun etymology stuff about words we use to talk about phones and how they work, and how they embed older, outdated notions into our current speech, until fuckin’ Crankshaft came by and ruined it with a dumb joke about “poking,” ugh.

Dick Tracy, 9/7/20

I am absolutely cackling at the image of Professor Stokes or whoever using this prototype vampire chassis and biting into some guy’s neck and starting to pump with its inadequate motor and the victim just being like “Hey, uh, what’s going on? That … that tickles, knock it off, guy. If you’re trying to drain my blood, you’re not doing it very well!”

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Mary Worth, 10/6/20

Sorry for not alerting everybody to the fact that Tommy proposed to Brandy using an onion ring yesterday, because I found it maudlin and predictable and also it rips off a bit from the Simpsons. But Brandy letting Tommy down not-so-gently by saying “Hey, we’re just having fun here, why ruin everything with labels, you know?”, presumably triggering a relapse into addiction and/or crime? I promise to keep you breathlessly up to date on developments.

Dick Tracy, 10/6/20

We temporarily step away from Dick tracking down deadly vampire cosplayers to bring you Sam laughing uproariously at a new comic in the Neo-Chicago Tribune! See, it’s funny because this guy kills people for the government, but nobody gets to kill him. This strip’s gonna be hit around the precinct!

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/5/20

Hey, remember beloved (?) Funkyverse supporting character Adeela, an Iraqi (?) immigrant who forged an unlikely bond with Wally because they both have PTSD from the same (?) war? Welp, she’s getting deported now, because of a clerical error! Please, my sides just stopped aching from the time you burned down half of Los Angeles, you’ve got to give me some time to relax before you bring this level of laffs back to the newspaper.

Gil Thorp, 10/5/20

I’m woefully underqualified to judge the sports action in Gil Thorp, but … Curtis Charles and his Ballard opponent aren’t so much fighting for position as a potential touchdown pass is heaved their way as just kind of standing there and thinking “Huh, he threw the ball, whaddya know,” right? This really fits in with my firmly held belief that all the games within the Thorpiverse are in fact pretty boring to watch.

Dennis the Menace, 10/5/20

I’m really enjoying how much room Henry and Alice are putting between Dennis and themselves here. “This kid? The one who doesn’t seem to know even the basics of the religion we supposedly profess? Never seen him before, padre.”

The Lockhorns, 10/5/20

I say this with all due respect to The Lockhorns: you may be a longstanding comics page institution, but you do not occupy the same place in the comics world as Garfield and definitely do not have the resources necessary to survive a legal battle with Paws, Inc. I beg you to step back from this before it’s too late.