Post Content

Dick Tracy, 10/28/20

Dick Tracy doesn’t gruesomely murder its villains like it used to, but I have to admire how efficiently this plot has wrapped up: Professor Stokes swooped acrobatically away from Dick and Liz, only to immediately be turned into hamburger by a cop car that was on its way to deal with an unrelated and presumably more normal crime. I like the focus on Dick dropping shattered remnants of the artificial fang apparatus into the evidence bag, just to remind us that, hey, you know who wouldn’t have died after getting run over by a car? A real vampire.

Mary Worth, 10/28/20

I gotta say, if your girlfriend saw you talking to a friend while he was waving a crack pipe in your face but you never actually ended up smoking crack with him, you should probably immediately tell her exactly what you did or didn’t do when she confronts you about it — or maybe even before! — rather than just saying vague, fake-sounding stuff like “It wasn’t what it looked like!” On the other hand, if you’re going to sassily tell your boyfriend that he needs to “tell it to the hand,” you need to shove the palm of said hand at his face, not just wave it around vaguely in his general direction. There’s plenty of blame to go around here, is what I’m trying to say.

Family Circus, 10/28/20

Yeah, Billy, the fundamental laws of mathematics that underlie the very fabric of our reality do in fact remain constant, sorry you find that so boring

Post Content

Family Circus, 10/27/20

I am extremely tickled that Dolly is standing on a stool in order to deliver this joke. I assume it’s a practical cartooning matter — if she were on the floor, she’d be cropped out by the circular border of the panel — but I’d like to imagine that she laboriously dragged the stool in in from the other room and climbed up on it so she could really get in her mother’s face with her latest nonsense, with Ma Keane refusing to make eye contact with her or acknowledge her in any way all the while.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/20

So it turns out the bad thing Sarah did was … that she gave her self a haircut, and not even in a comical or interesting way, and June was able to fix it without too much trouble, and even if she couldn’t, Sarah is like eight years old and does everything by Zoom right now, so who cares if her hair looks a little funny, you know? But that isn’t going to stop us from debriefing about it for days, and it won’t stop Rex — who, remember, is working in a COVID ward and the current strips are taking place in the initial wave of the pandemic so presumably he’s watching multiple people die daily despite his best medical efforts — from treating this as the biggest disappointment he’s encountered in his life to date. Rex says that he would’ve never thought to cut his own hair as a child, and it definitely tracks that he was boring as shit from the minute he was born.

Mark Trail, 10/27/20

Oh, huh, I see that Happy Trail Farms really is where various Mark clones are spawned using forbidden science, exactly as I predicted. Maybe we need to have a Crisis on Infinite Trails, with DoddTrail, ElrodTrail, and AllenTrail vanquished in combat, before RiveraTrail can thrive, to the extent that freelance writing in the clickbait era can be called “thriving.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished and isolated that it cannot participate in the modern economy, which is built around the mass manufacturing of complex devices out of standardized and interchangeable components!

Post Content

Six Chix, 10/26/20

Look, I know it’s “spooky season” or whatever but I honestly did not want to spend a lot of my day thinking about how ghosts interact with physical matter, ok? Like, we all know they can pass through solid walls at will, but also apparently lounge on furniture if they want. But what’s their relationship with gasses like? Do they have the ability to detect vibrations in the air and process them as sound, the way we do? When they “talk” to one another, are they doing it via audible noise or direct mind-to-mind (soul-to-soul?) communication, and thus maybe the “ears” in this statement are metaphorical, or a memory of what it was like to have a physical body, who knows how many centuries ago? Anyway, I’m not sure if I’d be obsessing about this less if any of these ghosts had visible earholes or anything, but I would’ve liked to have found out.

Dick Tracy, 10/26/20

There’s a been a lot of hilarity in this weird Dick Tracy vampire storyline, but the fact that Professor Stokes is swinging off the roof on a JAZZ FEST banner is the absolute funniest thing we’ve seen in this strip in a long time. I can’t quite explain why I’m sure a biology professor who’s into extremely chintzy mechanically-assisted vampirism would also be very into jazz, but I’m very sure that he would be. Professor Stokes is probably sad that his artificial bat wing apparatus is still in the prototype stage at the moment, but if he can’t fly away, at least he can make his escape with an assist from his beloved jazz fest.

Dustin, 10/26/20

God, I love that Dustin’s dad is absolutely seething in the second panel. He went through all this trouble of buying a big suburban house, just like society says he was supposed to, and now he finds out he has to maintain it, just like he has to maintain his failing body? This is bullshit. Bullshit.