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Dick Tracy, 1/24/20

Oh, hmm, it looks like bank robber/Styx aficionado/robot cosplay enthusiast Mr. Roboto is a theater critic in his everyday life, and he’s become sexually fixated on Mysta Chimera playing the role of the sinister robotrix Futura in Vitamin Flintheart’s stage production of Metropolis (not unlike Vitamin himself). The really sad thing is that Mysta is already a gangster’s daughter who’s memories were wiped and body was transformed by injections of moon-alien DNA. Isn’t that interesting and sci-fi-y enough for this creep? Why does she has to dress up like a robot as well to catch his interest?

Marvin, 1/24/20

There’s this whole running plot this week in Marvin where Jeff is hanging out at a motorcycle showroom with tough bikers that I don’t even want to go into because it’s so dumb and bad, but I am saddened by today’s strip, in which Jeff declares one of the bumper stickers on display “pretty funny.” Which of these lame non-jokes managed to prompt a grin from this pathetic man? “Bike at you!”, which I guess is supposed to be a takeoff of “Back at you”? “I [heart] the road” or “Leather rules,” which aren’t even supposed to be funny? This is a truly pathetic look into the joy-starved soul of Jeff Miller, if this is what briefly brightens the terrible darkness within him.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/24/20

“So, yeah, I didn’t fuck Les back in the day, but every year as I get older and less desirable, I have to ask myself, ‘Would I now?’ So far, every year the answer’s been a solid no, thank God. Uh, no offense.”

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Gil Thorp, 1/23/20

Man, I know it’s early, but this Gil Thorp spring storyline has been extremely snoresville so far, involving competition between two student-athletes for valedictorian, plus some actual basketball stuff that I can’t really follow and resent as a result. But I am mesmerized by today’s panel two, in which Marcell Irby controls the glass (I assume “Marcell Irby Controls The Glass” is the name of his avant-garde dance piece where he spins a basketball around on his head in front of a complex, abstract geometric background that he personally designed).

Dennis the Menace, 1/23/20

Pretty sure the real menace here is Alice, who apparently forced her son to sit in his punishment corner for so long that he was in danger of soiling himself? Or maybe it’s the whole Mitchell clan, for constantly getting Joey involved in their internal psychodrama. Look at him! He’s very, very nervous! He just wants everyone to be happy!

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Crock, 1/22/20

One of the dangers of doing a syndicated comic strip for years is that you either subconsciously repeat a joke or just submit a strip you drew years ago hoping your editors won’t notice; and one of the dangers of writing a blog making fun of comic strips for (gulp) 15-plus years is that I’ll see one of these repeats and make more or less the same joke about it that I did long before. Sometimes I miss it, but sometimes as I’m about to hit “publish” a little voice nags at me that it all seems too familiar. So it was today, when I had a joke about how the characters in Crock aren’t in North Africa at all, but rather are parasites who reside on the flesh of some unimaginably huge creature; but then I got that aforementioned nagging feeling, and went walking through my archives, and sure enough, back in 2007, when the creator of the strip was still alive, I made basically this joke about an an entirely different strip that made basically this joke. Anyway! More proof that the Crock characters are all inhabitants of some awful living planet made of meat, or something! This is Crockiverse canon, and you have to think about it every time you read the strip!

Shoe, 1/22/20

Shoe, meanwhile, is relatively “with it” for a long-running legacy strip today: The Wiz is, after all, an expert in all things computers, and it would be unrealistic for him to try to convince Shoe that there’s any viable revenue model for online journalism.

Dustin, 1/22/20

You know, if you’re going to do a strip about a middle-aged character picking up some youth slang, it might behoove you to be really, really sure you know what said youth slang means, since “ghosting” refers not to dropping a text conversation with outstanding matters still unresolved, which is what from context the Dustin clan seems to be talking about here, but rather ending a romantic relationship with someone by wholly and abruptly cutting off communication with them. Granted, what with how the rest of them treat Dustin, it’d be fully believable that he’d finally get fed up and ghost them in the correct sense of the word!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/22/20

“Can’t people just die of old age anymore without having to make a big production out if it? I mean, come on.”