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Dick Tracy, 9/12/19

I’m not going to bother bringing you up to speed on the current Dick Tracy “Minit Mystery” guest-artisted arc, which involves a murder that took place at a modeling agency. The only mystery I actually care about is this: is this storyline just an opportunity for someone to indulge their getting-yelled-at-by-women-in-bathing-suits fetish? All signs point to yes!

Beetle Bailey, 9/12/19

Is Sarge … about to chow down on a half-eaten cookie he fished out of a garbage can? I’m not sure I’d describe that as the behavior of a “big jerk.” It could be indicative of a number of other reasons you wouldn’t want to date him, though!

Dennis the Menace, 9/12/19

“Wow, Henry has a photo album full of muscle guys and he’s lucky that I didn’t fall for any of them? The real menace here is your narrow mind, son.”

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Marvin, 9/11/19

Sometimes, faithful readers, I have to take a good, hard look at myself and acknowledge that I’ve spent a decade and a half — more than half of my adult life — regularly getting angry online about how the popular widely syndicated comic strip Marvin just makes jokes about shitting, day after day after day, right in public where everyone sees it. Sometimes I feel like I do it too often and should save my righteous fury for days like today, which features a strip that’s not only about Marvin shitting but actually demands that we get into the weeds of the mechanics of the whole thing. Like, isn’t the whole deal with Marvin that he doesn’t care about getting his diaper changed? Wouldn’t he be more likely just to shit himself and the keep eating, having just made more room in his stomach, to the disgust of his fellow competitors and everyone around him? Anyway, damn you, Marvin, for making me contemplate this today, and also several times a week, forever.

Pluggers, 9/11/19

Pluggers at least has the courtesy to leave the digestive distress this plugger’s about to experience largely in the realm of the imagination. Will he endure a mere gurgle or two from chowing down on the long-expired canned food alone in his kitchen, or suffer the full-on runs? The details aren’t as important as the overall gist, which is that pluggers are cheap, lazy, and so depressed that they honestly don’t care whether they live or die.

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/19

Hey, everyone, did you catch the fun comics news in the Grey Lady yesterday? It turns out that this week’s strips, in which a CTE-addled Bull obsessively washes the family laundry over and over again, isn’t just another round of the usual CTE-addled laffs that we’ve come to expect. Nope, according to a big, spoilers-heavy article in the New York Times, it’s just the setup for a month-long storyline that climaxes with … (wait for it) … (stop reading now if you don’t want to learn the extremely predictable denouement to all this, I guess) … Bull’s suicide! Did you worry that Lisa’s demise, being brought about more or less by random chance, wasn’t bad enough??? Well, good news, the character deaths in Funky Winkerbean are just going to get more grim from here on in, and will continue until all the demands are met.

Mark Trail, 9/10/19

Fortunately Mark Trail is a tragedy-free zone, which means that Mark probably isn’t going to be eaten by a yeti. I do enjoy that Doc has stood up in the background between panels; perhaps he assumed that, having managed to survive a desert flash flood, he’d proven his mettle and would now be Mark’s permanent companion on adventures. His facial expression in panel two indicates that he’s terribly disappointed to be displaced by some kind of freakish camel-scientist hybrid.

Shoe, 9/10/19

Shoe of course is a leader on the funny pages among strips that telegraph to us how little any of the characters want to be there or to be participating in the “jokes” or “wordplay” therein. We’re all familiar with the Patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror, but I’m fond of today’s more subtle offering, in which the Perfesser leans away from Roz between panels, as if to get as far away from this “punchline” as possible without actually getting up.

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/19

The Gasoline Alley characters, meanwhile, are proud of their punchlines! So proud they need to explain them to one another, at great length, to make sure that everyone is on the same page.