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Dick Tracy, 10/4/18

Oh, my, it looks like “Pauly,” the latest ill-defined member of the new criminal gang in Neo-Chicago, is a valuable crime-gang member because he came from a broken home, like [checks notes] roughly half of people in America, if “broken home” means “their parents weren’t living together for some or all of their youth.” It’s true: we’re all stone-cold killers! Point us at any cop, especially one wearing a distinctive, brightly colored outfit, and we’ll do your evil bidding! Thank goodness you’re biding your time for your own inscrutable purposes, I’ve got places to be for the next few weeks at least.

Gil Thorp, 10/4/18

Guys, Gil Thorp isn’t just about teens, and sport, and teen sports. It’s also about teens’ troubled home lives, which are a real problem in America today and also have provided fodder for some of most memorable and accidentally hilarious Gil Thorp storylines, like Aaron Aargard’s pill-addled mom, and Marty Moon pretending to be an abandoned teen’s dad so he wouldn’t be put in the foster system, and Brent “Rap-Dog” Raptor getting emotionally abused by his mother because she was afraid if his self-esteem got too high he’d go away to college. So I’m excited to see where this “slow sister” thing goes. Is she the reason Tiki transferred to Milford? Is she the cause of his non-star status? I’m on tenterhooks!

Hi and Lois, 10/4/18

Here is an absolutely true story: when I was a kid, my dad had a freshwater aquarium, and over several years we (by “we” obviously I mostly mean he but he always included me in it and I felt like we did it together) slowly added all sorts of interesting tropical fish, and we had to upgrade its size not once but twice to accommodate them all. Now, I’ve always been a dog and cat guy, but I was really fascinated by the internal dynamics of the fishtank, and got attached some specific individuals (who passed on occasionally, as fish do). There was even excitement when one fish turned out to be pregnant (?) when we got it, leading to a zillion baby fish, most of whom got eaten but a couple survived to be our first second-generation fish. After a while, we had a huge, vibrant tank full of nearly thirty fish! Then, one day, we went to the fish store and found this very weird-looking brown lumpy fish about two inches long that the guy there couldn’t tell us anything about. Not long after we got him, we started noticing some of our fish missing, and if the cause isn’t obvious from the way I’m telling this story, one day my dad came into the living room to see half of our sole remaining angelfish dangling out of the brown guy’s mouth. He ate all the first, grew to be nearly a foot long, and then died. Why didn’t we get him out of the tank when it was clear what was happening? I honestly don’t know. We never got any more fish after he died and sold the aquarium and its equipment. Maybe, deep down, like Dot and Ditto, we were bored with the aquarium. Maybe we just wanted to watch the world burn.

The Phantom, 10/4/18

As an middle-aged person with old person parents, I can state with confidence that middle-aged and old people are just as dependent on their electronic geegaws as anyone, and it’s not really fair to smugly claim that teen girls are somehow uniquely addicted to the texting and the social media and such. Still, it’s quite endearing to me that the Phantom’s teen daughter Heloise, having done a pretty good job of holding her own in combat against The Nomad, is going to finish him off by blinding him with her phone.

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Spider-Man, 10/3/18

I know, I know, I make fun of ol’ Spider-Man a lot, but one way you know he really is a top-tier hero is that he has various powers, admittedly all based on a vaguely spider-centric theme. Like he shoots spiderwebs and he’s spider-strong and and he’s spider … sensible? You get it. Admittedly, none of his powers are helping him out in the very specific predicament he’s found himself in right now, but consider his would-be rescuer Iron Fist, whose sole power is punching. Punching with a fist … of iron, I guess. He’s gonna punch Spidey out of his problems, just you wait and see. (I haven’t watched the Iron Fist Netflix show or read any of his other comics, so if you feel like letting me know what the real scoop is, please let me implore you not to bother, I enjoy my studied ignorance, thanks.)

Hagar the Horrible, 10/3/18

I am charmed by how completely devastated Helga looks in the second panel here. We know that fancy sit-down restaurants exist in the Hagarverse, so I have to assume that the The Horribles attempted to go to one of those, but tragically miscalculated. Since Helga has always been depicted as the more civilized half of the pair, I assume she picked this place out, and is very sad to have to kill her own food, once again.

Pluggers, 10/3/18

My favorite kind of Pluggers submission comes from “Lots of pluggers everywhere” or, in this case, “Lots of pluggers coast to coast,” just in case you smug elitists thought the coasts were plugger-free. (Panama City, home of the official Pluggers P.O. Box, is located in the Florida Panhandle, which is strictly speaking on a coast, for instance.) Anyway, there are lots of pluggers who think it’s hilarious that you big-city liberals are going out and spending a whole $30 on a paper shredder when you could just spend way too much time tearing up paper by hand, letting little bits get all over the rug, and eventually lose interest and do a half-assed job and not actually make it difficult for identity thieves! Ha ha, I guess pluggers have shown all of us what’s what, again!

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/2/18

So “Atomik Comix” (I think that’s the whimsical spelling they’re going with, I may well be wrong but please do not bother telling me if so) is running into some trouble, because apparently neither its founder, a wealthy comics-obsessive misanthrope and shut-in, nor its creative directors, who for some reason quit presumably lucrative jobs in the film industry to take this gig, could’ve predicted that a brand new comic book company trying to foist nostalgic-feeling superhero print books that nevertheless feature entirely new characters might not be so successful or profitable. So they’re turning to desperate and doomed techniques to boost sales numbers, like giveaway contests! Specifically, they’re giving away some nostalgic “atomic bomb rings” Chester found on eBay, which, I am reasonably certain based on today’s strip, will turn out to have been made in the ’40s or something with real plutonium, causing cancer, because everything comes back to cancer in the Funkyverse! Can’t wait for the massive lawsuit that will bankrupt this company and its unlikeable employees once and for all!

Dennis the Menace, 10/2/18

There’s just so much going on here that doesn’t quite gel into a coherent comic but I still kind of love it? Like, Mr. Wilson is standing on the scale, which we’ve previously seen is a soft spot for him that Dennis can poke at, but apparently Dennis, who’s outside the bathroom, has decided to go for the “haha, remember that time when you shat so much you fucked up the plumbing?” jugular instead. And Mr. Wilson’s so mad about it! Like, he probably went in to weigh himself and closed the door because he didn’t want the little neighbor kid who unaccountably keeps coming into his house to make a fat joke about him, again, so instead Dennis just humiliates him by yelling “Careful of those big ol’ turds, Mr. Wilson!” It’s grim, extremely grim.

Slylock Fox, 10/2/18

How long has it been since the animalpocalypse ushered in the Glorious Animal Regime in Slylock Fox, do you think? Five years, maybe? Ten? Anyway, we’ve apparently got to the point in its political development when the mass arrests start.