Comment of the Week

My little friend is not so little anymore, Toby! In fact, she's quite large! Enormous, in fact! Nine foot six and getting taller by the day! It's actually quite alarming! We're getting into I'm a Virgo territory here! Did you watch that miniseries, by the way? It was on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago! Jharrel Jerome is a treasure! Some great performances by Elijah Wood and Walton Goggins as well, which reminds me that I need to start my Justified rewatch. Oh, Margo Martindale is another treasure, especially as a voice in BoJack Horseman. Anyway, Olive is a giant, is the point I'm trying to make.

els

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Dick Tracy, 4/22/19

A quirk of the newspaper industry is that, traditionally, many people have subscribed only to the Sunday paper, which was much larger than the other days’ editions, and, conversely, some people subscribed to every day but Sunday. You can see the effect of this in how the continuity strips deal with Sundays. Most structure things so that Sunday sums up the previous week’s action, accommodating both Sunday-only and no-Sunday audiences while boring the rest of us. The Phantom famously has an entirely separate storyline that runs on Sundays; Gil Thorp doesn’t bother running on Sundays at all.

Then there’s Dick Tracy, which treats Sunday as just another day of the week, man. This is hilarious to me this week because I’m imagining how anyone who didn’t see yesterday’s shootout would parse this conversation, which sounds to me a lot like Dick and Joe acknowledging, without coming right out and saying, that Tracy killed an unarmed man and then planted a gun on him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/22/19

I immediately and 100% believe that not only did Rex tell Sarah that ice cream trucks are “music trucks,” but that he also told her that they were the only legal way to listen to music of any sort. It’s great, how the music trucks will drive from neighborhood to neighborhood, bringing their songs with them! The rest of the time we get to enjoy a little peace and quiet around here.

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Dick Tracy, 4/21/19

Were you hoping we were going to find out what made “The Professor” tick? Did you think that there must be an interesting story behind an apparently successful sports columnist whose sense of professional pride led him to kill a series of gym teachers? Were you intrigued to learn more about the whole psychological deal that led him to obsess over his nickname? Well, too bad, because Dick pretty much figured out who he was right away and then gunned him down in an alley. I guess “The Professor” should’ve gotten his Ph.D. in marksmanship, so he could have at least winged Dick on the way out, or maybe in English, so that he didn’t embarrass himself by wildly misusing the word “ironic” as he expired.

Pluggers, 4/21/19

Wait, is this the first instance in history of pluggers being depicted as snobs? There are of course no channels on which programming is introduced by random drunk dudes wearing sweaty tank tops, but if there were, they would be immensely popular, and rightfully so.

Gasoline Alley, 4/21/19

Today’s Gasoline Alley is a cruel bait and switch because it allowed us to believe right up to the final panel that Rufus, one of the most irritating characters in an irritating strip, was dead.

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Hagar the Horrible, 4/20/19

This is one of a continuing series of strips that tries to situate our Viking heroes in the timeline of the Norse conversion to Christianity. Today, we learn that Hagar has sort of bought into the new religion, but mostly understands it on a fairly superficial level, which can be easily manipulated.

Pluggers, 4/20/19

Pluggers … aren’t English? That’s more or less what I’m getting from this panel, and, look, if there’s one thing I knew about pluggers before I even looked it, it was that pluggers aren’t English.