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The Phantom, 1/30/19

As an 83-year-old adventure comic set mostly in Africa, The Phantom has some, let’s say, confusing baggage in its world-building that gets papered over to varying degrees. Like, The Nomad, a longstanding Phantom nemesis and antagonist in the current storyline is a sinister terrorist whose real name is “Eric Sahara” and who looks like Mitt Romney, which is of course absurd, but they’ve tried to sort of make him more realistic by situating him in [squints at where Walker’s finger is pointing] North Africa; they also gave him a daughter named Kadia (not an Arabic name) and a wife named Imara (an Arabic name, but for men), and also … an Uncle Dave? Which is the funniest thing in the newspaper comics today by a mile. Dave Sahara, the terrorist’s uncle! Not a terrorist himself, but he knows a thing or two, that Dave.

Gil Thorp, 1/30/19

I don’t know if there’s a hard syndicate rule that prevents any teens in Gil Thorp from actually doing anything illegal or if the sacred responsibility to keep the strip pure is more of an unwritten thing, but it is funny to me how the teen antics mimic the sort of things that get actual teens in trouble, but don’t actually involve crimes. Like the time a sexting panic got triggered by a girl getting her picture taken wearing an extremely non-revealing cardboard bikini. Or, I guess, like the time that B/Robby Howry was dealing adderall, but it wasn’t actually adderall. Anyhoo, enjoy this posse of Milford teens almost but not quite getting involved in serious vandalism!

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Mary Worth, 1/29/19

There are a lot of ways this plotline could’ve escalated. Jannie could’ve implied that she’d be willing to do more than wink if that’s what it took to get a good grade, or, if we wanted to be more daring, Ian could’ve implied that she would need to do more than wink to get a good grade. But, nope, Jannie is just going to get outraged that her perfectly insane plan of occasionally saying nice things to her professor and then not doing her homework somehow failed to work. Mary Worth may not always pay off when it comes to actual drama, but it invariably delivers when it comes to characters making inscrutable choices based on opinions and assumptions that no real human being would ever actually hold.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/29/19

One thing you really have to respect about Funky Winkerbean is its commitment to the bit, with the “bit” here being “unending, grinding darkness.” Like, normally, you’d expect a comic with this dialogue to feature its old-timers exchanging rueful smiles and they contemplate the foibles of aging. But no, check out these guys. They’re miserable! Getting old and going deaf sucks, and they hate it!

Crankshaft, 1/29/19

Meanwhile, the joke over in the “fun” Funkyverse strip is that Crankshaft thinks Ralph is talking about his doctors putting a tube up his dickhole, but they’re actually gonna put a tube through his heartholes, because he has an extremely serious and life-threatening medical condition. But at least it doesn’t involve his dick!

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Mary Worth, 1/28/19

Monday is starting with BIG MARY WORTH NEWS, everybody: it turns out that Professor Ian Cameron will not just give you a good grade even if you don’t do your assignments, no matter how vigorously you wink at him. With that out of the way, we can now begin to explore the fact that he’s been ignoring his wife for entirely non-affair-related reasons, probably because he just doesn’t like her very much.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/28/19

Hmm, now I’m beginning to lean away from my longstanding “Hootin’ Holler is an extremely impoverished community that’s geographically, economically, and culturally isolated from mainstream American life” theory and pivoting to “Hootin’ Holler is a deliberately anachronistic intentional community/compound, much like the titular setting of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village.’

Dennis the Menace, 1/28/19

Dennis Mitchell only received the nickname “the Menace” during his trial for crimes against humanity, when the results of his awful genetic experiments came to light, but there were signs of what was to come from a very early stage in his life.

Family Circus, 1/28/19

Ha ha, kids sure say the darndest things in Munchausen syndrome by proxy situations!

Sam and Silo, 1/28/19

I admit that I’m still having a hard time trying to figure out what Sam and Silo’s deal is, even in terms of its cultural situation, by which I mean: what are the things outside of itself, in the larger cultural universe, that it references? Today we have name-checked the most famous political crisis in American history and … a 2006 cheating scandal in international test cricket? Never change, Sam and Silo, you delightfully unplaceably weird strip!