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Spider-Man, 3/29/18

“There are human beings trapped inside those grotesque forms! Not like me! I’m not grotesque at all! Just normal and beautiful, albeit with radioactive blood and freakish mutations! Plus a red-and-blue spandex outfit for some reason. Oh, yeah, and mechanical gadgets on my wrists shoot out goo, justlike a spider. I’m extremely normal! But, like, I care about these grotesque monsters, for whatever reason. I’ve got to save them both, or die trying! Or, well, maybe we’ll skip they dying part. They’re pretty unpleasant to look at, to be honest.”

Dick Tracy, 3/29/18

I certainly hope that once this is all over and this murderous chef is in prison for life, Dick apologizes to him for doubting him. His boss really is sleeping with the fishes! You can’t pass up on opportunity for that sort of wordplay.

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Family Circus, 3/28/18

So all week Family Circus has been doing a “Daddy’s boss is coming to visit!” storyline, which has featured Ma Keane in particular in just a state of constant anxiety about, I guess, the state of the house and the presence of four unruly and (let’s be honest) unattractive children. Her level of freakout seems WILDLY out of proportion to the actual situation, and today’s panel — which would make next to no sense if you didn’t know the context — even more so. Like, can Ma Keane even hear what Dolly is saying from this distance? Does she really think her husband’s boss is going to insist that, now that a five-year-old child has invited her to stay for dinner, the Keanes are honor-bound to feed her? Honestly the only way this all fits together is if Thel has been suspecting for years that Big Daddy Keane was having an affair with his boss, and in this panel he’s just gotten finished telling her that they’re running off together, tonight.

Judge Parker, 3/28/18

Hey, remember Toni Bowen, the network news’s main reporter on the Spencer-Driver beat, who brought America both the “Neddy has violated OSHA rules in so many ways” story and the “April is a international criminal, just not the way everyone thinks” story? And then she got fired? Well, she and Sam have bumped into each other down at the supermarket, and the sexual tension is palpable! The only question remaining is how exactly April, who’s still Randy’s wife and is keeping remote tabs on him via his own security systems and is also a literal assassin, is going to assassinate Toni, to death, until she’s dead.

Dennis the Menace, 3/28/18

I mean … I guess I’m not married to the Dennis the Menace brand, but I still think it’s a little late to pivot to an “old people do the darndest things” model, even if the readership is like 90% old people at this point.

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Dick Tracy, 3/27/18

It has been brought to my attention by many of you that Ghost Pepper didn’t dislocate his shoulder in a car crash; he got shot by Dick Tracy from an improbably angle as Tracy lay prone on the ground behind the car. This happened in a Sunday strip that I missed (SHAME), and also the windshield got shot out in the process and the airbag activated, I dunno. The point is that Ghost Pepper’s wound is seeping blood, and, his plan to lay low at the aquarium having been foiled more or less immediately by someone needing to get into the closet where he was hiding, one assumes that he’s about to fall into a tank where something that likes the smell of delicious blood, like a shark or an orca or a kraken or whatever, is going to put him on the Dick Tracy horror death list of honor.

Gil Thorp, 3/27/18

I hereby apologize for implying that the Social Justice Teens don’t know anything about sports and don’t know what they’re doing. In fact, their highly sophisticated campaign of clownish behavior and harassment aims not just to drown out and provide an alternative to Marty Moon’s racist rants but to also draw everyone’s attention away from the patriarchal and hierarchical world of sports altogether. Way back in in the mid ’00s, earnest liberals Steve Luhm and Hadley V. Baxendale tried to bring justice to basketball season by means of incremental reforms. But Steve Luhm ended up a bitter, overeducated high school janitor, and this current generation of radicals are here to smash the system to pieces with pure, goofy anarchy.

The Phantom, 3/27/18

Meanwhile, thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, the most self-righteous nap in human history is about to begin.