Post Content

Dick Tracy, 10/29/18

I did a small amount of Googling to try to figure out what “the old ‘neighborhood bank’ plan” was and came up empty, but I assume it was the sort of thing that wasn’t uncommon in the early 20th century, where local, unregulated financial institutions flourished and you could never be entirely sure if you were dealing with a grey-market bank or a ponzi scheme. But today’s Dick Tracy makes it clear how you could ensure your money was safe: just get your lawyer involved and then these undeground, gangster-run pseudo-banks would have to hold onto your money for decades and hand it over to your duly appointed heirs, decades later!

Crankshaft, 10/29/18

You know, when I was a kid riding a yellow bus to school, we had both a driver and a “bus aide” whose job was to keep us from killing each other so the driver could focus on not killing us in a terrible accident. Is that even a thing anymore? Was it ever a thing in most places? Anyway, Crankshaft has never had any assistance on his bus, and he makes do by just literally not giving a shit about what the kids do, not even bothering to look at them or spend any time thinking about them, really.

Pluggers, 10/29/18

Pluggers seems like they’re doing OK at first, but when you talk to them for more than a few minutes, the extent of their cognitive decline becomes obvious.

Crock, 10/29/18

Ha ha! It’s funny because the lady cactus doesn’t want to fuck!

Post Content

Ahh, Sunday Mark Trail nature facts, what do you have for me this week?

Mark Trail panel 1, 10/28/18

“Very few!” That certainly sounds extremely reassuring.

Mark Trail panel 2, 10/28/18

Wait, WHAT. What the fuck. Holy shit. Savage. Child-sized. SQUAMATES????

Mark Trail, 10/28/18

WAIT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BE AFRAID OF THESE HIGHLY INTELLIGENT LIZARDS OR NOT. ARE THEY FRIEND OR FOE. ARE THEY ONE OF THE VERY FEW KINDS OF LIZARD THAT POSE A THREAT TO HUMANS OR ARE THEY JUST A DANGER TO, LIKE, THE ECOSYSTEM OR WHATEVER BUT THEY’RE NOT ACTUALLY GONNA EAT US. LIKE I KNOW WE’RE PART OF THE ECOSYSTEM, ULTIMATELY, BUT LIKE ARE YOU USING “ECOSYSTEM” IN THAT REALLY INCLUSIVE SENSE HERE. PLEASE MARK I DEPEND ON YOU TO LET ME KNOW HOW MUCH I SHOULD PANIC

Shoe, 10/28/18

You know, I spend a lot of time on this blog musing about how the animals took over in Slylock Fox but next to none on the background of the bird-world of Shoe. And while I believe that the animal regime in Slylock was established by a sudden and violent revolution, I think that the Shoe bird-folk evolved to fill the niche left open after humanity went extinct on its own. The bird-men’s paleontological sciences are apparently underdeveloped, and they believe that many of the landscape modifications we left behind — the golf courses, for instance — are simply natural features of the landscape; the more religious among them see them as proof of a loving Bird-God who wants them to be happy, or, in this case, mildly frustrated.

Post Content

Mary Worth, 10/27/18

An act of providence? An act of providence? Mary, there wasn’t some crazy series of coincidences guided by a divine hand that led Mr. Wynter to this sad pup. You were the one who tricked him out of the apartment by claiming you had car problems and then drove directly to the animal shelter. This is as close to an open confession we’ve gotten of how we’ve long suspected Mary sees herself: as a direct instrument of God’s will on Earth, or perhaps even as a Deity in her own right.

Dick Tracy, 10/27/18

I apologize for my premature complaints about the realism in this story line. While it’s of course wholly improbable that newspaper syndicates would roll out, with great fanfare and expenditure of resources, a comic strip about two obscure actors from several generations ago, it’s significantly more likely that if a cartoonist contacted various newspapers and said “Say, would you like to run a comic strip I’m drawing about two obscure actors from several generations ago? You don’t have to pay me — in fact, the situation is quite the opposite, thanks to a trust fund that’s been earning investment income for decades and was set aside for this very purpose,” they’d at least hear the guy out.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/18

If this strip ran on a Monday, it would be the setup for a week’s worth of jokes about Lukey’s beefy, amiable cousin Moose, who might have been pulled from the 99 years of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith archives or might’ve just been made up today to be mined for laughs, who can say! But it’s not Monday. It’s Saturday. Moose is here because the best this strip could do for a joke today was “What if Snuffy thought Lukey was talking about an animal, but in fact it was a person who had the same name as an animal, or possibly a it’s nickname given to him because of his large stature,” and I honestly think that’s pretty sad.