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Dick Tracy, 2/12/18

Hey, so, remember last year when the xenophobic Congresswoman Bellowthon tried to pass a law restricting the rights of Lunarians and Lunarian-Americans, but then she got murdered and the legislation never went anywhere? You namby-pamby libs were probably pretty pleased about that, but now that the leader of this alien species is on Earth, smoking fine cigars with a prominent military-industrial complex CEO and casually mentioning that his people are abandoning “Moon Valley” and journeying to our world, planting secret colonies everywhere, you wish Congress had fully funded the Space Wall!

Marvin, 2/12/18

Maybe I spend too much time dwelling on the romance plots in Marvin. I mean, technically, they can be framed as stories about “the sex lives of babies,” but in reality they’re all pretty chaste, and the cartoon convention where infants and animals are given adult-level cognitive capabilities makes everything more or less on the level. Here’s the thing, though: half the time the punchline to these strips are about how Marvin, who has a girlfriend, smells like feces all the time? Because he shits his pants? And enjoys it? And it makes you realize, “Oh, this guy who has a girlfriend, he’s literally in infant. That’s bad!” Anyway, here’s another strip about diaper-wearing babies who poop themselves but also date each other, I guess!

Pluggers, 2/12/18

Pluggers know that a good way to sleep as long as you want in the morning is to unplug your clock so it doesn’t even tell you what time it is. And then when you do wake up, if you have a beard you can paw at it and go “Oh no! How long have I been asleep?” like you’re Rip Van Winkle. It’s a classic bit!

Mary Worth, 2/12/18

WHOA WHOA WHOA TED IS MOVING IN FOR A HUG AND MARY SEEMS PRETTY PLEASED ABOUT IT, THIS IS A SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT AND MAYBE ALL THIS TIME THEY HAVEN’T BEEN TALKING ABOUT “MARKETING” AT ALL???? STAY TUNED FOR FURTHER ROMANCE UPDATES!!!

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Mark Trail, 2/11/18

Man, I’m going to be thinking for a long time about the phrase “a favorite within the public consciousness.” Aren’t you? The next time you dismiss the latest celebrity flash in the pan, won’t you be tempted to say “Fame is fleeting; what I’m looking for is to become a favorite within the public consciousness, you know?” Anyway, Mark long ago told us that elephants are murderous yam thieves, and now we can’t help but visualize dozens of dead sea turtles, rotting in an algae-choked Salvadoran lagoon, while distraught naturalists pick at their flesh trying to figure out what went wrong. Enjoy!

Dennis the Menace, 2/11/18

Gotta admit, it’s pretty menacing of Dennis to remind his father that, the endless parade of one-off houseguests who bear the burden of his darndest-thing-saying aside, the Mitchells only actually know eight people, and almost half of them are children.

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/10/18

Hey, did you know that Les isn’t the only writer in the Funkyverse cast of characters? Harry Dinkle dabbles as a wordsmith as well, except instead of churning out endless paeans to his dead wife, he’s writing a novel about fictional musical pioneer Claude Barlow, and by “writing a novel” I mean he’s just stringing together a disconnected series of terrible and increasingly incomprehensible puns. This has been going for several days, and while today offers no respite from the onslaught, it at least provides a little visual interest, with panel three offering a terrifying vision of what it would be like to actually be a bunch of unpublishable and unfunny beats in a never-ending shaggy-dog story about someone named “Claude Barlow.”

The Lockhorns, 2/10/18

Shoutout to the Lockhorns for being the second syndicated comic to make a reference to a classic scene in the Bela Lugosi Dracula in less than a year, I guess? Anyway, my take here is not so much that Leroy is insulting his wife and mother-in-law’s singing or ever comparing them to ravenous wolves, but that he’s instead trying to impress his houseguest, who, with his deep widow’s peak, black-and-red ensemble, and odd overbite, is clearly a vampire himself.