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Dick Tracy, 1/17/18

So, just to remind you of the ongoing antics in the Dick Tracy Moon Maid plot: Glenna Ermine, daughter of flower-themed gangster Posie Ermine, was surgically and psychologically altered so that she looks like, and for a while believed herself to be, the deceased Moon Maid, daughter of the Governor of the Moon and Dick Tracy’s daughter-in-law, and now Ermine and the Governor (side note: who’s governing the moon in the Governor’s absence? Is there a Lieutenant-Governor of the Moon???) have broken into Diet Smith’s heavily guarded compound where Glenna, who now understands her origins and refers to herself as Mysta Chimera, lives. Anyway, if you thought that being held incommunicado in a research facility run by a defense contractor was a bad deal or something, today’s strip should disabuse you of that notion, since you can see that Mysta is free to relax and grill some burgers outside in the freezing Neo-Chicago winter anytime she wants!

Blondie, 1/17/18

Ahh, you know the old saying, “History is written by the winners, and then taught to the children by people who come across as ‘nice,’ but the children can’t help but sense the elided stories of the conquered and exterminated that lie beneath the sunny tales of victory, and so they and their adult friends who maybe they spend more time with than is healthy end up staring blankly out across the snowy landscape, unable to express the gnawing feeling of absence that underlies everything they know.”

Spider-Man, 1/17/18

Looks like Doctor Connors should’ve had one more bottle in his box o’ potential-arm-regrowing potions: a bottle of Hulk blood! All’s well that ends well, unless his new arm gets angry for some reason.

Pluggers, 1/17/18

Plugger multitasking: a plugger can simultaneously operate a manual-shift truck that would baffle an elitist city-dweller, exacerbate his incipient diabetes, and promote his favorite #brands.

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Mary Worth, 1/16/18

For those of you who aren’t fully “in the know” on the details of beloved syndicated soap-opera strip Mary Worth, “Santa Royale,” Mary’s home and the setting for most of the action, is a thinly veiled version of the California university/beach town of Santa Barbara — they even use the real names for neighboring places, like Goleta. Anyway, you’ve probably heard about the horrific mudslides in Montecito last week, but you might not know that Montecito too is part of the Santa Barbara area — is right next door, in fact. What I’m trying to say is that while I wouldn’t wish that sort of disaster on anyone in real life, it would be pretty funny in Wilbur, out for a brisk, optimistic walk after deciding to pretend that he has his life together emotionally, were suddenly swept out to sea by a wall of mud.

Pluggers, 1/16/18

Pluggers aren’t afraid of the dark … but they are afraid of that yawning hole inside of them, the one that they can never fill with food no matter how much they try.

Beetle Bailey, 1/16/18

The excuses Sarge has to come up with for all the times he physically abuses the soldiers under his command are becoming increasingly transparent.

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Gil Thorp, 1/15/18

It’s time for a new storyline in Gil Thorp, the strip about high school sports that isn’t afraid to get topical, the strip that was doing storylines about DREAMers way back in 2008, the strip that has the guts to say that head injuries are bad but football is great. Looks like this spring we’re going to be spending time with a couple refugees from Hurricane Maria, one of whom has a real bad attitude about her homeland’s devastation, unlike her brother who’s just a real chill guy. Will all their problems be solved with high school sports? Probably!

Funky Winkerbean, 1/15/18

God, imagine a future dystopia where humanity has ceded its autonomy to a soulless, implacable “machine” — a machine that, for instance, can tell when you’re using the photocopier at work to xerox copies of your new terrible graphic novel about your dead wife so you can personally hand them to your friends who keep saying “the attachment didn’t come through on that email you sent.” Well, you don’t have to imagine it, because it’s here. Welcome to hell, where death by cancer is a blessed relief.

Family Circus, 1/15/18

I know Billy is supposed to be making snow angels in the background, but I’d really like to believe he’s just flailing around out there, rubbing his gross little body all over the lawn, to claim the snow. “It’s my snow, asshole!” he gleefully yells at Jeffy. “You can’t have it!”