So with that fairly answered let me get back to recapping the plot of Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Any plot recaps — or other news that seems worthy — about the comic strip that I post later on should be at this link.
When I last checked, Spider-Man and Iron Fist were enjoying the Ritual Fight Until They Realize They’re Both Heroes all superheroes must do. They were outside the 14th-floor window of the hospital where FBI Agent Jimmy Woo recovered from a clobbering. I guessed Spidey and Fist would stop fighting and team up by Wednesday. By Wednesday Spidey had stopped fighting on the grounds his Spider-Sense told him Woo was in peril. Iron Fist smashes through the building wall, interrupting the woman trying to inject Woo with poison. She and her henchman try holding Doctor Christine Palmer hostage, but Spider-Man webs them. The heroes vanish.
Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 1st of July, 2018. I understand that there’s very little space in that bottom-row, first-panel to name and show villains. But it does mean Spider-Man’s “slew” of captured villains doesn’t include, like, a third example. I like his “knuckle sandwich” line, though, probably because it’s the kind of dumb joke I’d make in the situation.
Spider-Man suggests they team up, the better to find the “Golden Claw” behind the attacks on Woo. Iron Fist resists the idea, but wonders if Spidey might be right. He reveals himself to be Danny Rand, billionaire CEO of Rand Enterprises, survivor of a plane crash in the Training-White-Guys-To-Have-Mystic-Powers-Of-The-Inscrutable-East district of the Himalayas and recently returned to civilization. Went to school with The Shadow, Mandrake the Magician, Kit Walker Junior, and the 90s-animated-series Batman. Peter Parker responds to this show of trust by running away. Also by collecting the camera he’d secreted away to get photos of his Fight Cute with the Iron Fist. His are the first photographs that prove Iron Fist exists, and they make a front page photo-and-story for Peter Parker.
Petey mopes, though. He feels guilty not responding to Iron Fist’s trust in kind. And for proving Iron Fist exists, when he’d been working sub rosa against The Hand, another of those criminal syndicates I guess. Robbie Robertson, managing editor of The Daily Bugle, gives Parker the tip that Iron Fist has something to do with the martial arts studio. Parker swallows his conscience enough to go there and ask for its manager, Colleen Wing. The woman running the place sets an appointment for him at 11:00, on Crouching Dragon street.
It’s in the Chinatown district of the comic strip. The National Authors Advisory Council on Unconscious Racism dispatches an observer they dearly hope they can spare from Mark Trail. The women from the dojo lead Peter Parker through the twisty passages deeper into Chinatown. And then turn on him, attacking him with swords he dodges by using his spider-powers. He worries how to keep dodging them without giving away his secret identity when someone clobbers him with a giant metal mace. I know it’s a standard joke in Newspaper Spider-Man snarking circles to mention how he keeps getting hit in the head. But, boy, he keeps getting hit in the head.
Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 30th of July, 2018. From John Dunning’s On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. Ahem: The Green Lama, June 5 – August 20, 1949, CBS. “Cast: Paul Frees as Jethro Dumont, `wealthy young American who, after ten years in Tibet, returned as the Green Lama, to amaze the world with his curious and secret powers, in his singlehanded fight against injustice and crime’. Ben Wright as Tulku, his faithful Tibetan servant. Jack Kruschen in many roles. Also from the Hollywood radio ranks, Georgia Ellis, William Conrad, Gloria Blondell, Lillian Buyeff, Lawrence Dobkin, etc.” Dunning’s etc, not mine.
So the woman apparently running the dojo was not Colleen Wing. She was Suwan, grand-niece of the Golden Claw. Golden Claw has the real Colleen Wing bound. And he figures that Peter Parker, as the husband of Broadway actor Mary Jane Parker, is too important to simply make disappear somehow (?). Golden Claw demands to know what Parker knows of Iron Fist and Spider-Man. He claims all he ever did was get close enough to Iron Fist to take a photograph. Suwan searches Parker enough to find his boarding pass, showing he did just get back from Miami. She doesn’t search enough to find the Spider-Man costume he’s wearing under his clothes. She does discover Jimmy Woo was the FBI agent her grand-uncle ordered killed, though, and that’s a problem. She’s always loved him. Golden Claw has given her clear orders to get over him, but no.
And then in comes wide crime boss The Kingpin. He got released from jail at the start of this story. It’s part of the Superhero Parole Board’s longrunning, popular “Let’s Just See What They’ll Do” program. What he’ll do is order Wing and Parker taken to Wing’s studio where they can be set on fire. Iron Fist interrupts their murder, and punches the henchmen’s truck into Apartment 3-G. But they’ve still got Colleen Wing, and are ready to shoot her. And then Suwan does her heel-face turn, tasering the henchmen. She feels no loyalty to her grand-uncle now that he’s broken his pledge to not hurt Jimmy Woo, so, that’s nice to have settled.
Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 25th of August, 2018. Going back to the Green Lama. “In this scenario, Jethro Dumont was made a lama because of his amazing powers of concentration. He chose the color green because it was one of the `six sacred colors of Tibet’, symbolizing justice. His chant, opening and closing each show, was Om manipadme hum!” Music by Richard Aurandt and producer-directors Norman Macdonnell and James Burton, [ extremely old-time-radio nerd voice ] because of course. [ Normal voice ] I keep wanting to make this be the Green Llama.
She won’t explain the plot in front of Peter Parker. And that’s all right. He’s wanted to get into his secret identity anyway. He walks off, muttering, “Gosh, I wonder where Spider-Man, that excellent superhero everybody loves, is” and then coming back in costume. Iron Fist, Suwan, and Wing sigh, roll their eyes, and say, “Jeepers, it sure is lucky Peter Parker was able to get in touch with you by some mysterious means so fast”.
So what’s going on: Suwan leads them all to the Mammon Theatre. It’s the temporarily-closed location of Picture Perfect, the play Mary Jane Parker’s starring in. It’s also where Golden Claw and Kingpin booked their crime summit. Their plan: they’re going to tell everyone they’re taking over everybody’s rackets and this solves their problems, see? But Kingpin and Golden Claw are really going to kill them all. The first part of the plan goes great. All New York City’s gangsters are thrilled by this opportunity to be taken over. They’re fired up with enthusiasm and bullets. And that’s where the story’s reached now.
Next Week!
Alley Oop jumped the line, so we’ll just let him rest in 1816 Switzerland and that rerun. And next on my cycle is … Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity.
Not counted: two instances of pies shown on display in the window fronts of bakeries. My reasons for this are that pies are appropriate items to have on display in the window fronts of bakeries, even in real life; that said windows are not shown open and so the pies cannot be considered even loosely to be on a sill; and that there is no way to know the temperature of said pies on display and therefore whether to ascertain whether they are cooling relative to the general decline of the universe.
I know, I’m shocked too. And you know what else is shocking?
Oh yeah, also? A big gee, thanks to the Apple imagineers behind the spreadsheet Numbers who made it impossible to make this as the bar chart I wanted, with bars that started out in the indefinite foggy mists below and rose to zero and stopped there. I’m not as annoyed with you as I am with the Google Maps imagineers so your pit of wolverines is actually just a closet I’m going to lock you in with them, and they’ve been convincingly told you routinely insist Firefly is crazy overrated.
The most prominent is Henry, created by Carl Anderson. The one featuring the pantomime kid with a peanut-shaped head. Who lives somewhere there’s probably pies cooling on windowsills. Anderson had to step down from the comic strip in 1942, but other people drew it until … maybe 1990 for the dailies and 1995 for the Sunday strips? Nobody seems to quite know, which is one of the many baffling things about the comic strip. The web site claims Carl Anderson as author and that’s just a lie. At least the Sunday strips would often have Don Trachte’s name on the title panel. But I don’t know if he wrote all the dailies too, or when he might have stopped, or when the current reruns are from. Trachte, who died in 2005, was one of Anderson’s assistants. He took over the Sunday strips in 1942 and made them through to 1995. So that’s an amazing run, too. Wikipedia claims the comic was still run in about 75 newspapers, but I don’t know any of them. Henry‘s last day of weekday reruns is to be the 27th of October, and the last Sunday rerun, the 28th.
Also ending: Ted Key’s Hazel. This comic strip started as panel cartoons for the Saturday Evening Post in like 1943. The strip got made into a live-action sitcom in the 60s. It’s been with King Features since the collapse of the Saturday Evening Post. Ted Key — who also created Sherman and Mister Peabody, so show some respect — retired from the strip in 1993 and I guess it’s been in reruns since then? At least there’s no explicit statements from anyone that someone else took over writing, and Key’s signature is still on the panels. Wikipedia thinks it ran in fifty newspapers in 2008. Goodness knows how many it’s in now. It’s to end the 29th of September.
Ted Key’s Hazel rerun for the 10th of September, 2018. I feel like by the pattern and cut of the dress it ought to be possible to date its original publication to with a couple years, except that comic strips often have these weird cultural lags, which is to say that I’m guessing Mallard Fillmore is still wandering onto college campuses and finding dirty filthy long-haired hippies protesting Vietnam. Only this time, they’re protesting that Vietnam doesn’t have big enough safe spaces with Wi-Fi, nudge nudge ha ha ha (dies).
Also ending are two comic strip-like things I never knew existed. One is Sally Huss’s Happy Musings, an illustration-and-a-maxim panel that’s been going since 2006, Degg reports. It’s to end the 29th of September. And Play Better Golf With Jack Nicklaus, a thrice-a-week illustrated feature about furniture repair, is to end the week of the 15th of October. Its writer, Ken Bowden, had died in 2017, and its artist, Jim McQueen, died in 2016. Degg thinks the strip was in reruns before then. I couldn’t say anything to the contrary. Jack Nicklaus isn’t dead as far as I know, although I admit I don’t have anyone checking on that for me.
I’m sad to see any comic strip ending, of course. But Hazel and Henry ended long ago, really. It’s maybe nostalgically comfortable to see them around, but that’s something for web site reprints to do. Henry, also, serves as a weak thread of inspiration to all of us who dreamed of being a cartoonist and then discovered cartooning was hard work. Anderson — who was born while the Seige of Petersburg was still going on, for crying out loud — had his hit comic strip character picked up by King Features in 1934, when he was 69 years old. It suggests there’s time for all of us yet. This overlooks that Anderson had been working as a cartoonist and commercial artist for decades before hitting what we’ve arbitrarily named “success” here. Still, Henry got to be in a Betty Boop cartoon. That’s the kind of accomplishment few people will ever get to enjoy.
Interested in catching up on Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker? Enough to tolerate being put back a week for fast-breaking Alley Oop news? Not enough to wait for news about what’s happening to Henry? Then you’re in a correct enough spot.
Plots keep moving. If you’re reading this after about December 2018, I’ll probably have written another recap. And that’ll get the strip closer to whenever you’re reading this. That essay, when it exists, should be here. Where the essay is when it doesn’t exist is a problem I’m not competent to answer.
I have noticed a certain strange rhythm to Francesco Marciuliano’s Judge Parker plotting. There’ll be a crazification stage, where all sorts of big, Days Of The Week style explosion messes up everybody’s status quo. Characters run around, often yelling at each other, often through pop-culture terminologies. They act like they would in a movie about the events. Then there’s a retrenchment. It reads like Marciuliano has let the soap-opera craziness grow enough, and then stopped to think. Allow the crazypants thing to have happened. How would responsible authorities and reasonable grown-ups, the people whose task in life is to make things boring, handle it? (This is not to say boring is bad. The point of society is that people can be bored. They should be able to live without an endless fight for shelter and food and warmth and affection and stimulation. They should be able to take stuff for granted.) Some common sense comes in, and some of the plotting that makes sense for a soap opera but not for real life melts away. The story becomes a bit less preposterous, and the characters get a little breathing room. Sometimes there’s a flash-forward a couple months. And then it’s time for a fresh explosion.
Godiva Danube is dead, killed in time to mess up my previous plot recap. Shot in a hotel room. Neddy Spencer is shocked. She’d had a big and public fight with Danube days before. Prominent enough that the police ask about it. Besides the fight at the restaurant there is how they were partners in that clothing business swallowed up by a sinkhole. And local-tv-news footage of Spencer yelling she’d get even with Danube for throwing her under the bus. That Danube had asked Spencer to be her assistant before moving to Los Angeles, and Spencer refused, and then moved to Los Angeles anyway. That Spencer was alone the night Danube got shot.
This gets Neddy Spencer freaking not. I mean, it’s crazy to imagine the United States justice system convicting an innocent but available person. But crazy things happen in soap operas. Anyway, Neddy’s work-friend Ronnie Huerta has other suspicions. The police interrogated her about whether she knew of Spencer using or dealing drugs. Huerta’s also used the Google and realized Danube’s talk about movies she’s making was nonsense. Why would Danube want an assistant for a fake movie shoot? Why is the press asking the police department about rumors of CIA cooperation on the hotel murder of a minor actor? What if Danube was drug-trafficking? And needed some warm bodies?
Spencer and Huerta do the one thing you do, when you’re plausibly the suspect for a murder. They go trying to solve it themselves. At least investigate it. I don’t read cozy-mysteries often. Too much to do. But if someone out there knows of a cozy-mystery where the protagonist, having taken time away from her job as a part-time book reviewer for the Twee County News to solve the murder, gets yelled at by the sheriff for screwing up an investigation that otherwise was going fine and actually obeying rules of admissible evidence and all that, please let me know. I can dedicate a weekend to reading that.
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 22nd of July, 2018. By the way, Spencer and Huerta are very sure that Clarke here is an attractive blonde idiot. I don’t think there’s evidence for that, though. I remember him falling speechless during Spencer’s and Danube’s fight. But that seems like the best way to avoid a weird, awkward, very public scene to me.
Anyway, they follow their two leads. One is Sam Driver, who’s way off back in the strip’s original headquarters of Cavelton. They ask if he knows anything about Godiva Danube running drugs or anything suspicious like that? He gets back to them while they’re talking with their other lead, Danube’s boyfriend, Steve Clarke. They went to his apartment figuring, well, they don’t have any leverage and don’t know anything. But what the heck. They’re attractive women. He’s a guy. He might blurt something out. It goes well: in bare moments they’ve knocked out his roommate and have him in a hammerlock. He explains what he knows: nothing. But the cops wanted to know everything, so all he could offer was that he knew Neddy Spencer’s name. And that was all he knew, at least until they broke into his apartment “and made a plausible connection between the two of us”. Which is a moment of retrenchment. This is one of the reasons it’s stupid to go investigating the crime you’re suspected of.
Oh, also, Clarke knows that Danube was shipping drugs around. She’d fled a fading Hollywood career and the factory collapse by making low-budget Eastern European lousy movies. Her studio was a front for a drug cartel. Danube’s boyfriend-producer was also sleeping with other women. She ran off with a big chunk of his shipment. But the East European cartel wouldn’t have shot her, not in the United States: it would cross territorial lines and open a turf war they want. But other than that, he doesn’t know anything. (This is sounding like the informer scene in an episode of Police Squad, I admit. Maybe Angie Tribeca.)
As they’re getting this exposition Sam Driver calls back. He’s got news. The CIA figures Danube’s boyfriend is the head of an Eastern European drug cartel. One who gives the CIA information, and takes payment in favors. He wanted Danube dead as a new favor. The CIA’s happy to arrange this because they figured they could someone specific to kill Danube. And then capture the murderer. That would be April Spencer.
Who’s the other party who was freaking out at Danube’s death. And the other major plot thread going crazy here. She was there to kill Danube. She found Danube already dead. She and her father learn Danube had changed hotels for no obvious reason. And checked in under the name “Renee Bell”, one of April’s old fake identities. April’s father Norton goes crazy trying to get in touch with Wurst, their reliable big strong guy with a beard and tie.
It takes a couple months, reader time, to find why Wurst isn’t returning Norton’s calls. He’s in some posh Austrian manor house, where Danube’s ex-boyfriend/producer has kidnapped Wurst’s sister. But Wurst arranged for the murder of Danube, so here’s his sister back, and all’s well, right? Well, except that the ex-boyfriend/producer is figuring to kill Wurst as soon as he can. Wurst takes a cue from the Ghost Who Walks and breaks right back into the ex-boyfriend/producer’s lair. He goes a bit farther than The Phantom and kills them all, including killing the ex-boyfriend/producer with his bare hands. And then reports to his partner (he has a partner?) that it’s successfully done.
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 18th of August, 2018. I suppose that it is a sensible and correct use of the term. It just feels weird for these superspy-secret-agenty types to be talking about the people Norton knows as his “support network”. I think of one’s support network as the people who’ll reply to your tweet about having a lousy day with pictures of animals riding capybaras. And Norton strikes me as way more an opossums-carrying-babies person.
Norton gets in touch with his own CIA contact. Of course Wurst, his go-between, double-crossed them; who else could? And for all the work he’s done for “rogue” and illegal CIA operations, what could they do but turn on and eat their own? And if it takes trapping April to get Norton, why not? The CIA contact says he totally wasn’t trying to take Norton down. He even gave the Los Angeles police that tip about Neddy Spencer, to confuse things and buy Norton time. Also that, well, now there’s like a dozen CIA agents outside Norton’s cabin. Retrenchment: you can’t run around being crazy-superpowered killers for hire, not forever. You get attention. You get caught.
He tells April to save herself, like by using the tunnel out the back. One might think the CIA would have someone posted to watch the tunnel out back. But, c’mon, we can allow in a work of fiction the idea that the CIA might make a blunder that a modest bit of intelligence-gathering would avoid. And, I suppose, they cared about Norton, who goes out in the open to keep their attention. April was only of passing interest, as merely being an escapee from Super Duper Top Secret CIA Agent Jail. She sneaks out.
Neddy Spencer and Huerta have second thoughts about leaving Clarke alone. He swears he’s had enough of police and isn’t going to tell anyone anything. But: he has a lot of information about Danube’s death and if he doesn’t tell anyone anything, and he gets killed, then what happens? So they go back to his apartment. The find him and his roommate, on the floor, in pools of their own blood. They start to back away when they’re confronted by a sinister-talking man in an brown suit. He knows who they are. And says he was leaving, but this is great for him. Killing them right now will clear up a lot of things. Less great for him: April Parker’s there, and ready to kill him. This is another by-hand killing. Huerta, who doesn’t know April Parker even exists, is horrified by this, and that Neddy knows this. April says, “I heard the CIA set you up. Sam helped me once. So consider us even”. … All right, then.
There are comic strips it’s safe to make guesses about storyline shapes. Judge Parker, these days, is not among them. But I think we are getting into retrenchment on the Murder of Godiva Danube. One where people who have authority in investigating murders take the lead on the investigation, and about arresting the people who can be arrested and declaring innocent the people who are. I’m expecting a narrative bubble to the effect of “Months Pass … ” soon. We’ll see how that works out.
Anyway, so, certainly dead: Godiva Danube. Danube’s drug-kingpin ex-boyfriend/bad-movie-producer. Drug-Kingpin’s bodyguards and “support network”. Mysterious CIA-affiliated man come to kill off Neddy Spencer. Danube’s temp Los Angeles boyfriend Steve Clarke and his roommate. Possibly dead: April Parker’s father Norton.
Last time I checked in, money-man M T Mentis was explaining what’s going on in Alley Oop. It was the wrap-up of the storyline where Alley Oop and Wizer, trying to get to Doc Wonmug’s time lab in 2018, ended up in 1781 Philadelphia. Mentis explained how he had used the powers of a “time machine” to recover Alexander Hamilton’s stolen commission. It had stolen by … well, himself, because that’s how time travel would work if it could work. Anyway, Hamilton gets his commission. Storyline guest star Isaac Holmes — a real person — gets named as his aide-de-camp. I don’t know if that’s historical. But Hamilton and Holmes did have impenetrable professional correspondences later on, so, what the heck. That wraps up the story.
The 4th of July they return to the present, where Oop and Wizer get startled by all the fireworks. Wonmug explains it’s celebrating the war they just left. And since it’s late and everyone’s tired they figure to go to bed. Wizer’s amazed by the light switch in Wonmug’s home. Wonmug’s amazed that Wizer hasn’t been in the 20th-or-21st century before? I would have assumed he had been. This time travel business has been going on about eighty years now. I’d have thought all the player-characters had visited one another’s times by now. Wonmug’s assistant Ava Peckedge recognizes Wizer, anyway. Of course, she also thinks the United States is looking great ever since Operation Butterfly Stomp got up to full speed, so, you know.
Oop and Wizer take up Wonmug on his suggestion they “help themselves” to anything in the kitchen while he slips into something more comfortable. That clears the stage for some physical comedy. Wizer burning himself on the toaster (a four-slice model, so you know Wonmug’s living the dream). Oop smashing open a can of tomato paste. Spilling open a bag of flour. Wizer cries out “Why’s it so hard to find something to eat?” and there’s an answer. From Alexa, or something at least as good. It makes sense that Wonmug, pioneering technology of literally history-shaking importance, would keep a device that monitors every sound near it. And that sometimes transmits recordings of those sounds to one of the evil megacorporations leading society to its death. It’s good operational security.
They accept Alexa-or-Siri-or-whoever’s offer of the “usual order”. Then they find how to turn the gas burners on the stove. And I don’t want to be too snarky, but, like, in the Disney Wonderful World Of Color movie The Hound That Thought He Was a Raccoon, the raccoon needed way less time than this to accidentally set the whole toolshed on fire. It was like two minutes tops from going inside to escaping the flames. Charming film except when you notice where the raccoon was chained to the ground to film the scene. Stuff like that. Anyway. Between the can and the flour and opening the fridge Oop and Wizer make a pretty solid mess before Wonmug gets from the living room to the kitchen.
Anyway, the pizza — the “usual order” — arrives. I don’t know whether to be more impressed by how fast the pizza place is or by how much time Wonmug spent dithering around before helping his caveman visitors work out the Keurig. I’m also a little surprised Alley Oop’s had so much trouble. He’s been to the Present Day a bunch of times. But even in his first modern-day adventure (collected by Dark Horse press a couple years ago) he handled 1939 Long Island pretty well. But then I have never gotten a Keurig to produce anything but rage and weak, grounds-bearing almond amaretto. And I don’t even have “coming from a prehistoric land” as my excuse.
Pizza’s a hit with Oop and Wizer. Soda pop less so, since it goes all foam-explody in Wizer’s face. Anyway, the 3rd of August — a month, reader time, since they arrived — they get down to business. Wizer’s worried about the threat of time travellers bringing disease to Moo. The story before the Revolutionary War one was about Mentis’s cold spreading through Moo. Wizer cured it fast enough. But what about the next disease?
Wonmug has an idea. He’s got a couple hazmat suits that time-travellers could wear, at least for a reasonable quarantine period. He suggests seven days. That settles the concerns about cross-time disease, since nobody asks how they’re supposed to eat or go to the bathroom in these things. And so Oop and Wizer go home to Moo.
They’re greeted with cries of recognition! Also rocks! Because they were recognized as space aliens trying to invade Moo. This calls back to a couple storylines ago, when pantsless alien frog-plant Volzon and his mind-control ray tried to take over Moo. It’s an innocent mistake. It’s cleared up when Oop takes off his hazmat suit. Wizer warns this could make the Moovians sick; Oop argues they deserve it.
Oop goes off to sulk. It’s one of his minor and realistic habits. He gets a lot of gripes, not all from me, about his day-saving hobby and sometimes it’s too much. He thinks of leaving Moo, starting over somewhere else. Maybe put together that rock band and record that song that’s been stuck in his head the last sixty years, something. But while moping he runs across Dinny, his dinosaur. He’s all caught up in vines and needs Oop’s help getting free. “Just like the day we met! Remember?” I guess. I never read the original storyline. Yeah, he figures, and says to a concerned Oona. He’s not leaving. What’ll he do? He doesn’t know, but he’ll relax and enjoy the view a while. Jack Bender and Carole Bender, though, they’re retiring, and there you go.
So the comic strip is slated to go into reruns to the end of the year. (The first, starting the 2nd of September, is sending the gang to 1816 Switzerland in a storyline from 2013.) The syndicate will figure out what to do. Yes, I hope they find new people to produce the comic strip. I don’t like comic strips ending. Not just because the bulk of my readers are here for story-strip recaps. Alley Oop has a neat, slightly bonkers premise and I think it’s still got interesting storylines to run.
I did see commenters suggesting maybe they could rerun the earliest Alley Oop strips. I understand the desire. The early days of a successful comic strip are often most interesting. They’ll show what the cartoonist did before finding what worked best. So there are all sorts of imperfect variants on the strip’s best ideas, and odd turns and cul-de-sacs and situations that didn’t work out. It’s fascinating reading. But … look, it took six years for V T Hamlin to get time travel into the comic. Nobody reminisces how they loved reading the antics of that comic strip caveman who didn’t travel through time, because they forget that B.C. used to be a pretty good strip. But it’s okay to jump into a continuity somewhere other than the beginning. It’s especially fine if it took some time to get good.
But, given the (good as) boundless page space available on a web site, it would be interesting to see an Alley Oop Classics rerunning ancient comics. Or, if a curator could be found, something like the Doonesbury reruns. Those show samples of the storylines which shaped the major characters. This would be harder than Doonesbury, where stories advance in discrete weeklong chunks. But it’s imaginable. So it must be easy for someone else to do for me. We’ll see.
Not a thing. Nothing at all. Yeah, sorry folks, this one caught me by surprise. Shall pass on word if I get any, but I guess we’ll see what gets printed Monday and whether Olivia Jaimes takes over the strip or something. When I have more I’ll post it at this link.
It’s bizarre that they would have introduced M T Mentis as this major new character if they were only going to use him for two stories. Also that if they expected a farewell that they’d go out on a story quite as mundane as Wizer and Alley Oop getting confounded by Alexa and having pizza. (I’ll get around to that shortly.) But I hadn’t even heard rumors of the strip ending, or of the Benders considering retirement, before this.
Last time Gil Thorp was starting up a sequel to a story from before I did plot recaps. So let me recap that one from the distant, relatively happy times of 2016: Milford boys’ softball star Barry Bader’s father Del was on trial for drunk driving. While that trial was underway, he’d had a liquid lunch and got into a minor accident with beloved Milford girls’ softball star “Boo” Radley. She wasn’t hurt by that. She died when another car crashed into Radley’s stopped car. Del Bader has been in jail since. Barry Bader has been angry, pretty intensely so.
Two years later. Milford Trumpet reporter Dafne Dafonte nags Barry Bader into an interview about how everybody hates his Dad and doesn’t much like him. She mentions him being short-tempered, and he complains about how society casually spits on short guys. To that point I honestly didn’t realize he was supposed to be conspicuously short. Rod Whigham’s art has always avoided straight-on shots, and casually varies the angle. I didn’t attach any particular importance to apparent size.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 23rd of June, 2018. Ah, those precious moments where being correct — he wasn’t yet convicted when the accident happened — actually makes your position a bit weaker. Still, how did Dafne get to this question? That she did screw up a pretty obvious thing — that he couldn’t be a repeat drunk driver before his first conviction — suggests inexperience, which is authentic to her being a high school reporter. But we don’t see how her screw-up was reflected in the story, which other characters treat as having been reported correctly.
Eventually Dafne nags the elder Bader into an interview, too. This promises to be a glorious fiasco. Mr Bader was a ball of rage even before his drunk-driving convictions. He was also a bundle of sexist rage, offended by the discovery that a mere woman could be in charge of a courtroom. And now some teenage girl he never heard of wants him to talk about all this. I wouldn’t blame Bader for refusing to have anything to do with her. If any character ever asked Dafne what precise public service was being done by poking the Baders I never saw a good answer. It’d be interesting? I guess, but that’s not by itself journalism.
Del Bader starts off all right: his wife and son are struggling without him, and he’s treated as an awful person, for an accident. He points out how “Boo” Radley being an attractive, popular teenage sports star makes people view him more harshly than they would “if I’d hit a 50-year-old named Joe Smith”. But he also tries arguing, like, he was not a repeat drunk driver. He hadn’t been convicted for his first arrest yet. “I got railroaded”. Sometimes the literal truth does not make your case better.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 7th of July, 2018. I understand Barry Bader should have a different view on his father’s conviction than other people have. And that there’s only so much space a comic strip can have. But I did feel cheated there weren’t any specifics. Like, what’s something that Dafne reported that Barry believes was wrong, or unfair? I feel like that would have given the emotions shown in the story more effect.
Dafne writes a story leading off, “three hours from his comfortable home in Milford, Del Bader is in prison — and in denial.” It’s a catchy start and I hope someone ran it past the school paper’s attorneys. Barry Bader is furious. But his mother — she asks Dafne to come over. She wants to do an intervention. Mrs Bader has Barry sit down and hear about how his father really screwed up, and is screwing up Barry. And Barry needs to think seriously about being something besides a weirdly intensely angry high school athlete.
I’m not sure the exact role Dafne serves by being there. I suppose just that having an outside yet semi-involved party can keep a family dispute from growing too intense. Anyway it all seems to have a good effect. Bader returns to the team apologizing for being such a jerk. And he gets to close out his senior year hitting a three-run inside-the-park home run. Not bad, yeah.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 18th of June, 2018. As much a sideline as it was, I was endeared to Kevin Pelwicki’s weird little intense, nerdly turn towards perfecting his baseball technique. It’s revealed in the story that Pelwicki affects a pose of being a lunkhead. But actually gets better grades than I did in high school. And hey, look how I turned out! … so. Uhm.
There is — well, not really a subplot. Subplot, to me, suggests something that highlights the main plot, either by contrast or by reinforcement. This is just other stuff going on along the side. Senior Kevin Pelwecki got crazily obsessed with setting records and getting a college baseball scholarship. Coach Gil Thorp, rising above the cliche that he doesn’t really care, helps Pelwecki get his play up to form. But he’s not that serious about finding a college team that’ll offer Pelwecki a spot. He’s able to get Pelwecki a tryout, although as best I can tell the same tryout anyone would. That’s all right, though. Pelwecki finishes the season with 11 home runs, third-highest for the team, and comes to realize that he didn’t really want to play college ball. He wanted to be good enough that he could. I can understand that.
So Bader’s and Pelwicki’s storyline finished off, the 28th of July. with the 30th of July started the new, current storyline. It features the Official Sport of Comic Strip Artists For Some Reason: golf. (I think the reason is that golf was The Sport for Army officers in World War I. So Army enlisted men tried it in World War II. And since every comic strip from 1946 through 1969 was started by someone who’d been enlisted in World War II they carried their interest over.)
Wilson Casey and Tony Paul are really interested in golf. And seriously interested too: they’ll play in the rain, because hey, they get course time nobody else wants. They’re not Milford students; they attend St Fabian, and there’s mention that Gil Thorp is coaching them as part of his summer job. All right. Casey and Paul are really into the game. They just wish those snobs from Pine Ridge weren’t so obnoxious. And this sets off my Jim Scancarelli alarm. “Pine Ridge, Arkansas” was the setting for long-running old-time-radio serial comedy Lum and Abner. Probably just coincidence, though. The defining traits of both Lum and Abner — and most characters from Pine Ridge, Arkansas — was their complete lack of guile. This is not an accurate characterization of these kids.
In qualifications for the Valley Juniors golf tournament the Pine Ridge kids are teamed up with Blackthorne Country Club kids. And they together start cheating, cutting a few strokes off their holes. The St Fabian kids are ruthlessly honest about their play. In an earlier game one had counted a bunker as two strokes because he believed he felt his club strike the ball twice. Paul hits for 83; Casey for 82, scores Gil Thorp said should qualify them easily. The cheaters turn in scores in the 70s, and bump Paul and Casey out.
They’re stunned. They know the guys were playing in the 90s the previous week. I admit I’m stunned too; I had just assumed in this sort of contest some tournament official would follow each group. Shows what I know. Well, there’s stuff at pinball tournaments you probably wouldn’t guess happened either.
Thorp goes to the Pine Ridge Country Club pro with the question: come on, srsly? The Pine Ridge guy shrugs, saying, hey, golf is a streaky game. Sometimes a group of eight teens will all happen to play fifteen strokes better than their average all at once. Thorp tries to honor-shame the Pine Ridge guy, and goes back to his players with talk about how good their performance truly was.
And that’s the current standings: a summer storyline about cheating in golf. I realize it’s easy to snark about the insignificance of the subject. But it’s resolutely the sort of thing Gil Thorp is the right comic strip to write about. Really I’m still getting over learning that cheating in tournament golf play is apparently just that easy.
If you want the most recent happenings in Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., good news! It’s here. If you’re reading this not too long after August 2018. If it’s past about November 2018, I should have a more up-to-date essay here. May you find the context for the current goings-on that you need.
Heather Avery was working out the implications of her husband’s death last time I checked in. The big one: she asked the Avery International to continue on being rich and successful. The little one: she was going to sell the now-empty mansion in town. So Jordan, the live-in caretaker, would have to find somewhere else to live, at least once it sells. Her suggestion: that he use this big pile of money from the freezer to open that restaurant he always wanted to. His own “yes, and” idea: that he marry Michelle, his longtime girlfriend and partner in mansion-sitting. She likes the idea too.
Heather Avery takes her chance to visit Rex Morgan and family. She explains that in light of her husband’s death, and their child’s birth, she just doesn’t think she can bear to be in the comic strip anymore. She’ll stay in touch, she promises, but she’ll leave everyone else to get about their business.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 16th of June, 2018. I honestly don’t know whether I expect this to be Heather Avery’s farewell from the strip. It at least gives good reason not to worry about her until such time as Beatty (or a successor) has a solid idea, though.
That business is Buck and Mindy, pleasant supporting characters. They’re getting married. They’re doing it in Las Vegas, at a wedding chapel that features an Elvis impersonator who’ll walk the bride down the aisle. Nice to see things working out for them. Buck’s kid Corey is happy with the wedding plans too.
It’s a destination wedding. But at least all the characters who’ve been invited are able to afford the travel. And make the time for it. The characters who made the most time are 50s horror-comics star “Horrible” Hank Harwood and his son, Horrible Jr. They started their cross-country tourist-attractions expedition back in May or possibly 1946 and have been going strong ever since. For a while that was just little check-ins, in the disposable title-panel row of the Sunday strips. They’d mention how they were looking at giant ice cream cone guys, statues of Popeye, large soup cans, mystery castles, and so on. All the filming locations of the improbably long-running King Features comic strip Zippy the Pinhead.
(I’m not ridiculing Zippy the Pinhead, by the way. I love the comic. And I feel good about King Features that it keeps running a comic strip that would be hard-pressed to be less commercial. It’s a good legacy for the syndicate that ran Krazy Kat despite that comic almost trying to shake off readers.)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 1st of July, 2018. At the diner that Hank Senior just happened to stumble his way into. I admit I’m a bit impressed that he could steer a trip designed to be a sort of ambling, shuffling, let’s-see-where-we-figure-on-going-today expedition to get to the diner where his high school romance worked, and in her last week working there. Be a heck of a thing if he’d gone to all that trouble and she was taking the day off, though.
This threatened to completely overwhelm the comic, too, much as Zippy talking to roadside attraction statues took over that comic for about a decade. It was interspersed with Jordan-and-Michelle, and with Buck-and-Mindy, weeks. And then a bit that seriously broke up their looking at the world’s largest strawberry or the Oz Museum or stuff. In a small town diner Hank Senior encounters … Millie Gray. They were a pretty serious thing back in high school, but went their separate ways and had nice happy lives anyway. It’s a sweet little sentimental interlude, closed with Hank Senior admitting to his son that he knew exactly who was working that small-town diner, thank you.
Also breaking up the roster of watching people look at tourist traps: their RV breaks down. They rent an SUV to make the rest of the trip. So that breaks up a lot of them admitting that things are there to be seen. Still, they get to Las Vegas in time for the wedding and that’s all nice. Rex Morgan takes a moment to reflect on how great it is even if it’s slightly daft and hey, did you see where there’s a fourth wall over there? Anyway, pleasant stuff.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 10th of August, 2018. So I assume no cartoonists read what I write. Even though, yes, I know that The Phantom‘s writer Tony DePaul checks in now and then. I’m just not important. But. It’s not literally true that when I’m not blogging I’m playing pinball. It’s near enough. The Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame is one of the major things I hope to get to. And its founders have connections to my hometown, as it’s run by someone who ran Pinball Pete’s, the venerable East-Lansing-and-Ann-Arbor institution. So if I were conspiracy-minded, and thought it even the faintest bit plausible that Beatty knew anything about me including the fact that I exist, I could paint this as a crazily obscure call-out to me. But I’m not, and I don’t, and it isn’t. It’s just a neat coincidence. Also it is absolutely true that having something big and important and impossible to reschedule to get to will make you have the best pinball game of your life. Nobody understands how this happens, but if the effect could be harnessed it would revolutionize competitive pinball.
If it sounds like not a lot has actually, you know, happened I suppose I can’t argue otherwise. The stories have advanced only in little pieces and none of them has been that dramatic. I say, admitting that one couple has married and another has decided to marry. I do them some disservice by unwinding the story threads like this. It makes the action seems even slighter than it was. But, hey, sometimes everybody’s just having a nice calm time in their lives and manage a pretty good road trip. I say this not two days after my love and I learned that a correct answer to “Just how many tiny public parks with WPA-era 25-foot-long battleships built out of poor-grade ore rock can there be in this tiny copper-country Michigan village?” is “no fewer than two”. Touring quirky roadside stuff is for people who can handle ambiguous directions.
(Also we’re hoping in the coming week to eat at a Li’l Abner-themed restaurant but will be all right if it turns out we’re just not able to.).
Next Week!
It’s time for Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp! So how did The Milford Trumpet’s attempt at journalistic bear-baiting go? We’ll see what Barry Bader has to insist was taken out of context. At least if my plans turn out right.
Looking to understand the events in Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity? I’m happy to help. This update should get you ready for mid-August 2018, and maybe for a month or so after that. If it’s later than about November 2018, I should have a more up-to-date story summary and you can read it here. That link will also catch you up on the separate weekday continuity. Happy to help.
The Phantom (Sundays)
20 May – 12 August 2018.
The Rat Must Die, promised this story, which began back in October of last year. The Rat figured he could ease his way out of Bangallan prison by turning jailhouse-informant on his former partner, The Boss. The warden laughed him off. The Boss ordered a hit on him. The Phantom decided to take The Rat up on this offer. Not for freedom, just for The Phantom’s good word recommending a lighter sentence. They began a long hike out of Boomsby Prison, and then through the jungle. This lead them to the neighboring fascist state of Rhodia, where the Partner’s mansion was.
Last time I checked in, The Rat made another attempt at getting free of The Phantom, shoving the Ghost Who Walks into a carport. This fails instantly. One of the recurring motifs of The Rat’s story is his utter failure. He failed at whatever criminal activity sent him to prison, obviously. He failed at selling information for freedom. He failed several times over at breaking away from The Phantom. He failed to talk The Phantom into giving up his superhero ways. It leaves me a little sad for him. But his plans are all fairly dumb ones; he acts as if he figures, he’s a big, tough guy. Of course he can do whatever he wants. And it just doesn’t work. (It reminds me of dumb Mob scion Mikey D’Moda, from several Sunday stories ago.) Anyway, trying to take The Phantom by surprise just gets him clobbered, knocked out in two blows.
The Phantom strolls into The Boss’s house and takes out the guards easily. Comically so. Well, it’s late at night, nothing much has been happening, they figure The Rat is already dead. You never expect The Phantom to go knocking heads together. In a free moment The Phantom calls the Jungle Patrol. In his guise as the Unknown Commander he orders the extraction of The Boss’s minions. Also The Boss and The Rat. And that The Rat should get time off for helping bring The Boss to justice.
Then it’s just a matter of actually grabbing The Boss. That’s easy enough, since he’s sitting in a hot tub, not paying attention to some women there with him. The women flee. He comes along with The Phantom, protesting how this is totally illegal. Then The Rat clobbers The Phantom with a The Shovel. This gets The Rat and The Boss back on good terms. At least for long enough to talk themselves out of shooting The Phantom in the head.
Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 22nd of July, 2018. I will say this for The Boss: best I can tell, he avoided building a McMansion for his criminal lair. The place looks big, yes, but all the elements seem reasonably scaled, and all the rooms we see have clear purposes and are scaled about right for those purposes. So, you know, The Boss has a not-awful side.
The Rat at least has a stroke of conscience about it. All their conversation while journeying has left him kind of liking The Ghost Who Small Talks. The Boss, well, he just wants to “turn this guy into soup” before shooting him. This he starts by trying to run The Phantom down with his car. This raises natural questions about the quality of his corn chowder. Phantom wakes up in time to start dodging. But he only has his sidearm against a rampaging car; he’s faced with maybe shooting The Boss. Bad form to use deadly force if there’s an alternative, but what alternative does he have?
All right, so, wait. I got myself all ready to believe that Gene Mora’s Graffiti has got to be in reruns because at the top it reads “Copyright 2018 UFS Dist. by Andrews McMeel for UFS”. And UFS here is the United Feature Syndicate, which hasn’t been around since 2011. It had sold its licensing over to Iconix Brand Group, whose Wikipedia page claims they could get licensed products into Sears, KMart, and JC Penny’s. So I’m sure these are people who can handle the future of licensed Fort Knox merchandise. And then it sold the rest of itself to Universal Uclick, as part of that stage of pre-revolutionary capitalism where every thing is divided up between the bigger company and the smaller company. So it’s got to be reruns, with the copyright date just changed because somehow they can do that when they reprint comic strips for some reason. And fine. But then I got looking at one of John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not strips from last week.
OK, and that’s also got a Distributed by Andrews McMeel for UFS sticker on it. And that strip talks way too much about quirky oddball news items, printed one lead-time after everybody heard about them, for them all to have been made before 2011. Unless John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not is eight years into the most astounding string of forecasts of future mildly quirky events ever known to humanity and they’re saving that to reveal on the comic strip’s centennial this December.
That or both Gene Mora and John Graziano got like ten thousand “Distributed by UFS” stickers printed up and they’re not going to waste them until they’ve used every one of them up. Or someone at Comic Strip Master Command decided to keep the name UFS around, as a sentimental thing for fans of comic strip syndication companies. Which, all right. So that’s something for me and maybe like nobody else in the world ever.
So in short I don’t know what’s going on with this weird minor comic strip. And if I ever find out, it’ll probably be a little bit disappointing.
Also please enjoy this bit from a sequence of Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead. It’s from an August 2002 sequence where a strangely realistically-drawn woman turns up in the underground-styled comic strip. I discovered this from reading a strip compilation I borrowed from the library and felt as though Griffith were drawing a storyline just for me. (The woman turned out to be from — well, I won’t spoil the story unnecessarily.) And it’ll make a nice graphic for those times, like today, when the auto care place hasn’t updated its inspirational-despair sign.
Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 19th of August, 2002. I’m seriously considering using the last panel of this as my icon for What’s Going On In Mary Worth essays. There’s a similar, though less great, panel for Judge Parker and a fair one for Mark Trail. The one for Apartment 3-G would be great but that strip exists only in Vintage form anymore.
Mary Worth.
14 May – 5 August 2018.
Mary Worth had just talked a despairing Wilbur Weston off the cliff face last time I checked in. He’d been going through a rough time. His column got dropped from the local newspaper. His former girlfriend had a shiny new boyfriend. His shower radio broke. His daughter’s off in Europe arranging a major professor-student relationship scandal. But she promised him things weren’t as dire as all that. And he figured he could go along with a gag.
It worked out well, too. The local newspaper reinstated his paper, citing reader demand. I swear I didn’t write in. I’m cutting back on my ironic reading of stuff. His daughter writes in to say how he’s happy and nobody from the college Human Resources department has asked any questions. And Mary treats Wilbur to a dinner with friends during karaoke night. And they push him to actually performing for once. It’s one of those moves that either turns out great or disastrous. Here it turns out great. He sings the theme from The Golden Girls. It’s one of those moves so corny that it falls over the edge to be sweet again.
Karen Moy and June Bridgman’s Mary Worth for the 31st of May, 2018. “Will you be less anxious singing in public if we tell you we’ve all heard you singing in your shower for years now? No? Huh. Well, uh, what if we tell you we were fibbing about hearing you sing Frank Crumit’s `The Parlor Is A Pleasant Place To Sit On Sunday Night’ every morning, then? No?”
And that’s followed by a week’s victory lap. Mostly Jeff telling Mary Worth how great it is that she can fix people up and not marry him. The new, and current, story started the 10th of June.
It’s about Iris’s son Tommy. He’s flirted successfully with coworker Brandy. They have a late-night dinner together that goes well. He’s figured he’s in love already, and he’s only more sure when they go to see Action-Adventure Movie. They do talk about the movie a little, about what you do when you lose choices and about trusting in strained circumstances. It all feels like foreshadowing. Also slightly foggy movie discussion, but I accept this as a convention of the medium. (Any actual movie, even if it were on point, would be out of the theaters before Moy and Bridgman could depict it in the strip. And there’s not the space to describe a made-up movie’s plot in detail.)
Karen Moy and June Bridgman’s Mary Worth for the 15th of July, 2018. So for people who weren’t reading along, Brandy was named for that song about what a fine girl she was and a good wife she should be. Tommy correctly recognized this reference and sang a bit of the song to her. Tommy also recognized the wordplay implicit in a woman named Brandy who resents drink. She likes him anyway, so we know this is true affectionate coexistence.
Going to the bar afterwards reveals the drama. Brandy doesn’t drink alcohol. Her father was an alcoholic and drug abuser. She doesn’t want that kind of trouble in her life. Tommy doesn’t drink either. He quit after getting addicted to alcohol and painkillers. He’s been clean for over a year now, and has a support group that he feels comfortable with. Brandy’s talk about how this damaged her ability to trust people, and how she can cope with it only by banishing drink and drugs from her life, shatters Tommy’s hopes.
He’s spent the time since then in a self-inquisitive spiral. He’s clean now, yes. But he did get hooked. And he worries about relapsing. He started using alcohol and painkillers after he was badly injured at work, yes. So, you know, he’s not one of those people who have drug problems because they’re bad. He just needed relief from never-ending severe pain. Still, he can foresee Brandy learning about his past and blocking him out. (And for all my snark, I agree both Brandy and Tommy have reasonable fears that they act on appropriately.)
But Tommy remembers what comic strip he’s in. He lays out the situation for Mary Worth. She offers the reasonable advice that she would have to learn of his past. But also that Tommy is not Brandy’s father. But this is serious stuff, so she kicks the problem up a level, to God. Tommy goes to confession, revealing that I guess he’s Roman Catholic too. And he gets some decent talk about growing through your sins.
So that’s the standings as of early August, 2018.
Dubiously Sourced Quotes of Mary Worth Sunday Panels!
“The greatest test of courage on the Earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.” — R G Ingersoll, 13 May 2018.
“There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.” — Bernard Williams, 20 May 2018.
“Find a place where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” — Joseph Campbell, 27 May 2018.
“My friends are my estate.” — Emily Dickinson, 3 June 2018.
“To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” — Marilyn vos Savant, 10 June 2018.
“Don’t fall in love; rise with it.” — Amit Abraham, 17 June 2018.
“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.” — Dag Hammarskjöld, 24 June 2018.
“The simple act of caring is heroic.” — Edward Albert, 1 July 2018.
“Gamble everything for love if you are a true human being.” — Rumi, 8 July 2018.
“We all have our secrets. We all have our vulnerabilities.” — Brett Dalton, 15 July 2018.
“Fear is the mother of morality.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, 22 July 2018.
“When in doubt, tell the truth.” — Mark Twain, 29 July 2018.
“Repentance means you change your mind so deeply that it changes you.” — Bruce Wilkinson, 5 August 2018.
I don’t mean to pick on utterly harmless obscure comic strips. A lot of them are. And I have some knack for discovering comic strips so obscure that I’m not even sure the cartoonist’s family knows it’s being made. So please understand, I’m not saying that I want Gene Mora to quit writing and drawing Graffiti. But, I mean, look at yesterday’s.
Gene Mora’s Graffiti for the 31st of July, 2018. There’s, like, no information about the comic strip anywhere. Like even Wikipedia just lists that it’s a comic strip with a name beginning ‘G’, and it doesn’t even get into the question of whether this actually is a comic strip. The comic strip’s About page doesn’t say anything about when Gene Mora was born or how he got into cartooning or how Graffiti totally runs in like three hundred newspapers worldwide. (Comic strips always say they run in about three hundred newspapers worldwide.) The strip just exists without any causal agent.
This … has to be a rerun, right? I mean, yes, comic strips usually have a weird lag in their pop-culture awareness. And that lag only gets worse as a comic strip ages. And Graffiti has been running since Apollo 9 was on the launchpad. I guess? I don’t know. Sometime 1969 anyway. It might have been running only since Apollo 12 was on the launchpad. So given that it would be remarkable if the comic strip could reference anything more current than Disney’s Dinosaur.
And please understand, it’s not like I dislike the thing. I even have a weird nostalgic feeling about it. I remember as a kid reading it in the News Tribune. It was one of those weird comic strips they didn’t allow on the comics page. It just floated around somewhere in that section, waiting for people to happen across a drawing of a wall with text on it.
I mean, the copyright is 2018, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore. Why would it be copyright Andrews McMeel when they haven’t called themselves that since 2011? Right? Unless Gene Mora just had a whole lot of page blanks with the old name put up and is still using them? Which is ridiculous, but if you’re anything like me you know how long a comic strip still in production will show last year’s copyright sticker even after the new year’s begun. And, like, comic strips that would seem to take a lot more work, like Funky Winkerbean or Andy Capp, famously got a year or more ahead of publication. Could Graffiti? I just don’t know.
Don’t read the comments, but yeah, commenter, I’m sure a lot of people get their lives ruined when they’re sued for being politically incorrect. Happens all the time.
Mark Trail‘s current storyline began in April. Either the 16th of the 26th, depending on whether a couple strips about “Dirty” Dyer planning to kill Mark Trail come into play in the current story. Dyer’s been seen in interludes for quite a while now, a promise of a story to come. I’m still unsettled to see Mark Trail using any narrative technique besides “and then Mark punched the poaching smugglers right in the beard”.
So Mark, Cherry, and Rusty Trail were to visit the Azyoulik Resort, near the Mexican village of Santa Poco. They’re there to see wildlife and check in with an archeologist friend of Mark’s. James Allen has a bit of a taste for pulp adventure stories. His side project (with Brice Vorderbrug) is a weekly strip, Edge of Adventure, that’s entirely pulpy adventure action. Mark’s archeologist friend is Professor Howard Carter. So at this point anyone a little genre-aware knows the ending. At best someone is going to have to jump into a vortex of death rays to prevent some ancient unstoppable evil from eating the world. Fantasy/Science Fiction reviewer James Nicoll has asked how responsible societies allow archeology. The question has no answer.
James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 15th of May, 2018. I am always delighted when a story strip character responds to something with way more emotion than the situation will bear. So Minke Whale Skeptic there is fantastic. It’s the sort of panel that will keep me looking forward to a strip for years afterward.
There’s some commotion at the beach. Turns out a whale got stuck on the sand. Mark is on the scene, happy to explain it’s a Minke Whale. He would have explained all sorts of amazing things about how humans are killing them, except a square-headed man asks how Mark could know that. But the conversation gets distracted by the plan to push the whale back in the water. The reader gets distracted by Mark standing there shirtless on the beach while grinning a little weird. Anyway, this goes well for the whale. The square-headed man apologizes for doubting Mark. And it works well for Rusty too, as this whale-saving impresses Mara, the girl he cute-met on the airplane. They go off looking at toucans after dinner.
To the main plot, though. Professor Carter’s discovered a 2500-year-old lost temple (GET IT?). It’s a weird one. How weird? Weird. There’s a good week or two of driving to the temple that establishes some of the practical points of how the expedition is going. And it shows off Central American wildlife. The generic strip this whole story has been a single panel of a couple characters talking, usually inside a building, sometimes in a vehicle, while off on the right edge of the panel a cacomistle or a tayra or something goes about its business. Yes, we all want to see capybaras, but they don’t live that far north naturally.
Mark, Rusty, and Mara arrive at the temple and agree that it’s creepy. It’s a neat illustration. Architecture overgrown with plants is very hard to draw. But is it creepy? Mark and Rusty Trail agree that it’s weird, but can’t pin down how. I don’t know enough about Yucatan architecture of the fifth and sixth centuries BCE to know how either. They meet up with Howard Carter, whom Mark joshingly referes to as “you old tomb raider”. The National Authors Advisory Council on Unconscious Racism issues a Problematic Tropes Watch.
What’s so strange about the ruins doesn’t get exactly explained. Lidar, the use of pulsed laser light to map terrains, gets explained. But what’s archeologically mysterious about the four temples? Not so much. But there are some things established.
James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 19th of June, 2018. So just how rambunctiously was Rusty looking at a 2500-year-old temple and calling it cool that Mark Trail had to tell him to settle down? I’m not saying this question is interesting enough to make a fanfiction about, but maybe he was bounding around like a dog you took with you through the car wash or something.
Carter notes the carvings are not-quite-right for Mayan ruins. Perhaps, he says, the site simply predates the classical Mayan look’s development. This seems quite reasonable to me. I waited for some reason why I shouldn’t accept that explanation. Carter goes on to explain how some of the locals they hired as diggers had more sinister and pulpy ideas. “They believe this place was built by a more primitive, savage tribe — a tribe that routinely engaged in dark rituals!” And the National Authors Advisory Council on Unconscious Racism raises their advisory to a Warning. They also recommend casting a Mexican or Mayan person in a player-character role with all deliberate speed.
(To clarify my boring politics here. I don’t accuse James Allen of trying to write a racist story. I know nothing of him or his motivations beyond his comments on the Comics Curmudgeon blog. And what one can learn from reading the stories he writes. That is, what kinds of subjects and plotlines he finds interesting, or plausible, or salable. That’s not an exclusive or. That lets me say that he enjoys lost valleys and ancient peoples and forgotten civilizations like you got in late-19th and early-20th-century adventure tales. Remember one of his first weeks writing Mark Trail was Rusty Trail dreaming of being in the Lost World. And that’s fine. But those tales had a lot of late-19th and early-20th-century racism baked into them. Drawing on the elements that made those stories can summon that racism even against all the best intentions to write an exciting archeological mystery story. To put the words “primitive, savage tribe” in the mouth of the archeologist — even at the remove of “I’m just saying, I hear people saying this” — is unsettling. “Savage” is a value judgement, and a pretty ripe one coming in the pop culture of a country whose leader gloats at stealing children to lock them in dog cages. “Primitive”, too — a people’s understanding or practice of something can be primitive. Their calendar might poorly track the astronomical features it’s meant to. Their art might have few traits of specialized, focused development. Their clothing might be made more laboriously and be less useful than some available innovations would allow. Their mythology might be boring. But the people are as smart, as curious, as involved with each other, and as interested in their world as we are. If you call someone else primitive, then, remember that so are we.)
Carter can’t take Rusty and Mara inside any of the temples. But he can show them, and show Mark, some of the artefacts excavated. He mentions how much each piece is worth to any museum. And how they make a 3-D scan of every artefact before moving it to a secure facility. Also hey, it’s a bit odd that his assistant Becky, who’d had dinner with the Trails the night before, wasn’t in today. Oh and hey, did you know they’d be worth even more on the black market? Anyway, if other archeologists think you’re a bit artefact-classification mad you might be a touch out of control.
James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 12th of July, 2018. “Anyway, I’m sorry Becky can’t be here today. She was saying something about having to close on four mansions in Belize, I think? Seems weird, especially after she bought that apartment building in San Salvador two weeks ago and hasn’t even got to ride in her new private jet. Sweet woman, though.”
Mark joshingly asks if Carter’s found any gold fertility statues lately. You know, like hold on while I process Mark Trail being aware of the existence of human fertility. Sorry. You know, like their nutty old archeology professor Doctor Jones claimed to have found in some Chachapoyan death-trap temple. (GET IT? Yes! Like when you start multiball on the Indiana Jones pinball game. I’m guessing it’s in the movies too. Haven’t seen them.) And then Rusty runs across a weird little toothy, black-skinned doll. Mark identifies it as a “Zuni Fetish Doll” and yes I know that he doesn’t mean that kind of fetish but who even taught Mark Trail such a word as “fetish” exists? What were you trying to do to the world? Are you proud of yourself?
Anyway. Carter says he got the doll “the same way other people supposedly have gotten it”, delivered anonymously in a box. And, you know, he playfully leaves drinks and a cigar for it every morning. In the evening, the drinks are gone, the cigar’s smoked, and the doll’s face-down ten feet away. I never did trust that Elf on a Shelf guy. Carter figures it’s Bill and Ted having an excellent adventure by playing pranks. Anyway, that’s where the action stands near the end of July, 2018.
Sunday Animals Watch
How much nature has been in the last three months’ worth of Mark Trail Sunday informational panels? This much!
Harris’s Hawks, 6 May 2018. Not yet endangered, somehow.
Elephants, 13 May 2018. Humans love elephants so much that we’re going to kill every last one of them, apparently.
Lionesses with manes, 20 May 2018. Endangered, sure, but also so very tired of people on Twitter who want to show off they’ve heard of XX and XY chromosomes but don’t actually study genetics.
Rhinoceroses, 27 May 2018. Endangered for their horns and the way they unnerve spell-checkers.
The Au Sable River, Michigan, 3 June 2018. Hey, I’ve heard of that river! Anyway, Nestle’s probably going to steal it, but claim it wasn’t really theft because they paid the state $7.25 for the water.
Howler Monkeys, 10 June 2018. Remarkably not endangered except when it’s like 5:30 in the morning and they just keep, you know.
That Yellow Cardinal, 17 June 2018. Cardinals are probably okay; yellow, though? Huh.
Peppers, 24 June 2018. Not endangered, although hey, it turns out they could endanger you so that’s something to look forward to.
Paper Nautilus, 1 July 2018. It’s a shelled octopus. Not endangered, but wait until we figure how to pass their meat off as “dorsal cod” or something.
Iguanas, 8 July 2018. They’ve turned invasive in Florida, as though Florida didn’t have enough to deal with.
Eastern Cougar, 15 July 2018. Extinct. Good job, everyone.
Royal Flycatchers, 22 July 2018. Some species of royal flycatcher are ecologically vulnerable.
Ants, 29 July 2018. Um, OK, apparently there’s a newly-discovered southeast Asian species of ant that can explode and it seems like we should maybe have a plan in place in case it turns out most insects can just spontaneously blow up on us?
Next Week!
Wilbur Weston had been pulled back from the precipice of despair and the Pacific Ocean. But what comes after that step toward emotional healing? We’ll have a report on how everything is coming up mayonnaise next week, with Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. Also other plots.
I’m glad to be here. I’m glad to say that Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley seems to be back out of reruns and into new strip production. If I write anything after about mid-July 2018 about the strip it should be on this page. So if the story I describe clearly has resolved by the time you read this, maybe that page will help you to a more useful story summary.
Last time I checked in, Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley seemed to be running new strips on Sundays. After months of reruns every day of this week this was a good sign. It didn’t get the strip back to its full healthy serial-comic main nature. But it was evidence that Scancarelli was at least alive and well and getting the strip, in its 99th year, back on its feet. The daily strips — the ones that run a serialized, comic story — were running repeats from 2007. They’re not, anymore. It looks to me that since mid-June the comic strip has been new, telling what as best I can tell is an original story. But let me get those old stories out of the way.
Corky’s Diner. The perpetually drunk and incompetent Suds wants his dishwashing job back. The perpetually perky and incompetent Joy and Dawn want the dishwashing job. They’re having a race to see who can clean the most dishes. Joy and Dawn win by one plate, which they accidentally break while celebrating their victory. Joy and Dawn decide they don’t want the dishwashing job anymore. They thought it might be “the fast track to management”, and instead they’re washing dishes. So they quit, to try to their hand somewhere else, because they still believe in capitalism. And Suds has his job back.
New story. It started the 15th of May. It, too, started at Corky’s Diner, for a fairly graceful transition. The problem: Slim Wallet can’t sleep. The exhausted Slim does nod off at work, under a car. He bangs his head but good when he’s startled awake. He can’t stop hearing bells, a symptom baffling to everyone around him, who expected this was going to be a Sitcom Amnesia storyline. Right? I mean, doesn’t that write itself?
Still, it’s a good chance for him to get to the emergency room, and to do a couple week’s worth of old hospital/doctor jokes. “The form asks ‘sex’? I’m putting ‘none of your business’,” that sort of thing. The doctor prescribes some pills for Slim’s massive concussion. He’s shown with little bells orbiting his head even weeks later. It’s great visuals, but, like, it’s not like he’s a professional football player and we can pretend head trauma isn’t a thing.
But the ringing does go down, and he tries to get through his insomnia, for which the doctor prescribed sleep. And Slim even gets to sleep, dreaming of being on a deserted island with some Kissing Women. This dream Clovia wakes him from, unaware of the astounding thing that’s happened.
The astounding thing is that, when this storyline first ran in 2007, Slim didn’t have this dream. He had a string of things getting him out of bed, including construction next door. They put in a basketball court, causing late-night basketball games that keep him awake. This lead Slim on a long and daft storyline in which he buys a meteorite off eBay and gets a friend of his to drop it from his helicopter. The hope is to destroy the basketball court in a way that couldn’t be traced back to him as long as nobody ever tried. Not Slim’s finest moment here.
But no; from the 14th of June, the strips are — as best I can tell — new. Whatever caused Jim Scancarelli to step away from the strip in early November seems to have passed. He did not resume the storyline about Rufus courting the Widow Emma Sue and Scruffy’s Mother. That storyline left off on the news that Elam, Rufus’s rival for her affections, had proposed marriage and got turned down. I have no information about whether the storyline will resume up or what the fate of Emma Sue, Scruffy, and their Widowed Mother might be.
With the 18th of June started the current, and best I can tell, new storyline. It’s about Walt Wallet, the original star of the comic strip from 1918 — a date he mentions in his first word balloon. It started with a bit of daft old-guy cranky conspiracy theorizing that I saw confusing a lot of comics readers. Walt’s thesis: toothbrushes have more bristles than they used to. That is, from the front to the back of the toothbrush there’s more bristles. Why would toothbrush makers do that? It’s obvious. Everyone puts on enough toothpaste to cover all the bristles. So the only point to putting more bristles on is to make people buy more toothpaste. As corporate conspiracies go this is … eh, you know what? At least it would be an honest corrupt conspiracy. You would at least get clean teeth out of it. I’ll take it.
Anyway this nonsense barely gets started. Walt’s got an invitation from the Old Comics Home. This is one of the reality-breaking, slightly-magical aspects of the comic strip. The Old Comics Home is this boardinghouse for the characters of retired or cancelled comic strips. Now and then Walt Wallet visits, letting Jim Scancarelli do a bit of work with Major Hoople or Buster Brown or Little Sammy Sneeze or whoever.
The Old Comics Home is having a roast. They want him to be a speaker as they poke fun at Little Orphan Annie. “Will she think it’s funny,” asks Walt’s caretaker Gertie, and a fair question. But an important part of the behavior of the hew-mon is that your friends have license to insult you, and you accept these insults as love. In hindsight, “chimpanzees with anxiety” was a bad foundation on which to build the human species. Next time around maybe we should try basing humans on, I don’t know, “pheasants with gemütlichkeit” instead.
Walt’s preparation comes to thinking of the jokes you would think of about the comic strip. He takes notes of stuff like how Gertie thought as a girl the strip was named “Little Arf an’ Andy”. I am sure that at least one time when Walt Kelly’s Pogo was riffing on Annie they called the comic strip that. But I’m too lazy to check, so will go ahead and give the strip credit for a multifaceted allusion.
Other jokes are less deep cuts: how do the characters see without pupils? They’d bump into each other all the time! Or: Daddy Warbucks leaves Annie unsupervised an awful lot! What if Child Protective Services investigated the billionaire war-manufactures oligarch, as though law constrained the rich? Or: Little Orphan Annie had a jingle when she was on the radio; what if they changed some of the words? Well, if I understand, the point of a roast is for everyone to tell dumb insulting jokes about someone as a show of how much they love them. They don’t need to be insightful commentary that changes one’s view of things. They just have to exist.
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 18th of July, 2018. Well, I find it hilarious, but I also know exactly how this would sound as done between Frank Nelson and Jack Benny. I’m sure at some point Benny needed a tuxedo and Nelson was the only person working in any store or information desk in town. How could he be everywhere? As Nelson would put it, “either you’re lucky, or I’m un-lucky”. (And now that it’s mentioned, I wonder if the Cathy gag where every store clerk is the same woman is an echo of the Frank Nelson joke. I had always taken it to be an artistic choice that, you know, these people all serve the same story role so why distract the reader with different character models for the shoe clerk and the swimwear clerk?) Still, I say it’s a good, tight bit of insult-joke construction.
At the tuxedo rental, Walt and Skeezix run into who else but Frank Nelson. This is a good chance to share some of the insult patter conversations Nelson did so well with Jack Benny. And that’s where we’ve got to by the end of the past week.
I trust the next couple of weeks will get the roast organized. Maybe Annie will go missing and need to be found or something. And the visit to the Old Comics Home will probably show off Smokey Stover or Ignatz Mouse or so on. It seems like time with the Old Comics would be a natural feed-in to Gasoline Alley reaching its hundredth year. But it won’t reach that until the 24th of November, four months off. A serial comic can drag its story out, but something this slight for that long? It’s hard to envision.
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 15th of July, 2018. Wikipedia notes Jim Scanarelli is a bluegrass fiddler, and a prizewinner at the Old Fiddler’s Convention, which apparently has been held annually in Galax, Virginia, since 1935. To give some idea how long ago that was: 1935 was so long ago that in 1935, Jack Benny would people he was thirty-eight years old.
Meanwhile. The Sunday strips are their own little thing. Standalone gags that don’t play off the weekday continuity. Many of these have sported a nice Gasoline Alley 100th Anniversary sticker in the title panels. These came out of reruns first, and were the first signs that whatever kept Jim Scancarelli from writing and drawing the strips might pass. You can dip in and read any of them. I would swear last Sunday’s was an adapted Jack Benny-and-Phil Harris bit, but I can’t pin that down.
But the important stuff. The Old Comics Home. Old-time radio riffs. Elaborate bits of doggerel for the Sunday strips. Yeah, Jim Scancarelli is back. If I ever hear where he’d gone, I’ll pass that along to you. Thanks for checking in.
Next Week!
Mexico! Mysterious artefacts in the Yucatan! The strange and wonderful wildlife of Central America that we somehow haven’t killed yet! Maybe even a Sunday informational panel about cacomistles. All this and more in James Allen’s Mark Trail, if Nature hasn’t gone and killed us yet!
I’m glad you wonder what’s happening in Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. For me, its the middle of July 2018, and my answers reflect that. If it’s much later than July 2018 I might have a more up-to-date post. It’ll be at or near the top of this page, if there is one. Thanks for reading.
Central City newspaper publisher Britt Reid is secretly notorious racketeer The Green Hornet. But The Green Hornet is secretly on the side of justice. He sneaks into the criminal organizations that police and even FBI men cannot touch and breaks them up. And now, he’s appeared in Dick Tracy’s city, just behind Central City mobster Cyrus Topper. Reid, in his guise as a respectable newspaperman, and an unsuspecting Dick Tracy are sure they’ll get Topper. Tracy also thinks he can finally put The Green Hornet behind bars. So now sit back, pour yourself a large, hearty bowl of Post Toasties — fortified with pep shot from guns! — and enjoy this past three months’ installments of Dick Tracy and the Green Hornet.
Topper is trying to work with The Apparatus, the major crime syndicate in Tracy’s city. They suspect he’ll bring the Green Hornet in on them. It never crosses their minds that the Green Hornet and his new parter, Red Wasp, might be breaking up criminal organizations. They did, after all, just smash a counterfeiting ring. Hornet and Wasp used the Green Hornet’s supercar Black Beauty to smash it open.
The Apparatus wants the Green Hornet away from Topper’s proposed Protection-Racket-As-A-Service. I’m fuzzy on how that scheme supposed to work. The “protection” is from blackouts on the computers small-time people rent out to banks who need the processing for transfers. Is that a thing?
But I mostly doubt the details matter. The part that doesn’t doubt remembers Matty Squared. Mister Bribery’s artificial-intelligence agent is laying low in Cyber-Mexico until the heat’s off. But another digital crime thing might be a thread they’re saving for later.
Anyway, the Apparatus is confident the Green Hornet won’t muscle in, and assigns Jarman as his first protectee. Topper starts explaining to Jarman that he’ll be paying money when The Green Hornet muscles in, if we pretend guns are muscles. The Green Hornet starts explaining to Jarman that he’ll take the protection money when Dick Tracy muscles in, if we pretend guns are muscles. The Green Hornet drops a gas grenade, making his way to Black Beauty and starting a chase. Topper gives chase. Tracy, somehow, can’t get out of the gas fast enough to chase after the cars. So he instead meets with the police chief’s informant from Central City, Lafayette Austin. Lafayette Austin’s introduced like someone we should recognize. I admit I don’t. He’s not listed in John Dunning’s Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio for either Dick Tracy or the Green Hornet’s radio shows. He might be original.
Topper loses the Green Hornet. Hornet doesn’t return the favor. Kato, the Hornet’s faithful valet, has been secretly working as Topper’s valet “Skiyaki”. Topper figures to try shaking down his an old friend at Mazuma National Bank, before skipping town. But Dick Tracy, tipped off by Austin, is there. The Green Hornet, I assume tipped off by Kato, is there too. Also there: the Green Hornet’s smoke bomb and gas. Also also there: Dick Tracy’s two-way radio gas masks. In the fight, the Green Hornet clobbers Tracy and Kato knocks out Sam Catchem. But they use Tracy’s wrist-radio to summon backup, and leave the also-unconscious Topper for arrest.
Tracy gets credit for arresting Topper, and for scaring the Green Hornet back to Central City. That reported sighting’s premature, made by the Red Wasp — Lenore Case, Britt Reid’s romantic lead — with the backup Black Beauty. It should give Reid time to clear out of town gracefully.
And that, with the 27th of May, closes the Dick Tracy/Green Hornet crossover adventure. The 28th begins a new one, one with many parts moving together. The first part is Sawtooth, contract killer last seen in the strip around Christmas, not-killing Dick Tracy. Mister Bribery, his contractee, micromanaged the murder. You freelancers out there know how it is. Mister Bribery is, from prison, offering $25,000 for the murder of his former pet scientist Ygor Glitch. Sawtooth is up for it, and what the heck, figures he can try killing Dick Tracy again and see what happens.
Meanwhile Diet Smith and the Moon Governor have put together the “Moon Compound”. It’s a museum exhibit meant to explain the Lunarians to the people of Earth who have nothing to fear from their advanced science, and secret colony living in an undisclosed location, and control over magnetism, and cute stubby little antennas, and power to dispense electric shocks severe enough to render adults unconscious, and close ties to the industrialist billionaire Diet Smith who himself enjoys confidential ties with a police officer who has an 87-year track record of extrajudicial killings of suspects in often fantastically gruesome ways. The unwashed masses can have such weird, inexplicable fears!
Honeymoon Tracy and her friend Ugly Crystal — Mister Bribery’s niece — bond over their strange family experiences. Honeymoon’s half-Lunarian. Her mother, the original Moon Maiden, was killed long ago. A second Moon Maiden, Mysta Chimera, surgically created by human superscience from the amnesiac daughter of a mob boss, has joined the strip and loosely Honeymoon’s family. Please do try to keep up. Ugly Crystal doesn’t know her father, and Honeymoon wonders whether anyone could do something about that mystery. If she only had an in with some scientific superdetective or something.
So at a midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dick Tracy’s partner Sam Catchem — uh. Sorry. I have to go lie down a moment. I don’t know what’s even real anymore.
So at a midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dick Tracy’s partner Sam Catchem runs into Sawtooth. Catchem’s there for the fun of it. Sawtooth is there on business: he knew Glitch was a Picture-Head, as they call Rocky Horror Picture Show fans. So he went where he knew Glitch would be, and eats him. I mean, I’m fairly sure that’s what I’m meant to infer. “It was as if some huge predator caught him by the throat” could mean many things, I suppose.
Tracy’s able to identify the victim, and the perpetrator, and who likely ordered the hit. This is thanks to his scientific superdetective work of having Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo character Inspector Ishida call up and tell him what’s going on. So, y’know, never under-develop your intelligence network. (I haven’t read Usagi Yojimbo but I hear good stuff about it. I’m just going by what the captions, complete with copyright notices that I haven’t seen under other crossover guest stars, tell me.) Also Sawtooth might have given the scheme away by warning Catchem he was coming for Dick Tracy.
On to the search for Sawtooth. With special guest Lafayette Austin, who’s introduced with such emphasis one wonders if they feared we wouldn’t notice him. Sawtooth and his assistant/boat-anchor Grimm are hiding out in a hotel. Grimm is losing all their cash betting on horses. Sawtooth is figuring to kill Tracy and then head out of town. Sawtooth looks to The Pouch for tips.
The Pouch, by the way, is an information-dealer who works the city zoo as a balloon vendor. His backstory is he used to be a circus-show Fat Man, and lost almost all that weight. He took the flabby excesses of skin and sewed them into numerous closable pouches with with to be a courier. In the 70s, he used a popcorn popper to kill a guy and got away undetected. So remember: if you aren’t perpetually going “Wait, what?” you’re not reading authentic Dick Tracy.
Okay. Now stuff is coming together fast. The Moon Compound exhibit is getting ready to open. Honeymoon and Ugly Crystal enjoy a tour, under the supervision of Mysta and some of the minor Lunarians. Grimm loses the last of his and Sawtooth’s money as Sawtooth wants to check out. Meanwhile, Dick Tracy is thrilled to be entering his sourdough bread in — I’m sorry, I have to go lie down a bit again.
Right. Dick Tracy is baking sourdough bread for a charity banquet. And he’s got people ready to pick up his many fine loaves of enthusiastically-baked bread. The bread-transport guys arrived Saturday. They’re Sawtooth and Grimm, in disguise.
So. Yes. There is a lot that’s been happening the last two months, and it’s not all clearly a single unified thread. This was, to me, a bit hard to follow day-by-day. But it’s quite clear when read in bulk like this. Tracy continues to have a lot of his investigative triumphs come by people just thinking to tell him the plot. There have been a couple references and guest appearances, even besides the Green Hornet’s.
The most noteworthy of those was Michael Patterson from Lynn Johnston’s For Better Or For Worse poking in back in late June. That was a great reminder of the old days on Usenet group rec.arts.comics.strips and every other comics-discussion group. We’d gather to talk about how awful the prose of his in-universe award-winning super-novel was. And how nasty the strip was to the upstairs neighbors, who were painted as villains without actually doing anything worse than not liking Michael. And how much everybody hated Elizabeth getting yanked out of her life and forced to marry Granthony. And how nastily Lynn Johnson treated Granthony’s first wife because — gasp — she didn’t want to have a child, but did anyway after Granthony whined her into it. This is way too much space given to a side appearance like this, but do please understand. My Gen-X cohort has endured many betrayals in our lifetime. One of the most lingering was the last couple years of For Better Or For Worse. Complaining about it was such a glorious experience while it lasted. I mean, it’s okay talking about how stuff in Funky Winkerbean doesn’t work like that. But it didn’t have the epic fall from what we thought-at-the-time-was-greatness-and-maybe-kinda-wasn’t that For Better Or For Worse did.
Anyway. Topper’s failed cyber-protection racket might feed into artificial intelligence Matty Squared. Still no developments on B O Plenty’s house being haunted. And Denny Lien was kind enough to explain a bit of Diet Smith’s strange mention of a time machine machine last December. Apparently a while back Smith had been working on a time machine, in the hopes of saving his long-dead son Brilliant Smith. The machine wasn’t practical. But the thing about a time machine is the development and testing cycle of a working one can be as short as you like, once you take it seriously. Those are the major outstanding plot threads that stand out to me. Well, that and whatever it is we’re supposed to make of Lafayette Austin. Some of the GoComics.com commenters have suggested that would be “Shaggy from Scooby-Doo”. All right.
This is not a further What’s Going On In The Phantom post. It’s got that tag, but just because I wanted to talk about a couple strips from the Comics Kingdom Vintage page, which is currently running a story from 1951. If you want updates on the current Sunday or weekday continuities I’ll have them at this page, when they’re ready to go. (Barring a surprise or interruption my next update on current Phantom strips should be a Sunday-continuity update around the second Sunday in August.)
But thanks for reading on anyway. So this strip turned up in Comics Kingdom’s vintage comics. It’s from a story in 1951 where for reasons I honestly don’t remember, the Ghost Who Walks’ then-girlfriend, Diana Palmer, is slated to swim Whirlpool Channel. And the baddies are trying to prevent her success, I think to settle some gambling debts or something. Their earlier attempts to stop her have failed, so they’ve fallen back on the old kidnap-the-Phantom-while-releasing-man-eating-sharks-into-Whirlpool-Channel trick. (Imagining Maxwell Smart mentioning how that’s the fourth-largest whirlpool channel he’s ever seen.) And this is where it’s gotten:
Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy’s The Phantom for the 1st of June, 1951, and rerun the 10th of July, 2018. Yes, The Phantom asked where on earth they even got two man-eating sharks (one for Diana, one for him). Dice’s funny but correct answer: ‘Where do you usually get sharks? Outa the ocean!’
Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy’s The Phantom for the 2nd of June, 1951, and rerun the 11th of July, 2018. I mean, I love spouting nonsense and seeing who’ll bite. But my mind would probably have gone to how they needed woman-eating sharks and these are able to distinguish male from female and so preferentially eat males that it’s silly to send them after Diana.
And yes, I understand, that in a dire fix like this the hero will say anything to distract, confuse, and thus take by surprise the baddies. And that if you say anything authoritatively enough, quickly enough, people will at least not immediately ponder whether what you’re saying makes a lick of sense. But I truly love that the bad guys are at least momentarily buying into the premise that of course The Phantom will bring to their attention that they’ve gone and brought the wrong kind of sharks to send to eat his girlfriend. He might not want his someday-fiancee to die, but to let them go off being wrong about their death-trap design? Unthinkable. It is such a me thing to do, honestly. My love has had to have words with me about this, albeit in less dire situations.
Glad to see you’re interested in Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant. If it’s much later than about September 2018 when you read this, I’ve probably written a new essay bringing things further up to date. It should be at or near the top of this page.
Prince Valiant.
15 April – 8 July 2018.
Prince Valiant has been absent from Prince Valiant lately. He’s busy working his way back from the mystic East. We’ve instead been following Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles. Her problem: a populist aristocrat name of Krios is leading an anti-foreigner movement. He wants to limit all trade to a port that it so happens land he owns would be perfect for the purpose. Aleta’s sent her daughter Valeta to ask questions about the murder of Ingolf, first mate of a Norse trading vessel. It seems someone in Krios’s family killed Ingolf, and possibly two Misty Islanders. Zulfa, rival for Valeta’s interest in Ingolf’s captain Haraldr. She arranges a secret rendezvous with Ingolf’s girlfriend’s brother. No, nobody just has a simple relationship to anyone else in this story, thanks for asking.
Zulfa deploys her wiles on Antonio. By ‘her wiles’ I mean ‘alcohol’. He empties out some of his many ominous secrets. His father’s ambitions. His sister Andrinoa’s affair. His brother Drakon’s doing of terrible things. How Ingolf was to be on Krios’s island tomorrow night. He passes out as Drakon enters. Krios ordered Drakon to make his brother’s “indiscretion” disappear. She does, after smashing open the window lattice and leading Drakon on a chase across the tiled roofs of Krios’s estate.
Aleta asks Krios to come over and answer just one more question. Given the lock of hair found with him, and the servants found killed with him: what’s the deal? Krios declares he can’t keep the secret any longer. It’s his daughter. Andrina killed Ingolf in a “fit of passion” and throws her at the Queen’s feet.
But Antero steps up. He declares he can’t abandon his sister, not until he’s sure “she is being treated in the manner she deserves”. Antero promises that Andrina has a sick mind, but bears no guilt. And that he has something to share with Zulfa. It’s about the mysterious meeting on Krios’s island that Ingolf was to attend. He does, and returns to his father’s home, where he’s shut in.
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for the 1st of July, 2018. Squid fishing is an actual thing by the way, and they are mostly nocturnal. So the fleet makes sense, don’t worry about it. Personally, I think this is too many fishers going after squid for my lifetime rate of squid consumption. But that’s just my tastes.
That evening, Krios and some men slip out of town, as part of the nocturnal-squid fishing fleet. Krios makes his way to the island. There he rendevous with General Vialius, who brings startling news: all this is happening during the time of the Emperor Justinian. I never knew the era of Prince Valiant was pinned down to a century, never mind to within a couple decades. Justinian also sends his greetings to Krios.
Hi, readers interested in the 250th weekday-continuity storyline of long-running superhero comic strip The Phantom. I have no idea what that story is going to be. I’m writing this in late June 2018, in the midst of storyline number 249, A Reckoning With The Nomad. When story 250 starts — or other stories do — I’ll try to cover them, as well as any Sunday-continuity stories — with essays at this link. Thank you.
Where was the story in early April, last time I checked in? A failed airport bomber offers to reveal the identity of The Nomad, international terrorist and menace to The Phantom since 2011. The Phantom knows who The Nomad is: he’s Eric Sahara, father of his daughter’s roommate at Briarson School in New York City. The Phantom figures some kind of legal and political chaos will follow the Nomad’s naming, if he is truly publicly identified. So he figures to break into The Nomad’s compound and abduct him. He saw the Nomad from afar, acting strangely non-fleeing for someone who could expect authorities to be closing in on him. And that’s where we had been.
The Phantom gets past the security guards the way superheroes always get past security guards. Mostly with a bunch of well-placed punches that don’t attract other sentries. He grabs The Nomad out of bed. The terrorist cringes, whimpering and begging for mercy, and tells an incredible story, backed up by flashbacks on-camera. He’s not Eric Sahara. He’s just a Parisian man, abducted, surgically altered, and forced at gunpoint to be a decoy Fake Nomad. No-Nomad? That’ll suffice; I missed the fellow’s actual name. The Real Nomad’s plan succeeded. The Phantom’s trapped in a jungle bungalow, surrounded by armed guards. Who, you know, weren’t working too hard to stop his breaking in, earlier in the paragraph. Ah. No-Nomad runs, begging for his life, telling his captors how they don’t need him anymore now that their plan has worked. They murder him.
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 3rd of May, 2018. While telling his story the No-Nomad explains how he had to act as if he were giving stern speeches and to just blather on about anything. He tells of how he’d recite fairy tales, and The Phantom thinks how he has to learn how to read lips. This startled me with the discovery that The Phantom couldn’t read lips already. I assumed that was part of the hypercompetent superhero starter kit of powers and abilities. Considering what he does manage to do in this story it’s startling to learn of an actual definitely-established thing you can fake him out on.
They’re ready to murder The Phantom too. Also his pet wolf, Devil. And they have an enviable tactical advantage. They surround the bungalow’s exits. They’re stocked up with 800 million jillion kerspillion rounds of ammunition and grenades and rocket-propelled grenades and missiles and neutron bombs and photon torpedoes and Starkillers and a couple right nasty rubber bands flung from between their fingers. Plus I bet they call him nasty names too. Those really hurt.
So it’s a well-organized trap. Their one mistake: they left a mattress in the No-Nomad’s bedroom. It’s cover. It lets him deflect a rocket-propelled grenade so as to blow open a new way out, an action both cool and absurd. (This broke the ability of one of Comics Curmudgeon’s commenters to suspend disbelief. I understand. I’m still along for the ride, but I would also have watched the Mythbusters episode where they tested this one.) Phantom and Devil race through the new opening. They escape The Nomad’s underlings who somehow fear they’ll be punished for letting The Phantom escape the death trap. The Phantom decides, yeah, he’s definitely going to take advertising from that silver-threaded mattress-kit delivery service on his pop-culture hangout podcast, The Ghost Who Walks Out Of Bad Movies. (Highly recommended if you need some more stuff to listen to. He and Mandrake the Magician have this great running gag of pretending to be Confused Johnny Hazard not understanding the exposition no matter how simple they make it.)
The Ghost Who Brings A Mattress To A Rocket-Propelled Grenade Fight is scathed, though. He unwisely pulls some shrapnel from his neck, opening up an artery. There’s nothing for it. He rides Hero, his horse, back to Skull Cave, while keeping as much pressure as he can on it. (This is another point that shattered a Comics Curmudgeon’s suspension of disbelief. I’m more sympathetic to this.) He makes it to Guran, though, and emergency surgery. Also a blood transfusion that surely will not result in his no longer being able to turn into The Incredible Hulk.
That’s the night The Phantom has had. Other people have had it worse. The failed airport bomber started to name The Nomad. His police motorcade came under attack, live on cable news. Other people had it superficially well. But even they have fraughts of danger all around them. Eric Sahara turned up at his daughter’s school. He plans to disappear. But before that he plans to spend a day with his daughter and, what the heck, her roommate. This makes a neat mirror of the day The Phantom spent with the young women at the start of this story. He doesn’t seem to have anything particularly devious planned for The Phantom’s daughter. But plans change, especially if he comes to realize who she is.
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 20th of June, 2018. So to nitpick the plausibility here: did The Nomad know already that his rather plausible trap for The Phantom had failed? He’d have to feel like a real dink if he went to all the trouble to set up a new identity only to learn The Phantom had died of blood loss in some remote part of Bangallan rainforest anyway. Or is he just assuming that however good his traps are they aren’t going to work on The Phantom? Or is he just taking a belt-and-suspenders approach, doing his level best to kill The Phantom and also to take on a new super-criminal identity that’ll take a few years to unravel?
And that’s the major developments the last several months. As the shortness of this essay indicates it hasn’t been a dense plot. It’s had plenty of action, and intrigue. It’s just been a lot of stuff happening on one very busy night for everyone.
Next Week!
Palace intrigue! Border panics! Murder and coverups. Trade disputes. There’s not very much of Prince Valiant the last couple months in Mark Schulz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant. But I’ll do my best to talk about what is there instead.
Also at least some of you are wondering what’s going on in Alley Oop. This is my recap for basically spring of 2018 and it should get you well-grounded for at least another couple weeks. If it’s past about August 2018, that might not be a big help. But an essay at or near the top of this page might be. Good luck. Let me know if it doesn’t do anything for you.
Alley Oop.
1 April – 23 June 2018.
So I left Oop somewhere near Philadelphia on the 31st of July, 1781. OK, Jack Bender and Carole Bender did, but still. Alley Oop and Wizer were sent there by well-meaning rich idiot M T Mentis. Mentis had responded to Oop’s transport-request beacon. He didn’t notice how all the screens in Dr Wonmug’s Time Lab read “DESTINATION: JULY 31, 1781”. This is one of those subtle big events in history. It’s when General George Washington commissioned Alexander Hamilton to command several regiments. Great time to toss in some confused Moovians.
Private Isaac Holmes, carrying Hamilton’s commission, runs into Oop and Wizer. In the collision both the sealed commission and Oop’s time-signalling necklace fly loose. Holmes suspects spies, or something, anyway. But they come under enemy fire, and by the time they find some quiet they realize the letter’s gone. Oop and Wizer start to worry they’ve changed history, a risk that hasn’t been a major concern in the strip so far, best I know.
Meanwhile in 2018, Mentis tells Wonmug about Oop’s signal. And that Oop isn’t there. Also that maybe it’s kind of because he had set the time machine to 1781 because he was thinking about Alexander Hamilton, “you know … since he’s so popular now”. Wonmug gets a Revolutionary War outfit from somewhere I seem to have missed, and figures to set off to try fixing whatever’s gone wrong. He leaves Mentis at the Time Lab with orders to stop breaking all time and space already.
Meanwhile in 1781, a desperate Holmes enlists Oop and Wizer to help recover the letter. They borrow outfits from a couple wounded Continentals. Wizer applies some healing potion in trade. And they get a funny little training session about how to load and fire a musket. This pays off a bit; later Oop’s able to tell someone a fresh-discharged musket is harmless except as a club. Oop’s more into using the thing as a club which, fair enough. He also gets the bayonet, too. Oop, Wizer, and Holmes follow the tracks of the letter-thief and find the shaded figure in Redcoat custody. Oop gets a daring raid on this small party started. But that’s broken up when Dr Wonmug materializes right in the midst of things. The Redcoats and their captive get away in the confusion.
Wonmug knows what the letter must have been. Hearing that it’s Alexander Hamilton’s commission orders makes Holmes suspect spies. Fair on him. Also at this point Mentis wandered over to ask me why I go off on him being the dumb one when Wonmug, with 80 years of experience at this, is acting like that. Fair enough. Wonmug says that the British spy to actually watch for was likely James Moody, who’d intercept Continental couriers. I’m going ahead and assuming that’s legit history because I don’t have the time to research that myself. Ah, yes, Moody was born in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey. I’ve been there. Story Book Land’s a great little kiddie amusement park there. He wrote one of the few memoirs of the Revolution from the Loyalist perspective. Hm.
Jack Bender and Carole Bender’s Alley Oop for the 27th of May, 2018. … So I guess that one of the Redcoats should be identified as James Moody. But that hasn’t been directly established by someone who could know, on-screen. It’s just Wonmug’s surmise so far unless I’ve missed a reference.
Oop and Wizer chase after the Redcoats and their prisoner. Wonmug and Holmes hang back long enough for Mentis to pop in from 2018. Mentis asks why they don’t make a copy of the letter, since Wonmug knows its contents and all. Wonmug says there’s no time; they need to go in and help Oop in his fight and recover the real letter.
Mentis time-transports away. But that’s all right. Oop’s already clobbered the Redcoats into unconsciousness. This lets him recover the time-signal amulet, but the letter is still missing, as is the prisoner. Given the hopeless muddle this all seems to be, Wonmug decides to go with forging the commission after all. They race to deliver the letter and, along the way, find Oop’s time-signal amulet again. This isn’t a continuity error in the story; Oop notices, he already has his recovered amulet. Wonmug figures to worry about it later because, yeah. Mentis is right. I shouldn’t be calling him the strip’s dunderhead. In fairness, Wonmug’s had a bunch of crazy stuff happen today.
Also his forgery doesn’t work for even a second. Alexander Hamilton may be kind of a dope w/r/t William Duer, but he knows legitimate commissions are going to have a proper seal. Hamilton orders Holmes, Oop, and Wizer arrested when the mysterious Contental prisoner races in with the real letter. Also a startling revelation: the prisoner was M T Mentis all along. Mentis explains to Hamilton that when the first letter was lost, his friends made that duplicate. But here’s the original, with the seal, and the content seems to match so everything’s all right with history and all?
Jack Bender and Carole Bender’s Alley Oop for the 17th of June, 2018. But really isn’t the amazing thing that Wonmug doesn’t doubt he would be able to plausibly forge George Washington’s handwriting and style of composition to a person who had served as his aide-de-camp for years? Even by the standards of white guy scientist types that’s some remarkable self-confidence.
With that straightened out, Mentis starts explaining to Oop, Wonmug, and Wizer what’s going on in Alley Oop. It turns out while Wonmug and Oop and all tromped around whatever they were doing in 1989, Mentis was paying attention to Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He didn’t use the time machine to run off. He used it to pick up the commission right when it was first lost. And thus was the mysterious shadowy figure that set Oop and company were pursuing.
So, this story. I’m surprised by the direct talk about the chance Wonmug’s Time Lab might change history. My impression was the comic strip had always taken that as something not to worry about, at least since I started reading it with attention. But then it’s also only in the forerunner to this story that they worried about time travellers bringing diseases. It looks as if they’re setting up one of those closed-time-loop adventures. These can be a particularly satisfying sort of time-travel story. Also the rare Alley Oop story where time travel more than how they get from one story to another. And, yes, I’m glad that it’s given Mentis the chance to recover some needed intelligence points. It’s a pity that Wonmug lost a bunch along the way. But he’s got some to spare. And I am also impressed by the grain of historical detail being put into the minor parts. Apparently there was an Isaac Holmes, too, who’d be a prisoner of war in Philadelphia. This might be a spoiler. I’m not sure this is the person who’s made a character here; the Wikipedia article on him doesn’t list things like when he was a prisoner or how, precisely the historic Holmes served in the army. There’s room to not worry about it all.
So MyComicsShop.com has decided my love needs to buy something from them. And they’re advertising characters my love kind of knows without ever having read, like Casper the Friendly Ghost, or other members of the Harvey Comics A-Team that my love has never heard of, such as Little Lotta, Hot Stuff, or Baby Huey [*] and I’m doing my best to explain any of them. (“Well, Little Dot is a girl who likes things to have dots on them, or have things that look like dots, and she had three books with her name in the title that ran for a collective 279 issues, each with like three or four stories in them, and she was in other books with her own stories too. Yes, she’s one of their best characters.”) And this got me looking into their theoretically available Harvey Comics and this lead me to a series that I guess that I knew existed but had never looked at, which is this:
As the watermark says, this is from MyComicsShop.com, and I’m including the image because I do not know anything except showing you it that gets you the whole thing. I tried describing it for the alt-text for this and all my attempts come up short. I apologize to people just reading the text version because it’s just … I mean … the heck?
But here. I can at least take this cognitive burden off of you: Daisy and her Pups, based on the lovable dogs of the Blondie comics, started off with the issue labelled #21. The next several issues were labelled numbers 22, 23, 23, and 25. Then they reverted to issue number 6, and went on to 7 and 8 and so on, ending at issue number 18. Also there’s an issue 27 in there somewhere. This is all for good solid logical reasons that I can’t repeat because every time I try to explain them my hair bleeds.
[*] I exaggerate. My love is familiar with the existence of Baby Huey but mostly because Zippy the Pinhead sometimes gets on weird tears about him.
![[ Spider-Man and Iron Fist confer on a hospital rooftop. ] Iron Fist: 'The next time you shoot your sticky web stuff at me...' Spider-Man: 'I don't like the idea of our teaming up any more than you do.' Iron Fist: 'In that case, you REALLY don't like it!' Spider-Man: 'But if we work separately, we'll only be duplicating our efforts.' Iron Fist: 'What makes you think YOU can track down this so-called 'Golden Claw' as fast as I could?' Spider-Man: 'Hey, I've put away Dr Octopus, Green Goblin --- a whole slew of bad guys! Who've you got on your resume, a couple of jaywalkers?' Iron Fist: 'Did you ever hear of THE HAND?' Spider-Man: 'What? A guy called FIST fought somebody called THE HAND? I'll bet you gave him a knuckle sandwich, right?' Iron Fist: 'Now you're really beginning to ANNOY me!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/stan-lee-larry-lieber-alex-saviuk_spider-1-july-2018.gif)
![[ As Peter tries to evade the three swordswomen attacking him ... ] Suwan; 'Someone has felled the brash reporter!' (He's hit by a very large metal ball.) Golden Claw: 'You left me NO CHOICE but to do it myself.' Swordswoman: 'Golden Claw!' Suwan: 'Grand-Uncle!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/stan-lee-larry-lieber-alex-saviuk_spider-man_30-july-2018.gif)
![[ Desperate to locate the comic strip home of the 'pretty girl' character who's wandered into Zippy's domain, Griffy ransacks 'Apartment 3-G' ] Lu Ann: 'I don't know WHY but I have this terrible feeling I'm being ... satirized! Now please leave.' Griffy: 'But -- we work for the same syndicate!' [ Visits 'Judge Parker' ] Griffy: 'She may be in copyright violation!' Parker: 'I don't see a SEARCH WARRANT, Mister --- I'll see you in court!' [ And tracks down 'Mark Trail' ] Griffy: 'No, she doesn't have an ear tag or a tufted forelock.' Mark Trail: 'Sorry, Chief --- if she's not tagged or tufted, I can't help you!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/bill-griffith_zippy-the-pinhead_20-august-2002.gif)
![[INT STEVE'S APARTMENT BUILDING - NIGHT] Clarke: 'OK! OK! Will you stop trying to rip my arm off?!' Spencer: 'It's called a hammerlock. Get to know it unless you start talking.' Clarke: 'All right! I ... ow! I'm talking! After Godiva's death, they came right for me. They demanded I tell them everything ... so I just started giving names. I remembered your fight in the restaurant, so I told them about you. I swear, it's as simple as that ... until you came here and made a plausible connection between the two of us.' Huerta: 'I can't believe Boy Toy has a point.' Clarke: 'But I'm through talking to the cops, and you're not the only one Godiva used ... '](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/francesco-marciuliano-mike-manley_judge-parker_22-july-2018.gif)
![[ INT STEVE CLARKE'S APARTMENT BUILDING - DAY ] Spencer: 'Ronnie, listen --- ' Huerta: 'YOU listen!' Spencer: 'I can explain --- ' Huerta: 'What more could there possibly be to tell? I thought you were just some pathetic rich girl who couldn't get food orders right --- and you still can't --- but it turns out your entire childhood was the Artful Dodger with Krav Maga! And your ex-best-friend was killed by the Drug Lord of Vienna! And your family is friends with some supermodel assassin! Plus, let's not forget your sister was kidnapped by some crazed half-aunt no one ever heard of before and probably will never hear from again, because why should anything make any sense?!? AND I'm surrounded by three corpses. So can we just go now, Neddy?!' Spencer: 'Yeah, let's ... let's leave before anyone else decides to show up.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/francesco-marciuliano-mike-manley_judge-parker_9-september-2018.gif)
![[ Wizer refuses to share the cure for the common cold with Doc. ] Wizer: 'I guess I deserved that, but I wish you'd ... ' Oop: 'Give it up, Doc! I wanna go home NOW!' (ZANG!) Wizer: 'It's nice to be back where no one is shooting at us for a change!' Oop: 'You can say that again!' Moo guard: 'Oh no! The aliens are back!' (And he throws a rock, hitting Oop in the head.) Moo Guard: 'King Guz, come quick! Volzon's back!' Guz: 'Send the word to everybody! Prepare for attack!' Oop: 'I've got a bone t'pick with you, Guz!' Guz: 'Attack! It's the pit for you two, whoever you are!' (Moovians all over throw sticks and rocks and arrows at Oop.) Oop: 'That it! I'm leavin'!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/jack-bender-carole-bender_alley-oop_19-august-2018.jpeg)
![Jay: 'I've been thinking about Dafne all day, when I should be thinking about Valley Tech.' Trumpet Editor: 'I hear you, Jay.' [ At the jailhouse interview ] Dafne: 'Do you concede that you were a repeat drunk driver?' Del Bader: 'No! I hadn't been convicted yet on my first arrest. I got railroaded.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/neal-rubin-rod-whigham_gil-thorp_23-june-2018.gif)
![Kevin: 'I'm glad for Ryan, but how come he's getting recruited and I'm not?' Gil Thorp: 'Because unlike you, Kevin, he had the foresight to be a left-handed pitcher.' Kevin: 'Good point ... but I'm still gonna take it out on Madison.' [ Sure enough: two homers, four RBI! ]](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/neal-rubin-rod-whigham_gil-thorp_18-june-2018.gif)
![[ Heather's visit with the Morgans winds down. ] June: 'We'll miss you terribly, you know.' Heather: 'And I you --- but I need to make a fresh start.' Rex: 'We understand and wish you and little Phoenix the best of luck.' Sarah: 'I want Phoenix to have Mr Fuzzy.' (She hands a small teddy bear up to Heather.) Heather: 'How sweet of you, Sarah --- I gave him to you when *you* were a baby.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/terry-beatty_rex-morgan-md_16-june-2018.gif)
![[ At the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas ] Hank Jr: 'We'd better get back to our hotel, Pop. You'll need your nap before the wedding.' Hank Sr: 'I suppose so. Wouldn't want to snooze during the nuptials --- but let me finish this game first. I'm going for a personal record.' Hank Jr, picking up his cell phone: 'Okay. I'll get it on video so you can relive the moment.' Hank Sr: 'That's my boy!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/terry-beatty_rex-morgan-md_10-august-2018.gif)
![Minion, leaving the rec room: '[ Belching ] Anyone want anything from the kitchen?' The Phantom, thinking: 'He's not coming back, but it's the thought that counts.' [ A Bad Man Alone With The Phantom, in the kitchen. ] Minion, chopping up fruits for a smoothie: o/`I .. don't ... like your ... lit-tle games .. o/` (He runs the blender, and pours the smoothie.) The Phantom: 'That looks good.' (The Minion gasps, and The Phantom clobbers him. The Phantom sneaks up on the rec room, drinking the smoothie.)](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/tony-depaul-jeff-weigel_the-phantom_10-june-2018.gif)
![The Boss: 'Hey! Let me get SHOES on my feet!' Phantom: 'No need ... they have prison shoes where you're going.' [ Criminal likes the law for once. ] Boss: 'It's not right! I --- I can't be extradited to Bangalla! Rhodian law says I can't!' Phantom: 'Are you a citizen of Rhodia?' Boss: 'Maybe I am, maybe I'm not. The point is --- you don't know I'm not!' Phantom: 'No difference to me either way ... file a complaint with your friend, The Rat!' (As they approach the garage.) Phantom: 'He's right over ... ' (He's not there.) '... Here?' (The Rat clobbers The Phantom with a shovel.)](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/tony-depaul-jeff-weigel_the-phantom_22-july-2018.gif)
![[ Back to GRIFFY, on his quest --- he enters the MARY WORTH strip! ] Jeff, on the phone: 'What should I do? There's this oddly drawn guy here, looking for a missing girl!' Griffy: 'I need so see Mary!' [ Soon ] Griffy: 'Morning, Ms worth! I'm from th' Zippy comic! Can we talk?' Mary Worth: 'Young man, you need help, all right. Th'kind only a MENTAL HEALTH professional can provide!' (Griffy, thinking) 'Uh-oh! I'm frozen in place and unable to speak under th'withering gaze of Mary Worth!!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/bill-griffith_zippy-the-pinhead_19-august-2018.gif)
![[ At Karaoke ] Wilbur: 'SING in front of all of you? No, I can't!' Mary Worth: 'You can! We're here to cheer you on!' Iris: 'Let it out! We know you want to!' Professor Papagoras: 'What have you got to lose?'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/karen-moy-june-brigman_mary-worth_31-may-2018.gif)
![[ When Brnady reveals why she doesn't drink ] Brandy: 'I saw firsthand what the misuse of alcohol and drugs can do to a person you love.' Tommy: 'I'm sorry about what you went through growing up.' Brandy: 'Sigh. It affected my trust in people. My father became a different person when he drank and used drugs! He beat my mother ... and he cursed at me! When he suddenly left us ... we struggled to make ends meet! That's why I don't drink or do drugs! Just the thought of it makes me sick!' [ Tommy feels ashamed of his past. ] Tommy, with that deer-in-headlights stare, thinks: 'GULP!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/karen-moy-june-brigman_mary-worth_15-july-2018.gif)
![[ As Mary returns from shopping ] (Her grocery bag breaks open, with cans of tomatoes falling out.) Mary Worth: 'OH NO!' [ She's offered a helping hand! ] Tommy, picking up cans: 'I GOT IT!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/karen-moy-june-brigman_mary-worth_24-july-2018.gif)
![[ The truck arrives in front of a fairly tall, multi-tiered, complex Mayan-ish pyramid covered in plants; there's a huge grimacing, fanged face sculpture at the lower right corner of it. ] Truck Driver: 'Well, here we are --- I told you. Kind of creepy!' Rusty: 'WOW! Dad, look! How cool is that?' Mark Trail: 'Settle down, Rusty!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/james-allen_mark-trail_19-june-2018.gif)
![[ LIGHTS OUT! Everybody dance! ] (Dick Tracy and Topper shoot at each other. Green Hornet shoots someone with his gas gun.) Topper's Chauffer: 'BOSS! My gun's in the car!' (Kato kicks the chauffer. Dick Tracy and Green Hornet face each other.)](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/joe-staton-mike-curtis-shelly-peger-shane-fisher_dick-tracy_20-may-2018.jpeg)
![[ Dick Tracy meets a new ally. ] The Chief: 'Lafayette Austin is from Central City. I pounded a beat there before I came here.' Austin: 'Pleased to meet you, Tracy! I was one of his informants back then. When I learned Topper had come to your city, I followed in case Pat needed help.' [ ELSEWHERE ] Red Wasp/Lenore Case: 'Chief! We've got word from Kato!' Green Hornet, reading the message: 'Topper is escalating his plan. Will keep you apprised.' [ ELSEWHERE ] Topper, crying out to Kato/Shiyaki: 'Shiyaki! Fix me a drink!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/joe-staton-mike-curtis-shelly-peger-shane-fisher_dick-tracy_13-may-2018.jpeg)
![[ AN UNEXPECTED GUEST AT THE 'ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW' ] Sam Catchem: 'Sawtooth!' Sawtooth (his mouth bleeding): 'Sam Catchem! You're a cop!' Grimm: 'I've got him!' Sawtooth (winding up a punch) 'Tell your buddy Dick Tracy I'm coming for him next!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/joe-staton-mike-curtis_dick-tracy_18-june-2018.gif)
![[ Diana starts her long, hard swim across Whirlpool Channel. ] Dice: 'She's off! Okay, Scratch, cut the net [ to release the sharks ]!' The Phantom, thinking: 'How can I stop this? Hmm --- ' Aloud: 'WAIT, you fools! Those are sand sharks! They won't go near a human being!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/lee-falk-wilson-mccoy_the-phantom_1-july-1951.gif)
![Dice: 'You say those sharks aren't man-eaters? The skipper said they were! How do you know?' The Phantom: 'See the fins --- and those markings! Whoever sold you those sharks pulled a fast one!' [ A splash of salt water catches Scratch by surprise --- his gun drops for a moment. ] Phantom: 'Why, everybody knows the difference!' [ But a moment is all The Phantom needs! ] (He slugs Scratch.)](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/lee-falk-wilson-mccoy_the-phantom_2-july-1951.gif)
![In the house of Krios, Zulfa has pulled secrets from the drunken Antero --- but as she tries stealthily to depart, Drakon leaps from the shadows! Antero's brother is strong and merciless but doesn't know that Zulfa is not merely a court minion, but also a skilled warrior. [ She hits him with a small table stand. ] The blow to his head momentarily stuns the huge man and allows the Amazigh woman to break his grip and dash to the latticed window at the far end of the gallery, which she smashes to flinders ... before responding decisively to the sound of footsteps close behind. [ She throws another stand at him. ] Then she is out the window, where she is confronted with the uncertain footing of the tiled roof below! NEXT: A slippery slope.](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/mark-schultz-thomas-yeates_prince-valiant_13-may-2018.gif)
![[ 2018 ] Wonmug: 'Why would the transport be set for the Revolutionary War?' Mentis: 'I guess I forgot I'd been researching that as a trip we might take to find out more about Alexander Hamilton (gulp) ... you know, since he's so popular now.' Wonmug: 'POPULAR? You must be joking!' [ 1781 ] Alley Oop: 'I promise you we're not a threat to you!' Holmes: 'Well ... I guess I'll have to trust you, since I must deliver this urgent letter from General Washington! ... WHERE'S THE LETTER? YOU MADE ME LOSE THE LETTER!' Oop: 'Relax! It's just a letter!' Holmes: 'JUST A LETTER? LOSING THAT LETTER COULD MAKE US LOSE THE WAR!' Oop, whispering to Wizer: 'Oops!' Wizer, whispering: 'You think we just changed history?'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/jack-bender-carole-bender_alley-oop_15-april-2018.jpeg)
![Mentis: 'Oop, did you say you know who has the ltter from Washington to Hamilton?' Oop: 'Yeah! Two enemy scouts have it, my necklace, AND an American prisoner! We've got 'em outnumbered, so let's go get it back!' [ Meanwhile ] Redcoat: 'It looks like we lost those Yanks!' Other Redcoat: 'Good! We're almost to the camp, so we can relax now!' Alley Oop falls on them, yelling 'ALLEY OOP' as he does. Oop, to the Redcoats' prisoner: 'You're safe now! Stay back!' Prisoner: 'Thank you!' [ Meanwhile, not far away ... ] (ZANG! and a cloud as someone appears from the Time Lab.) Holmes: 'Not again!' Wonmug: 'What now?' (Mentis appears, in Continental garb.) Wonmug: 'Mentis?!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/jack-bender-carole-bender_alley-oop_27-may-2018.jpeg)
