The Incredible Insanity that is Newspaper Comics

As a kid, I loved newspaper comics. Every morning at breakfast, I would open up the paper and eagerly consume each and every daily strip. Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Zits, and yes, even Garfield kept me entertained as I ate my Reeses Puffs and Oreo O’s.

A lot of the adult-oriented comics, like Doonsbury and Brenda Starr went right over my head as a kid. Spiderman was neat, but when he wasn’t punching anyone, the pace of the comic dragged to a crawl. Little me was not able to fully grasp most of what was happening. Which is a shame, because newspaper comics are completely insane.

Let’s talk about Dick Tracy.

Created in 1931 by Chester Gould, Dick Tracy is ostensibly a comic about a detective who solves crimes and captures criminals. What it’s actually about is James Bond gadgets, space aliens, and straight-up killing just about everybody. The body count is staggering, actually. Dick Tracy is a cold blooded executioner who uses space-age technology to assist his crusades against the forces of evil. His exploits can be followed by heading over to GoComics.

His incredibly bizarre exploits, that is.

Oh, and I’m sure the casual mention of aliens didn’t slip you by, right? Yeah, that’s a thing. There’s a recurring character in the comic who is literally from the moon. She can shoot energy out of her hands, make things explode, and had a flying car. She also dated one of Tracy’s sidekicks, because that’s just the kind of thing that would happen in this universe.

There was recently a story about an immortal man’s body double going rogue and hiring a man with hair for a face to assassinate a woman holding an auction for the philosopher’s stone. Just… take a moment to parse that sentence. You good? Ok, moving on: Daddy Warbucks, the adopting father from Little Orphan Annie, is a major villain in the series. Yeah, the guy from the musical. Same dude. Alright. That’s about as much Dick Tracy insanity as I can take for the moment – lets take a look at a different strip.

The Phantom is a comic started in 1936 by Lee Falk, creator of another insane comic called Mandrake the Magician, which is a whole lof of crazy as well but we’ll get to that eventually. The Phantom is a superhero in a very traditional sense. He wears silly purple tights, has a secret jungle hideout in the shape of a skull, has magical indigenous jungle friends who can see the future and a super-intelligent wolf, and- Ok, wait, this isn’t sounding very normal at all, is it.

The titular “Phantom” is actually, like, 80 dudes that all decided to dress up in purple spandex unitards and live in the jungle, fighting crime and somehow asking to be taken seriously despite wearing a ridiculous skin-tight purple suit. They punch Nazis with a special ring that leaves the imprint of a skull on their enemies faces. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, like some deep-cover rainforest illuminati. The current plotline involves a tribal leader, and friend of the Phantom, who foresees the Phantom’s own death by not eating anything for several days and then taking copious amounts of drugs.

You know, kid stuff. Because kids read this. You can actually read The Phantom online, as each strip is published on the comic’s own site.

Let us change tack for a moment and go back to something I mentioned a moment earlier: Mandrake the Magician. This comic is… It’s something. It’s really, really something. It’s about a magician who actually is magic, and is considered by most historians to be, literally, the first actual superhero.

Which is pretty rad, on paper… And then you remember what early comic books were actually like. Weird, wacky powers, insane and overcomplicated plots that didn’t make much sense after 5 minutes of scrutiny, and writers just pulling things out of their ass left and right.

Case in point: There was an arc a year or so ago where Mandrake the Magician, and his wife, were awakened one night by a giant yellow eye several feet tall looking in at them through their second-story window. Mandrake’s wife was understandably terrified, but Mandrake remained calm and revealed the actual threat to be… Giant walking eggs from space who are uncomfortable in the presence of hair.

So, on making contact with this alien race of giant eggs, Mandrake does what any other sane human would do and show them his pre-prepared book of hairy animal photos and then destroy eggs in front of them. Of course, they hightail it out of earth so fast you could practically hear the sound barrier breaking.

I would like to take a second to point out that all of this is presented with complete seriousness. This isn’t deadpan humor; no, this is real drama folks.

Mandrake reveals that the reason he was so calm was because he had seen aliens before, and proceeds to tell the story of how a race of giant mantis-men had pretended to be a big fat baby-faced white guy in order to shove living beings into a bag of infinite size so that they could… You know what? I’m not gonna finish explaining that one. It’s too weird. And more to the point, it has absolutely nothing to do with giant eggs so I have no idea why Mandrake brought it up in the first place.

Mandrake the Magician is also readable online for free, here at the strip’s homepage.

There are so many more strange and wonderful stories that take place in the world of daily comic strips that I can’t even begin to start typing them out. There are comic strips I love, and others that I read every day just because I love to hate them. If you have a lot of patience, or know someone who still has a newspaper subscription, I would take a second look at a medium that most people abandon by the time they reach age 13. The truth is, there’s a lot of stuff on those printed pages that has more in common with the latest Marvel movie than whatever dumb joke Garfield is running. So even if you don’t have a newspaper, there are plenty of places online you can read this stuff. It’s worth taking a few minutes to check this stuff out. You won’t regret it.

Shout out to the goons on SomethingAwful for bringing this incredible and strange experience into my life. Y’all suck for doin’ this to me.

*And thanks to SA user Johnny Walker for reminding me that Devil was a wolf, not a dog.