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Pearls Before Swine, 8/12/09

Hello, anonymous rude denizens of the Internet! You have driven Stephan Pastis into his Internet Happy Box, so I hope you’re satisfied with yourselves. Actually, when people started emailing me about this strip this morning, I had a weird moment of déjà vu, as I thought this had run months ago. In fact, Stephan e-mailed it to me when he drew it, but that was back in April thanks to the high-tech distribution system that underlies the newspaper comics industry. Anyway, at the time I promised to rip him a new one when this came out, except he hasn’t been doing any of the terrible pun strips lately. SO UNTIL NEXT TIME PASTIS. You stay in that box just to be safe, though.

Baldo, 8/12/09

I went to college at Cornell, which is in the absolutely lovely (some might even say “gorges” HA IT’S A PUN GET IT) city of Ithaca, New York, which, despite being lovely, does not have much going for it in the way of malls. When you grow up going to Cheektowaga’s fabulous Walden Galleria, it’s a bit of a letdown doing all your enclosed chain-store shopping and food-court dining at the Pyramid Mall. This establishment appears to have since changed its name to “The Shops At Ithaca Mall,” which I find extremely amusing — oh, there are shops at the mall, you say? Anyway, I always used to mock the Pyramid Mall’s smallness by referring to it as the “Petite Mall”; I thought this was hilarious and everyone else was either more or less indifferent about it or thought it was actively offensive to people who have seizures. This is a roundabout way of saying that, why yes, I do feel validated by having essentially the same joke used in a Baldo strip 15 years later, thanks for asking!

I originally felt like there might be only about fifty-fifty chance that my terrible seizure joke was in fact the intended reading of this strip, but then I realized that there was no other obvious humor content here, so I figure that has to be what’s happening.

Hi and Lois, 8/12/09

It has not escaped my notice that quite a few of the recent Trixie-centered Hi and Lois strips have featured the pre-verbal infant girl wandering around outside apparently unattended. Maybe her parents are hoping that she’ll be adopted by a local wolfpack or some other band of animals and they’ll be relieved of responsibility for her; unfortunately, they hadn’t counted on the effectiveness with which the builders of their suburban subdivision cleared it of most wildlife. Trixie’s only option is to take up with a colony of frogs, which will go fine until she hits puberty and heads to the culvert under the arterial road with amplexus on her mind, only to be bitterly disappointed.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/12/09

Ha ha! He finds his wife’s mother so irritating that he’s going to hand her over to savages who will use her as a slave or a sacrifice to their pagan gods! MOTHERS IN LAW, am I right, people?