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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/26/11

Oh, thank goodness, this tortuous negotiation is over. Berna will go to Rex and June’s financial advisor, “Dex,” who will be Rex wearing a fake mustache and speaking in a comical fake British accent, and who will urge her to invest her lottery winnings in the series of Cayman Islands-based shell corporations that Rex and June have set up for just this sort of eventuality. With that settled, Rex will go and deign to spend five minutes with whatever patient has been coughing his or her lungs out in the waiting room for the last hour.

Shoe, 1/26/11

Well, that’s because doing homework is an essentially boring activity to look at, and television as a medium is all about visual excitement! The comics, by contrast, seem to feature child characters doing their homework all the time. This … this could be relevant to the state of the medium.

Dennis the Menace, 1/26/11

Dennis refusing to join Margaret in a little light necromancy? Definitely non-menacing.

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Crock, 1/25/11

Today we have an excellent demonstration of the inner workings of the underimagined hell-world that is Crock. Our action involves Figowitz, who is always slouched despondently against the exterior wall of the Foreign Legion’s fort, and Captain Preppie, who for dramatic reasons should be shown sitting jauntily with his legs crossed. Except: there is no furniture upon which the good captain can place his shapely buttocks in Figowitz’s blasted desert sitting-spot! What to do? Summon a vaguely cuboid sitting-box out of nowhere, of course. Once Preppie gets up to stroll away, this mysterious plinth can simply vanish into the ether of narrative convenience out of which it emerged.

On a surely totally unrelated note, the chunk missing from Preppie’s right elbow in panel one is no doubt of aesthetic significance too sublime to be understood by a ruffian such as myself; we certainly shouldn’t assume that this particular drawing of the handsome captain has been carelessly cut and pasted from an earlier strip.

Apartment 3-G, 1/25/11

Normally when your new boyfriend drives you to a creepy abandoned house somewhere in New Jersey, that’s a sign of very bad news to come. But Paul drives a huge, pearly white Hummer! He must be a classy guy!

Marvin, 1/25/11

The WikiLeaks saga, combining as it does political intrigue, cloak-and-dagger spy drama, philosophical debates about the merits of openness vs. secrecy in different realms, and accusations of sexual assault, has enough inherent drama to serve as a the foundation for a whole series of fascinating novels. Or, if you’re Marvin, you could use it as the basis for a pun about pissing yourself!

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Mary Worth, 1/24/11

Attention, manufacturers of electronic gadgets and gizmos! Have you saturated all conventional media with ads for your iPad/Kindle/Nook/whatever? Are you wondering how to reach that lucrative 65-and-older shut-in demographic? There’s no way to get more value for your marketing dollar than to purchase product placement in Mary Worth. Oldsters everywhere will soon be using your product to read their favorite old-timey books once they see their hip comic contemporaries, like Mary Worth’s Dr. Jeff, extol the virtue of your reader on the funny pages. The conversation beginning today is guaranteed to last weeks, and all generic references to “that reading device” can be changed to your product name as soon as your check clears.

Marmaduke, 1/24/11

Don’t worry, Marmaduke’s owners! The Pied Piper led away rats to be killed and then stole children to sell them into slavery. Marmaduke isn’t doing anything like that! He’s merely enlisting a hellish menagerie of beasts into his demon army, the better to overthrow the humans and establish his awful nightmare reign here on earth.