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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/28/11

There are a number of things that I find dubious and hilarious about today’s Slylock Fox mystery, chief among them being Slylock’s withering and unwarranted contempt for Count Weirdly’s mad science skills. “Even if Weirdly did have a working time machine”? You mean, like the working time machine you yourself used to journey back to the Cretaceous Era? Oh, sure, when you get a jones to go look at some dinosaurs, you’re all like, “Hey, Count, we’re buds, right,” but when other people are around it’s more like “Whatever, you’re guilty and probably your time machine doesn’t even work, pssht.” What a user!

Plus, with Weirdly in command of a device that can interfere with the very timeline, Slylock’s smug array of historical facts are completely meaningless. Sure, Thomas Edison didn’t make the world’s first phone call … in our universe. But what would keep the crazed Count from traveling to the 1870s and feeding young Thomas Edison information about telephony, to ensure that this important invention would be born here in USA America and not cooked up by some beardy Scot lurking on Canadian soil?

More to the point, seeing as Weirdly is at the controls of a time machine, he automatically has a perfect alibi for everything. He could have easily burned Farmer Bear’s crops 10 minutes ago, spent a leisurely year or so in the 1700s hanging out with Voltaire, then returned to the present instant. Basically, he now has unstoppable powers and Slylock’s ratiocinating will be wholly incapable of stopping him, so we should all adjust ourselves to life on Planet Weirdly pretty quickly if we know what’s good for us.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/11

Seeing that Hootin’ Holler is completely cut off from the mainstream of American cultural and economic life, I’m saddened to discover that it’s somehow still been thoroughly infiltrated by the fad diet industry. Still, I kind of like the way Loweezy invites poor Lureen inside to break the news to her in private that there’s no quick route to weight loss. She even takes care to close the door behind her, something that probably takes a bit of effort, as the first panel in the second row clearly indicates that it’s not attached to the house via any sort of fancy flatlander hinges.

Judge Parker, 8/28/11

Ha ha, sure, Sam and Abbey will just head out on a journey in their luxurious Sex Winnebago, leaving the groundskeeper or whoever in charge of their 14-year-old daughter, who’s announced her plan to win some pasty-face boy’s love by any means necessary. What could possibly go wrong?