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Slylock Fox, 11/20/06

There are some puzzling narrative decisions going on in this Slylock Fox. Apparently the artist has tired of actually drawing the mystery scenarios and has decided to settle for the thrilling visual spectacle of Slylock reading a word problem to a group of schoolchildren. Still, I’m so God-damned trained by this feature that I keep staring at the clock on the wall, thinking that the fact that it’s ten after nine is an important clue of some sort.

Perhaps once he’s assessed their fitness for detective work, he can explain how you can make a living from butting into other people’s disputes and solving them with elementary deduction. Max Mouse, meanwhile, is just courting death. It’s bad enough that Slylock brought the tiny rodent into a class full of predator animals, but Max’s inability to keep away from the teacher’s apple should by all rights get him devoured before recess.

Judge Parker, 11/20/06

As Raju heads off into the boat-wrestling sunset, I hope that we get lots and lots more Celeste Black to fill the void. I’m loving her swoopy arm gestures in the first panel here; presumably she’s performing an interpretive dance piece entitled “Jesus Christ I’m so hung over WHY ARE THE LIGHTS ON SO FUCKING BRIGHT IN HERE I hate you all”.

Archie, 11/20/06

Archie is, of course, a moron, but the setup for this joke was so convoluted that it’s hard to blame him for his poster verbiage faux pas. I’m more concerned about the fact that this placard was created in an art class, and yet is essentially just a bunch of words on a big piece of paper. The curved line at the bottom doesn’t make it “art,” and “Mr. Weatherbee” isn’t even centered properly. Pretty sloppy, Andrews.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/20/06

Sorry I couldn’t work up the energy to cover last week’s Rex Morgan, during most of which June was holding our mop-haired purse-snatcher at broompoint. If you only follow this strip through my commentary on it, you should know that we learned a few things last week about our cast of characters. We found out that Nikki and his trashy mom are Katrina-driven evacuees from New Orleans, forced to live in the slums of Rex Morganville because George Bush doesn’t care about white people. We also learned that if you take June’s purse she will never let you forget about it.

There’s some problematic punctuation going on in our omniscient narrative box at the upper left. No sentence in which the main verb is modified by the word “reluctantly” should ever end in an exclamation mark.