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Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/16/22

I just want to offer my 100% unironic appreciation of everything going on in this panel. I love the weird angle we’re seeing Shady from, I love his expression as he watches his nemeses through the grate, I love the way he’s cradling that bag of cash and the way Max is ogling the few scattered bills on the floor, and I definitely love the look of smug triumph on Sly’s face as he gets ready to hit the dial button, knowing exactly what’s coming next. Shady is definitely dumb enough to leave his ringer on while doing crimes, but is he dumb enough to give his cell number to Slylock in the first place? Maybe, but it’s just as likely that the Forest Kingdom’s NSA equivalent is happy to hand out the phone numbers of known undesirables to law enforcement. There’s no such thing as human rights in a state where humans have been hunted to near extinction!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/16/22

Oh, man, remember a few years ago how Snuffy found his dad in the woods where he had been asleep for decades, Rip Van Winkle style? You’d think that would make him really appreciate the world’s possibilities and work to make the most of his new lease on life, but no, he’s just going back to chicken-based crime. You hate to see it!

Funky Winkerbean, 1/16/22

I sincerely hope that that is the helmet that Bull died in. We deserve that much.

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Gil Thorp, 9/15/21

[clears throat] [extremely Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head voice] FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! [takes a long, deep breath, representing the years 2016, 2017, and 2018, when the annual Milford bonfire was mysteriously absent] FIRE! FIRE!

Whew, it’s bonfire time again, everybody, guaranteeing a robust grain harvest and fewer barren wombs among the townsfolk! Every year we learn a little something new about the bonfire, and today’s panel one shows us that, assuming the student body doesn’t shlep all those logs by hand to some open field somewhere, it takes place a lot closer to the school itself than I would’ve guessed. Legend has it that Milford will only win a state championship if the flame is allowed to burn the building to the ground!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/15/21

One of the running jokes in the early days of this strip, when it was mostly fun gags about a bunch of goofy teens, was that Les Moore wielded a machine gun as part of his hall monitor duties. I keep waiting in the post-Turn-to-Grim Funkyverse for this to get retconned into the result of some awful school shooting, and that hasn’t happened yet, but until then I’ll console myself with “Majorette Holly’s flesh was a mass of scar tissues due to ever-more-dangerous baton tricks her deranged mother forced her to perform.” I guess today’s colorist glanced at the text and thought, “Oh, these pictures are all supposed to be close-ups of burn wounds, huh,” which is a nice touch.

Daddy Daze, 9/15/21

Look, man, I spent several hours with a couple babies this past weekend and they didn’t seem happy at all! They cried multiple times just because they had to go to the bathroom or were hungry or whatever. I mean, I had to go to the bathroom and was hungry too, but I managed to hold it together, for once!

Mary Worth, 9/15/21

WILBUR WHEN A CAT PISSES IN HIS SPOT ON HIS GIRLFRIEND’S COUCH: Animals are bad! They interfere with me having sex!

WILBUR WHEN HE HEARS A GNOMISH OLD MAN MET A NICE WOMAN JUST BECAUSE HE OWNS A DOG: Animals can help you get sex? Go on, Mary, I’m very interested.

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Dennis the Menace, 1/8/21

I feel like over the years Dennis the Menace has spent less time on Dennis’s actual menacing more on everyone’s second-order reactions to said menacing, or their perceptions of him as a menace, which may or may not be based in reality. Like, be honest: who’s the real menace here? The kid who’s playing fetch with his dog? Or the guy who’s buttonholed a total stranger and appears to be deep into a conversation along the lines of “You’d think with a nightmare specimen like this you’d be dealing with a deeply tainted bloodline, just generation after generation of idiots and defectives, but no! I guess it turns out that true evil can arise from the seemingly innocent! Sinister horror lurks below the surface of our every day life, and indeed inside each one of us!”

Marvin, 1/8/21

I guess maybe this joke would’ve landed better if the Miller household weren’t a largely featureless void consisting mostly of a blue rug and a enormous expanse of white wall. But even so, it’s still a little off! Marvin refused to sit in the corner, so here he is sitting … not in the corner, ha ha? It’s like someone’s been told that they can’t do poop jokes anymore, and so they’re trying to reason out what other kinds of jokes might look like from first principles, and this was their first stab at it.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/8/21

We saw a glimpse of the exterior of Chez Winkerbean in a strip just before Christmas, and I was too busy focusing on the negative to take note of the frankly enormous house that Funky and Holly live in. This is curious, considering that their income derives from managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor for its fickle absentee owner, and not long ago Funky sunk his savings into a failed attempt to franchise Montoni’s shitty pizza in New York City, a metropolis noted for its pizza-snobbery. Admittedly, the real estate market in Northeastern Ohio is not exactly booming, so maybe my radar on what a 5,000-square-foot suburban McMansion would go for is off, but today we learn that the Winkerbean family has the means to drop on the order of four grand on a TV without that even being noteworthy enough for Funky to remember. What I’m trying to say here is that managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor may actually be actually pretty lucrative, in the sense that it makes a great front for money laundering for organized crime.