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104

You don’t get a lot of chances to drag a guy off by the collar like that, so you gotta take advantage

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Gil Thorp, 8/4/26

I have thought for some time now that Gil is universally considered the most important person in Milford, and perhaps even in whatever geographic region is covered by the whole Valley Conference (“the Valley,” I guess). Today’s strip is more evidence: I simply don’t believe that an ordinary person could call the cops and say “Uh, this guy at my wedding is being weird” and they’d show up in less time than it takes for said guy to finish his supervillain monologue.

Judge Parker, 8/4/26

The fun thing about Judge Parker is that there are two potential ways this could play out — April is furious that Neddy has left their child in the care of her perfectly capable adult sister, with a family rift and endless boring emotional processing to come, or the “April” calling Neddy is actually an AI deepfake voice program and this is part of a larger plot to kidnap Charlotte — and I’m not sure which it’s going to be.

Hi and Lois, 8/4/26

Hey, Irma is married to Thirsty, and Lois, her only friend, recently (in 1980, 1980 is recently in comic strip time) got a job as a realtor and can’t spend as much time hanging out with her as she used to. Let her have fun on her dang phone! Are a few afternoons lost to an infinite scroll through one AI slop reel after another really that much worse than watching her claw desperately at a block of wood like an animal?

132

I think it’s weird that Slylock enforces laws about both deceptive advertising practices and major felonies

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Slylock Fox, 8/3/26

I have no idea what the relationship is between Count Weirdly and the little purple being who’s always hanging around his workplace/castle — is it his creation? his adopted child? his [gulp] biological child? was it spawned by some unnatural process that doesn’t fall into any of those three categories cleanly but falls into all of them in part? — but clearly it views the count in a paternal light, and it’s pretty devastating that it’s so excited to show off the Count’s supposedly legitimate business enterprise to Slylock, only for the Fox Detective to immediately debunk the whole scam. Also, unrelated, but I’ve never really had much reason to contemplate whether Weirdly was wearing anything under his trademark shapeless nightgown, but the very vivid buttrack on display here implies that he probably isn’t.

Crock, 8/3/26

The past is in fact another country, as this Crock strip from 1998 demonstrates. Sure, the idea of a boy baby aggressively hitting on a girl baby and being punished for it is timeless, but why is the girl named “Cyber”? Was this the setup to a joke about computers that turned out to be too hard to execute so they fell back on the classics, or did the Crock creative team in 1998 simply say “What are they naming girl babies these days? Cyber, right? That’s a word I hear a lot but I don’t know what it means, so it’s probably a girl’s name.”

The Lockhorns, 8/3/26

I spent some time trying to parse Leroy’s facial expression here and the conclusion I came to is that it’s supposed to represent “sophisticated horny.” Like he’s thinking, “Ah, yes, women’s beach volleyball … the intellectual’s sport. You get to enjoy athletes at the top of their game demonstrating their prowess at leaping and spiking the ball, all in a beautiful seaside setting. And if one of these statuesque competitors were to engender a pleasant feeling of arousal in me while I watched? Well, I’m mostly trying to keep tabs on various stats to see how my fantasy team is doing, but that would be an added bonus.”

123

It’s the Russ…ians, maybe?

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Judge Parker, 8/2/26

Oh wow, as predicted, that big Hollywood exec loved Ann’s little sermon and green-lit the series as soon as she stalked out of the room. So now it looks like all’s well that ends … wait, what’s that? April’s calling? She wants to make sure her intellectual property rights to Netflix’s new daughters extended universe are respected? And she’s calling on whatever number Neddy has for her in her phone? Which presumably could be very easily tracked by [tries and fails to remember who April is on the run from exactly, decides it’s not worth investigating] her enemies?

Mary Worth, 8/2/26

So Dawn has been unable to track down Tommy ever since he overheard Wilbur talking shit about him, leading him to purchase drugs and subsequently flush them down the toilet. This has caused Dawn some anxiety, but good news! He’s fine. He’s come by to tell Dawn that her good words strengthened his resolve, and he did a bunch of drugs to prove to himself that he can quit whenever he wants and that he’s not an addict anymore. Problem solved!

Suburban Fairy Tales, 8/2/26

Suburban Fairy Tales is a strip whose main characters are the Three Little Pigs, and one thing that’s always bugged me about it is that it neglects the Three Little Pigs’ best-known defining characteristics: that they have wildly divergent skills when it comes to building structures that can endure abuse. Well, today is a shout-out to us Three Little Pigs oldheads, and I for one appreciate it.