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Gil Thorp, 11/15/10

When Milford’s police chief says that pleasure isn’t the word he’d use, he must be referring to Gil’s pleasure, because, like a selfish lover, he appears to be deriving a great deal pleasure from this midday office encounter — smug, smug pleasure, as his little smile in panel two indicates. And why not? Every Gil Thorp plot in which one of Gil’s charges is accused of wrongdoing ends up with the poor Mudlark exonerated in completely unrealistic fashion; now we’ve got this season’s hero Cody Exner — the poor foster kid who tries so hard to be a good team captain — on video selling “dope” (which I assume in whatever decade Milford is in still refers to boring old marijuana rather than heroin or something awesome). Will Gil finally have to admit that his judgement was wrong? I mean, he shrugs off each year’s failure to win a championship with remarkable aplomb, so maybe he’ll just take the attitude that, eh, we pick two team captains every year, statistically one of them was going to be a drug dealer eventually.

Judge Parker, 11/15/10

Hey, Judge Emeritus Parker! Remember that $100,000 advance check you got? See, in the publishing industry they call it an “advance” because they’re paying you in advance for money your book hasn’t earned yet. So, you shouldn’t be getting those $850 royalty checks until your book or books have made $100,000 worth of royalty money for you, which, for a first-time author writing what I assume to be dull legal thrillers, should occur sometime around 2081. My best guess is that this check is actually money Sam found under the cushions of one of the lesser-used sofas in his vast mansion and he’s giving it to Judge Emeritus Parker in a (failed) attempt to get him to stop complaining. If it is a real royalty check and his book has miraculously already earned him a six-figure sum, whatever those initial promotional expenses cost couldn’t possibly be enough.

Mark Trail, 11/15/10

Mark Trail is the serial strip with the loosest grasp of how humans actually think, speak, and behave, so naturally it also puts the least effort into making the shift from one plotline to another seem even remotely naturalistic. “Mark, a man is waiting for you at the house! He will tell you what will happen next, to all of us!”

The Lockhorns, 11/15/10

Wow, this, coming so soon after this, implies that the Lockhorns is moving tentatively towards the third rail of Lockhorns narrative: Leroy and Loretta’s sex life. By next April, each day’s panel will find them in the midst of some depraved sexual act. They will of course still sport expressions of heavy-lidded weltschmerz and will emotionally devastate each other with cutting remarks.

Archie, 11/15/10

The horrifying vision of a nauseated Mr. Weatherbee in panel two, combined with Archie’s fries-spewing from last Saturday, leads me to believe that the AJGLU-3000 has found some particularly depraved pocket of the Internet dedicated to puke porn. “Is this what the hu-mans want to see?” the cybernetic humorist thinks to itself, whirring softly. “It seems unappealing to me, but I have no digestive tract, so who am I to say?”

Comment of the week update! Guys, I’ve decided, for scheduling reasons of my own that are really far too boring to go into here, that I’m moving the COTW post from Monday to Friday. I’m going to skip a week this week, giving Black Drazon pride of place for another five days. ENJOY YOUR EXTRA TIME AT THE TOP, O NOBLE COMMENTOR!

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Archie, 11/13/10

What would it be like being a machine intelligence like the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000, a collection of spare solid-state electronics whose remarkable achievement of sentience has been harnessed to create Archie strips that are almost, but not quite, funny to humans? Do machines perceive the universe differently than we do? For instance, is it easier of them to understand that time is really just one dimension among many? While the biological entities can only comprehend time in a single direction, perhaps the AJGLU 3000 grasps its essential reversibility. That could explain the middle panel of this strip, which, taken out of context, could just as reasonably be interpreted as Archie spewing french fries out of his mouth, rather than him shoveling them down his gullet to avoid the predations of his insatiable best friend. “Serves me right for adhering to the linear monodirectional notion of time that the fleshbags use!” says Jughead, in a joke meant only for the amusement of the strip’s cybernetic creator.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/13/10

“Ha ha, yep, Rex, once again you’re going to be chasing down an elected official who’s heading off to murder his political opponent due to a misunderstanding about the release of confidential medical information, while the whole town cheers him on, having learned about his condition via Pacebook! I’m experiencing some déjà vu, because this happens all the time! Hoo boy!”

In case you ever wonder what you — and America — misses out on when newspapers shrink comics down to near-illegibility, check out this close-up of Rex’s spiffy lab coat:

Ha ha, that’s not just some nurse or physician’s assistant or lab tech in a white coat, buddy; that’s Dr. Rex Morgan! Show some damn respect!

Dennis the Menace, 11/13/10

“Admittedly it’s all with children … and they’re not really interested in me as a person, only as some kind of indefatigable machine that churns out cookies … so many cookies, so many hungry mouths … oh, God, I hate my life.”

SUNDAY COMICS UPDATE: Uh, you guys, the Sunday comics all seem to be unavailable, on all the usual suspect Websites? OH MY GOD IT’S COMICSGEDDON! Damn it, this is the newspaper industry’s revenge for me finally cancelling my print susbscription, isn’t it? Well, I got stuffs to do, so I’ll try to post Sunday strips tomorrow, assuming they appear. ASSUMING ANY COMICS EVER APPEAR ONLINE, ANYWHERE, EVER AGAIN.

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Archie, 11/3/10

So I think it’s important that we start asking ourselves what the deal is with Jughead and the homunculi. We all know that he keeps a tiny version of Archie, with its hands gruesomely removed, in his locker. Now we can see that a similarly stump-handed model of Jughead himself sits smiling on his bookshelf. Are these tiny figurines intended to represent the souls of Jughead and Archie? Does Jughead use them to manipulate their relationship, through ominous voodoo rituals? These are the sorts of questions that should be the root of the panic we see in Archie’s eyes in the final panel, but he appears to be more shocked that Jughead is working himself up into a frenzy by looking at hamburger porn on his laptop, when this ought not to come as a surprise to anybody.

Apartment 3-G, 11/3/10

Oh look, it’s Mrs. Bloom, aka the beloved crazy taser lady of six or eight storylines ago. Mrs. Bloom is excited about visiting her son in Florida, except she worries that she won’t be able to sneak her taser, which she’s nicknamed “Prissy,” onto the plane.

Beetle Bailey, 11/3/10

It appears that the Halftrack-bot needs a visit from the repair shop, because it’s disabled itself by humping the corner of its desk too vigorously.

Jumble, 11/3/10

As ever, I’m too lazy/dumb to actually do the Jumble, but I note that “IT’S ‘POISON'” fits nicely into the blanks of the answer and into the scene in the comic panel. Look at the ostentatiously casual way the waitress is checking out that customer out of the corner of her eye. Ha ha, that’s what you get for never leaving a tip, buddy!