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Judge Parker, 9/4/11

Oh, hey, have the mega-rich of Judge Parker stumbled into yet another opportunity to maximize their already unspeakably hegemonic spending power? Sure looks that way! I look forward to a solid week of this oddly bearded man simpering and groveling, hoping that the sudden appearance of some wealthy people who want to buy a stupid RV on a whim will keep the business solvent and his health care benefits in place for another few days.

Family Circus, 9/4/11

Wow, Billy sure is looking ludicrously smug as he thinks fun thoughts about the summer just passed. You’d think that he’d be sad about the coming school year, but perhaps he’s looking forward to regaling his unwilling classmates with smug tales about how much better his summer was than theirs.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/4/11

Miss Prunelly is in such an ecstasy over the gift offerings she’s receiving from a long line of worshipful students that she isn’t even bothering to correct their nonstandard use of “brung.” It’s sad, really.

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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?

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/7/11

You really need to read the solution and think about its implications to this realize how gross today’s Slylock Fox is. That suitcase is full of stolen money and mammal milk, implicating the bear lady. (I wonder what will become of her cub when she’s sent to the slammer? Will it be sent to Ursine Foster Care, i.e., left in the forest to fend for itself?) Since we now know that a bird can’t be expected to have a milk bottle in her suitcase, we’re left to figure out for ourselves just how she’s going to feed her little chick en route. Is there hidden in that unopened suitcase a bottle full of fish guts that she vomited up? Or will she just be puking a portion of her airline-provided meal directly into her child’s mouth, disgusting all of her fellow passengers?

As a side note, the criminal bear’s bottle has not been placed in a ziplock bag and put through the x-ray separately from the rest of her luggage. I sure hope that’s what triggered the search of her suitcase, because it would be depressing to me if our human universe TSA’s regulations are even more pointlessly stringent than those in the world of Slylock Fox, which is a notorious police state.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/7/11

Parson Tuttle is a notorious grifter and fraud with little or no theological training, so it’s not that surprising that he’s desperately hitting up one of his community’s elders for some pearls of spiritual wisdom that he can drop into his Sunday sermons. I do love how incredibly put out he looks when Grampy finally gets to the point. “I can’t wait for my enemies to die, that’ll take forever! And killin’ ’em all just sounds like work.”

Crankshaft, 8/7/11

I’m not sure if either Abbot and Costello or The Who have really been victimized particularly badly here, but if Crankshaft wants to start apologizing for its terrible punchlines, I’m certainly not going stand in its way.

(Also, as faithful reader David Willis points out, today’s Crankshaft probably takes place a decade before today’s Funky Winkerbean, meaning that Crankshaft is dead, maybe! Hooray!)

Panel from Crock, 8/7/11

This right here pretty much says all you need to know about Crock.