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Shoe, 8/13/10

This diner patron has suddenly realized that the ambiguities of the verb “serve” could be deadly in a world of talking animals. We already know that the birds in the strip eat other birds, so why wouldn’t Roz just kill her bird-man customer and feed him to a fish-man? No reason. No reason at all why she wouldn’t. Better tip big, bird-man!

Family Circus, 8/13/10

The whole “Keanes go to the beach” storyline we’ve been enjoying (for certain limited definitions of “enjoying”) over the past couple of weeks is, as several readers have pointed out, a repeat from the ’70s or ’80s. Certainly that was a more innocent time, when Jeffy’s brazen nudity was merely implied and not rubbed in our faces.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/13/10

“No, yore paw is passed out, from th’ likker.”

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Judge Parker, 8/9/10

Well, it turns out that Sophie’s cheerleading-driven powers of all-knowingness only give her universal access to cold, hard facts about whose ex-boyfriends are back in town, and whom those ex-boyfriends have divorced. The underlying motivations behind those circumstances are as opaque to Sophie as ever, and it’s kind of heartening to see that the youngest Spencer-Driver foundling is still an unsettling android-child, despite her makeover into a tween fashion plate. “NEDDY-UNIT: THE SOPHIE-UNIT DEMANDS INFORMATION ABOUT LOVE AND THE EXPERIENCE THEREOF! WILL LOVE OVERLOAD THE SOPHIE-UNIT’S CIRCUITRY IF SHE ATTEMPTS TO INCORPORATE IT INTO HER TOP-LEVEL ALGORITHM? THE SOPHIE-UNIT WILL INITIATE THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘IRRITATION’ (SUCCESS OF IRRITATION-INSTIGATION SUBROUTINE ESTIMATED AT > 95%) IN THE NEDDY-UNIT UNTIL THE DESIRED INFORMATION IS GIVEN!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/10

Ha ha, the chicken has fallen in love with Snuffy, whose main source of food is the chickens that he steals and eats! This has the potential for being one of the funny pages’ great tragic love stories. Let’s hope the artists don’t shy away from the heartbreaking beheading scene!

Dick Tracy, 8/9/10

Wow, usually we don’t get to see the badly decomposed corpses until the end of the Dick Tracy storyline. What exactly is that lump floating atop the body in panel one — is there an alligator lazily feeding on the poor sap, with Officer Hugepelvis gingerly sneaking up on it with plans to taser it? This could be the greatest Dick Tracy plot ever, if by “greatest” you mean “with the highest body count,” which is really the only metric I can think of that fans of this strip would respect.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/9/10 and (panels) 7/11/10

I have to admit to having been scandalized by Friday’s Snuffy Smith, in which a local young woman casually admits that her paramour has left her to enter into a polygamous relationship with sisters. What could be the cause of this attack on traditional values in Hootin’ Holler? Could the male population have been so reduced in number by moonshine still explosions that the women have to share them? The throwaway panels, in which another local admits to fathering more than a dozen children with who knows how many women, points in the same direction. It’s also possible that some multinational chemical conglomerate is using whatever fetid lake serves as Hootin’ Holler’s water supply as a illicit disposal site, with the noxious substances causing a freakish increase in the libido of the male inhabitants.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 7/11/10

Was this all that Tommie ever wanted — shared humiliation? She knows that her own world of sadness will never end, but now that Lu Ann and especially Margo have been dragged down with her, she allows a brief smile to cross her face.

Hey, everybody, do you know what today is? It’s the sixth anniversary of the beginning of this blog, which in Internet years is several lifetimes! Look back in wonder at my first-ever post, in which I talk about Non Sequitur (something I would almost never did again) and break my own (later-instituted) Don’t Talk About Mallard Fillmore Rule right in the title. I think I have come a long way in my writing skills and comics appreciation in the 2,400+ posts that have followed, and both my skills and my appreciation have been honed by the 369,000+ comments that readers have added to the site. Thanks to all of you, whether you’ve been reading for six years or six days — it’s only knowing that so many of you enjoy the site that keeps me doing it. And don’t worry, I plan to carry on until the Internet is replaced by something even more irritating and time-sucking.