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Hey all, just a head’s up: I’ve updated the posting and discussion policies for the site, mostly to reflect and explain how I already run things around here anyway. If you’ve never read this, read it, and even if you have, check out the updates, particularly the new FAQ/Socratic dialogue I’ve added that will hopefully be illuminating about how not to get banned/yelled at!

And now, on to comics.

Dick Tracy, 9/30/10

Is it possible to construct a more delightful phrase than “Dick Tracy, undercover hobo”? I believe the answer to that question to be a firm “no,” but only because no English word-sequence can truly convey the awesomeness of panel one, where Dick’s eyes glow hypnotically out of his shadowy, bearded face. Dick’s gone undercover among the scruffy unhoused set to track down a bum who’s handing out thousand-dollar bills. As a homeless man handing out thousand-dollar bills would in all likelihood be almost immediately robbed and murdered, but just in case that isn’t in process, Dick makes sure to shout out his location as loudly as possible, for no good reason.

Mary Worth, 9/30/10

Desperate for some way to enliven this offensively smug scene, the Mary Worth artist distracts us with wacky perspective shifts. Panel two, for instance, caters to every reader’s fantasy by showing what it would look like to be a master assassin lurking in the bushes across the street, watching Mary and Jeff through the scope of a high-powered rifle, and waiting for the perfect moment to pull the trigger.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/30/10

Oh, Elviney (if that is your name — I’m pretty sure it is but I don’t feel like looking it up), why do you sigh so? Is it a sigh like “Oh, that tired old chestnut?” A sigh like, “Darn, I was hoping for some effective weight-loss tips from my portly friend?” Or a sigh like, “Good lord, all of us in this blighted hamlet are so very poor and hungry?”

Wizard of Id, 9/30/10

Ha ha! It’s funny because Floyd died terribly, for no good reason!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/7/10

In all my years of reading the strip, I have encountered few scenes in Snuffy Smith more harrowing than panel two here. Lureen looks rightly terrified at the slavering mob of women who have assembled at the Gossip Fence, the traditional gathering place for female-oriented rituals in Hootin’ Holler. Little does she know that any woman who manages to successfully bed the hamlet’s most eligible bachelor is by iron custom torn to bits and devoured by all the other women in the town. This is how the community maintains its uniform hideousness: by weeding all the even vaguely attractive people out of the gene pool.

Archie, 9/7/10

Mr. Weatherbee, with his black shirt and white jacket, always seems to be waiting for an ’80s fashion revival that never arrives; today, he’s really attempting to force the issue by donning a piano tie. GIVE IT UP, MR. WEATHERBEE. IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Spider-Man, 9/7/10

I love the fact that Spider-Man, true to his intense laziness, just automatically associates computers with video games and nothing else. “Wait, you can use the keyboard-television for things that aren’t Farmville?”

Pluggers, 9/7/10

Seriously, pluggers are shockingly lazy and just straight up don’t give a rat’s ass about what you think.

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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.”