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Momma, 9/30/13

To “render” a judgment just means “to pronounce, declare, or state the decision of the court in a particular case.” Which doesn’t seem like it’d be very rewarding for someone like Momma, who isn’t a lawyer and doesn’t even live in Washington, D.C., so you can understand why she looks so world-weary as she explains this in panel two. (Is that sheet of paper she’s looking at a Supreme Court verdict he’s going to have to render soon?) But since they’ve heard her rendering judgements for the Court for most of their lives, Francis and MaryLou probably just assume that she’s the one literally laying down the law on America. After all, if there’s one thing reading this strip for years has taught us about these two, it’s that they’ve very dumb.

Beetle Bailey, 9/30/13

Super excited that Beetle Bailey has decided to discard any pretense of offering gentle military-themed humor and is now all about sex with robots and the characters’ crippling alcoholism. General Halftrack’s booze problem used to be limited to weekends, but now it’s spread to pretty much any day of the week as his downward spiral into substance abuse gathers speed!

Crankshaft, 9/30/13

“It’s homicidal rage! Really, he’s a complete monster!”

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Mary Worth, 9/29/13

OH MY GOD YES YES YES TOMMY THE TWEAKER’S COMING BACK, EVERYBODY! Tommy was the very first great Mary Worth character I got to cover in this blog’s history. He referred to drugs as “stuff” and smoked weed where Mary could smell it and dreamed of having his very own meth lab and tried to sell meth to some college kid but the meth didn’t work and an angry mob smacked him around but the cops rescued him and then he thought-ballooned hilariously. Later, he went to jail and found Jesus by reading a tiny, tiny bible. Obviously hilarious hijinks are in store for us now that our rotating-door prison system has dumped this hardened criminal back on the streets of Santa Rosa after a mere nine years in stir. Iris is right to push Wilbur out of her life right now! He’s already terribly addicted to delicious sammiches, so who even knows what’d happen if he got hold of the hard stuff.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 9/29/13

Oh, isn’t this cute! A bunch of anthropomorphic animals sitting around telling stories about how humans treated one another, in the Before Time. Isn’t it funny how humans had this thing called presumption of innocence? That they didn’t just throw you in a jail cell forever because some fox decided you were guilty? Might explain a lot about why they aren’t in charge anymore. Animals, they don’t worry about niceties. Animals get things done.

Beetle Bailey, 9/29/13

Oh my god, look at Zero’s face in the next to last panel, the sinister glint in his eyes as he imagines enveloping the enemy, cutting off all means of retreat, and methodically pounding them to bits with artillery. Their attempts to surrender are met only with sinister laughter. Testimony about this moment will feature heavily in his war crimes trial.

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Beetle Bailey, 9/25/13

Probably you were hoping that Spec. Gizmo’s sex robot would a be a shameful, one-off joke that would never reappear in the comics pages or on the Internet again. Well, too bad, because you don’t live in your perfect world! You live in this world of unrelenting horror, with the rest of us. Anyway, panel one reveals all sorts of unfortunate things. For instance, when Gizmo’s robot was first unveiled, nobody had bothered to drape human clothes over its square metallic chassis, yet now it appears to be wearing some kind of exaggeratedly girly dress with a crinoline skirt, further gendering the fembot and making it a slightly more acceptable target of Chip’s sexual lusts. The mere act of clothing it can be seen as akin to teaching it a shame-based code of sexual morality, much like the one Adam and Eve learned abruptly after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The fembot’s rudimentary ethics may be limited to sexual matters, as it seems more than willing to use its inhuman strength to work violence against humans, though perhaps this is a sign that its advanced circuitry understands the concept of consent and believes that attempts to violate its structural integrity may legitimately be met with self-defense.

Anyway, I was going to do a close reading of panel two along these same lines, but then I read “He has to turn off the work switch and press the love button” and so I went and lied down for an hour instead.

Mary Worth, 9/25/13

OK, Mary Worth: I enjoy making endless jokes about Wilbur’s sandwich obsession as much as the next person who blogs about newspaper comic strips, but I like to do it on my terms. Frankly, if you’re going to include an entire panel of the sort of filthy talk that you might expect to hear when you dial 1-900-HOT-SANDWICH, I’m going to feel a little bit baited.

Herb and Jamaal, 9/25/13

I genuinely enjoy how insanely excited our nameless white-collar drone/Heart and Soul customer looks in the first couple of panels as he sets up his joke about how meetings make you doze off, ha ha, amiright people. He’s really going the extra mile here, and I appreciate it when people put effort into their sarcasm.

Phantom, 9/25/13

“Except for a period from the 1870s, when European powers began the wars of conquest referred to as the ‘Scramble for Africa,’ until the process of decolonization really took hold in the 1960s! I mean, the British, man! I couldn’t leave a skull mark on the chins of the entire British Empire, you know what I’m saying?”

Pluggers, 9/25/13

Pluggers remember a time, now thankfully in the distant past, when they had to engage in brief bouts of physical movement every half hour or so.