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Slylock Fox (panel), 8/11/13

In a neglected roadside nature museum sits a dusty diorama labeled “The Eagle.” But there is no eagle — just the shattered skeleton of a fox lying on a patch of bloodstained dirt near a few tufts of reddish fur and what might be part of an ear. The yellowing card reads, “The diet of the American Bald Eagle is almost entirely fish. An eagle will not attack a fox unless it competes for the eagle’s food or otherwise provokes it.”

What I’m saying is don’t piss off the eagle, Sly. I mean just look at him, Jeez.

Beetle Bailey (panels), 8/11/13

Oh look, it’s Beetle’s Dad! Did you know he’s also the father of Lois Flagston from Hi and Lois? His wife starves him until he completes the work she’s assigned! Just like in the Army!

Hi and Lois, 8/11/13

No starvation for Hi — Lois keeps meat on those bones with a steady diet of nutritious soups. But his family’s relentless petty demands give him no peace, and drive him by degrees to the farthest margins of his home. Lois is blind to his suffering — this is just the way families are, isn’t it?

Judge Parker (panel), 8/11/13

I’ll spare you the cheesecake, money porn, and blocky “romantic” banter (well, most of it) in today’s Judge Parker, but floating there in the final panel is proof that Randy’s fianceé is an original badass. That’s right — the minute she and Randy split up to evade the mystery woman in the floppy hat, CIApril confronted her and stone-cold threw her hat in the water. Final warning, too: if she stalks them even one more time, April will tell all the girls in homeroom Mystery Gal’s a total skank.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Mark Trail, 8/7/13

The cruelty of Nature is well documented, but the cruelty of Mark Trail, Man of Nature, retains its power to shock. Blissed-out Rusty nurses his otter and dreams of fishing, but mere days from now he will have neither otter, nor fishing, nor any last shred of hope. Mark just twists the knife, while Andy’s mind is all on dinner. Say — maybe they’ll have fish!

Beetle Bailey, 8/7/13

In the grip of his alcoholic hallucinations, General Halftrack misinterprets Lieutenant Fuzz’s invitation to Where the Wild Things Are costume sexplay. Lt. Fuzz takes it as a rebuff and retires to his quarters for another long night of Patton, tears, and self-abuse.

9 Chickweed Lane (panel), 8/7/13

OK, I take back all the terrible things I said about the Not-Ardins’ mouths yesterday.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/7/13

Heather’s hissy fit reminds Rex what June has in store for him when he gets home. Four months wasted figuring out Milton’s vomiting might be something he ate, and no boat or free meal in it for them anywhere? And now he’s supposed to look into the Alzheimer’s thing, too? These wealthy, entitled jerks! Why, if Milton weren’t his only patient ….

Shoe, 8/7/13

Well OK on the face of it this is one of those “reverse-engineered from the punchline” jokiform utterances we see so often in Shoe, Archie, and Herb and Jamaal. A real-life bird-woman would say, “I surprised my husband in fishnet stockings”, but where are you gonna go with that when you’re on deadline and that tee-time is coming up fast, huh?

But on a deeper level, blondie here is being really unfair — I mean, sometimes a fella just wants to feel pretty, and pantyhose is gross in August and it’s not like I didn’t double-check to see what time you were coming back. Wait — HE! He didn’t check!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Heathcliff, 7/15/13

Last week’s Heathcliff fish joke, while well within the expected whimsy-parameters of an inoffensive long-running legacy comic, still adhered to a basic logic, that logic being “cats like stealing fish, to eat.” Today’s panel provides something more in line with the profound weirdness bubbling below the surface of this feature’s modern iteration. Cats like fish, and I suppose cats like “playing with their food,” when their food is alive, but instead here the tenuous conceptual cat-fish connection produced a scenario where Heathcliff has a collection of fish of varying densities that he uses as athletic equipment. How dead are these fish, anyway? Are they still floppy? Do they hit the ball with a meaty smack, or have they started to rot, with contact with any projectile producing a cloud of scattered fish-flesh? Or … maybe, as I imagined last week, we’re meant to interpret the fish’s open eyes as meaning that it is still alive, which makes its bemused facial expression all the more hilarious. “Oh, now the cat’s using me as a baseball bat. That’s fantastic, just fantaaaastic.”

Archie, 7/15/13

The current run of Newspaper Archie Reruns From The Late ’90s Or Maybe The Early ’00s has actually involved a continuing plot that’s running over multiple weeks, which is kind of a new one, though not new in the sense of these strips actually being new, obviously. Anyway, Ronnie’s cruel father made her get a job! Obviously this job just became another venue for her long-running battle with Betty over Archie’s dubious charms. Which I guess is bumming him out? Look at how miserable Archie looks in panel two! I’ve never seen him sadder! And this is before he finds out that Veronica is stalking him with potentially malicious intent. Maybe he’s just sad that she gets access to all that delicious ice cream and he doesn’t?

Beetle Bailey, 7/15/13

As we already know, Camp Swampy exists in an pocket universe in which a single, awful day keeps on happening, forever. Dimly aware of the nightmarish nature of his reality, Beetle is attempting, through this conceptual artwork, to convey the horror of his damned existence.