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Judge Parker, 8/5/23

Poor Sam looks so hangdog there trying to mumble his way out of a jam. But Abbey sees the glimmer of a Business Plan, and she’s intrigued: “You … you would have paid us to kill someone? Damn, murder for hire sounds easier than running a B&B out of a horse barn, and with no cooking or messy arson! I bet April could give me some pointers!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/5/23

Hey Buck: If that earworm bothers you, just put the nail back in.

Mark Trail, 8/5/23

“Nothing can distract me—except maybe my phone and these daily smash-cut scene changes! Woooo … squirrel!”

Arctic Circle, 8/5/23

Part of the Comics Curmudgeon mission (Reading the Comics So You Don’t Have To) is keeping track of developments in under-the-radar strips like Arctic Circle here. For years, this strip has been sounding daily pollution and climate-change alarms, with “punchlines” never straying too far from “Ain’t It Awful?”

But that changed suddenly and without warning last week, when we started getting charming but off-message strips about singing in elevators, dogs and Frisbees, “Bears Like Ice Cream,” and such, and I wondered if the strip was having some sort of crisis. So it’s reassuring to see its return to catastrophe-themed humor, even if they had to swap out the existential threat.

Blondie, 8/5/23

I don’t know what the Blondie creative team is going for with the label on that suave lothario’s sweet turquoise crew-neck. “Thirsty’s” is a Hi and Lois brand, and it’s obviously a bar, not a sandwich joint. If those wild accusations by former franchisees of Dagwood’s Sandwich Shoppes LLC soured you on using that brand, you could at least go with “Hungry’s.”

Hi there! I’m sitting in through Monday the 14th while Josh takes a well-deserved break at scenic Undisclosed Location. Let me know at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net if you have any issues with the site, your subscription, or email delivery and I’ll do what I can to help.

—Uncle Lumpy

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Blondie, 8/3/23

It’s a little unsettling that Blondie just produces this elaborate sandwich tray out of nowhere between the second and third panels. I’m imagining her humming softly to herself as she made it over the course of the quiet morning before these ladies showed up, thinking, with increasing anticipation, about her husband “going away” as football season got into swing. Oh, sure, he’d be there, physically, for the most part. But she’d sure have to deal with him a lot less. “How nice! Where are they going?” she asks, innocently, hoping to have found others in the same predicament.

Dennis the Menace, 8/3/23

Sure, this seems pretty treacly at first glance, but I’m going to go ahead and ID as at least mildly menacing a scenario where a couple of unaccompanied children and an unleashed dog are wandering around the countryside, pulling a wagon with a makeshift weapon in it.

Family Circus, 8/3/23

BILLY KEANE: FAIR-WEATHER PATRIOT

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Gil Thorp, 8/2/23

God, can you imagine being part of an institution so dehumanizing and destructive to your identity that it strips your very name away from you, leaving you nothing but a number for identification? And then also, in a mostly unrelated matter, you were prison? Ha ha, I kid, but seriously, it’s a good thing Marty is sober now because in the old days there is absolutely no chance that he’d be able to keep track of two sets of numbers while doing the play by play.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/2/23

I was going to question why Silas’s general store, literally the only retail outlet in town, would even need to advertise, but then I realized that the residents of Hootin’ Holler need occasional reminders that they have access to a place where money can be exchanged for goods; it’s only recently that the community has taken the first tentative steps beyond its traditional subsistence agriculture/chicken theft economy.

Blondie, 8/2/23

Sorry, guys, Marx says that the struggle of class against class is a political struggle, so you are definitely discussing politics.