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Spider-Man, 7/9/18

How would rumors like that spread, anyway? “Listen, there may or may not be this one guy, dunno who, and he fights a hypothetical sect called The Hand! They’re famous for keeping their activities, identity, and their very existence completely secret: nobody’s ever heard of them, and everybody knows it! Maybe this guy fights them with his hand? No way to tell! Don’t hold me to any of this, OK? Pass it on!”

Mary Worth, 7/9/18

Hey, you two, I have nothing but respect for your respective sobrieties; Tommy, you have apparently turned your life around yet again, way to go. But before you go getting all boldface, accept that maybe not every waitress is on fire for details of your personal journeys? Think of “Just order your damn drink” as a thirteenth step or something.

Judge Parker, 7/9/18

(Sigh)

No, Neddy, they didn’t — they asked where you were. Ronnie Huerta invented that whole drug thing after the fact. Are you on drugs or something?

Haha Sam is shopping online for a matching lamp. Maybe the strip is so deeply invested in desk lamps because the lawyers don’t have any actual work to put on their desks?

Crankshaft, 7/9/18

♫ Love is the drug got a hook in Ralph! ♬

The only real question is how soon this ends badly.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Dick Tracy, 7/4/18

Citizen! Share your Fourth of July with this steel-jawed law enforcer, literal red-headed stepchild, and alien halfbreed, arrayed before a monochrome American flag! Comply!

Crankshaft, 7/4/18

All week long, Ralph has been flirting with both myocardial infarction and Sandy here, to the dulcet strains of jazz classic I Can’t Get Started — doubly ironic because even if he does, there remains the matter of finishing.

P.S. In California we have fires, and our air really does look like that. I don’t know Ohio’s excuse.

Mary Worth, 7/4/18

Tommy and Brandy emerge from some kind of hostage drama, and the foreshadowing is thick: Tommy will demand sex on threat of murder, and Brandy will gladly opt for death: “Humanity, schumanity — a girl’s got to have standards!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/4/18

Every year around this time I become insufferable on the subject of fireworks. Growing up, we had the good, real kind — the ones that fly, flash, and most of all explode. I once got arrested for pitching an M-80 into the lagoon at a public park, and I can’t say I regret it.

But now the runup to every Fourth of July brings a week of TV-news moralizing about how awful fireworks are and police BS about how THIS TIME the department will be REALLY SERIOUS about enforcement. The spokespeople are hilarious: “Yes of course we will totally send our officers charging into drunken parties in private backyards, risking their lives to keep lawbreakers from injuring themselves. It’s our top priority. Youuuuuu betcha.”

But the highlight is the late news on the Fourth itself, when every station stops their tut-tutting and backdrops the news desk with a live feed of the Oakland skyline — a lacework of smoke trails silhouetted against a sky lit bright as day. AMERICA, dammit!

Still and all, I wouldn’t put explosives in the hands of Hootin’ Holler’s most belligerent drunk.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Spider-Man, 6/15/18

Oh, hey, whaddya know, Spider-Man and Iron Fist’s laudable attempts to find out why Jimmy Woo got stabbed and stop him from getting stabbed again, respectively, have unfortunately been set aside so that they can battle it out on the roof of a hospital while engaging in some of the most cringe-inducing banter this strip has ever seen, which is really saying something. Mostly, though, I’m interested in the third panel here. Like many comics, Spider-Man is extremely wedded to the classical iconography that has nurses dressed all in white and sporting a nurse’s cap, even though that hasn’t been the standard nurse’s uniform in the U.S. in decades. Another change in the nursing profession is that now there are male nurses, who never wore the cap, so putting that kind of retro outfit on them would be pretty silly, which gets you incongruous visuals like we have in this strip, where one of our sinister baddies has taken regular scrubs from the supply closet, and the other prepped for this job by shopping in the “naughty nurse” section at the local Halloween superstore.

Crankshaft, 6/15/18

Bad news, everybody: Crankshaft’s garden club isn’t going to turn into a weekly senior citizen S&M orgy, despite what we’ve all been hoping.