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Crock, 10/11/10

It shames me to admit this, but I recognized the hideous mutant bird-thing in Crock today more or less right away. It made a previous appearance taunting Figowitz about a year ago, only back then it was blue and I assumed it was meant to represent the bluebird of happiness. Is it meaningful that the bluebird of happiness in this blighted, soul-crushing strip is now a drab brown color? Probably!

Mark Trail, 10/11/10

Good news for Mark! He definitely won’t have any trouble selling that story he’s working on when it stops being about political insiders shooting semi-tame animals in a caged hunt and starts being about political insiders shooting a little girl. Admittedly, he’ll have to find another future mate for Rusty, but there seems to be a pretty much endless supply of mutant child-things in the Mark Trail universe, so presumably that won’t be a problem.

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My Cage, 10/6/10

Have I ever mentioned in this space that My Cage has been cancelled by King Features? Well, if I haven’t, My Cage is being cancelled by King Features, which is too bad because (a) I like it and (b) it’s not a 70-year-old strip being churned out by the grandsons of the strip creator. Anyway, the strip is spending its last month in newspapers in a cloud of meta, and since I’m a sucker for attention, I’m happy to repost this installment, which name-checks my site and an insult given herein. Cathy was able to attend the awards ceremony at the last minute since she now has no other commitments, but she ought to know that a strap-on duckbill does not a fursuit make.

Crock, 10/6/10

Dear creators of Crock: Despite the fact that the two concepts are often discussed in similar contexts, there is a difference between “camouflage” and “body armor”! Nevertheless, I hope the confusion in this strip arises from your confusing these two things, because otherwise it is nothing but a howling pit of gibbering madness.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/6/10

It should come as a surprise to no one that Hootin’ Holler’s one law-enforcement official is thoroughly corrupt, but the extremely paltry sum with which the locals can buy justice is a shocking commentary on the depths of the community’s economic despair.

Pluggers, 10/6/10

I don’t know which premise here I find less believable: that pluggers, whose lives are notoriously empty and meaningless, might be in a hurry to get somewhere, or that pluggers would even bother going to a restaurant whose very name implies that they’ll be forced to use a fork with their meal.

Apartment 3-G, 10/6/10

Who wants to see Margo ruin a perfectly nice wedding with her terrible behavior, just so nobody ever asks her to be a bridesmaid again? Me! Me! I want to see Margo ruin a perfectly nice wedding with her terrible behavior, just so nobody ever asks her to be a bridesmaid again!

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Family Circus, 9/4/10

There’s certainly a little something weirdly circular about Dolly praying for the power to pray more intently, but perhaps we ought to take this scene at face value and respect the poor girl’s fervent desire to keep her mind focused on the divine in the midst of a chaotic living situation. Her casual description of her middle brother wandering about the house muttering incomprehensible but threatening nonsense to himself is particularly harrowing.

Crock, 9/4/10

Though I once praised the poor damned souls who do the coloring for the comics, they still must be called to account when they err. Why must we buy into the beauty myth that only blondes are sexy? The Crock artist appreciates an attractive brunette, obviously, having gong to some pains to ink in the hair of Grossie’s sexy friend (since this is Crock, she’s probably just named “Sexy”). Why do you supply a blondeish nimbus that was not part of the original artistic vision, O Colorist?

B.C., 9/4/10

Ha ha, she made a real impression on him … with her enormous ass! Possibly by sitting on him! And her name is “Fanny!” And they’re, uh, ants, and probably when an ant has a distended rear thorax section like that it means something, but, uh, bugs gross me out so I don’t want to look it up. Probably it relates to breeding or something though, or feeding the young. Which casts this strip into a completely different and more disgusting light. Jeez, I think I liked B.C. better when it was just telling me I was going to hell.