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Spider-Man, 7/22/17

Ah, Newspaper Spider-Man, always striving to be “hip” and “with it” but always falling just a bit behind! I’m sure over at Newspaper Spider-Man HQ it feels very of the moment to have MJ’s studio publicist svengali barking about a major blogger waiting, but since I’m a major blogger myself, let me assure you that blogging is pretty much over, and has been since about 2011. The new hotness is “influencers,” which is a code word for social media stars with 500,000 Instagram followers or 4,000,000 pageviews on each and every one of their YouTube makeup tutorials or whatever. Newspaper reporting has been over and done with for a lot longer than blogging, obviously, so a more accurate scene would just be this publicist talking about how he’s got three influencers waiting, and since they’re all millennials (or, what’s the thing after millennials? Gen-Z? UGH) their attention spans are notoriously short.

Dennis the Menace, 7/22/17

I love the knowing smiles that Henry and Alice are flashing here. I’m not sure what secret they’re sharing — that Henry is a terrible liar? that in the white-collar professional world, business and pleasure mingle on the golf course, helping consolidate the wealth of the upper class? that this “business trip” is an opportunity for them both to rendezvous with their secondary partners before reuniting and reaffirming their loving bond within the a context of consensual polyamory? — but whatever it is, it holds menace in the sense that it means that the world isn’t as simple as Dennis believes.

Slylock Fox, 7/22/17

Hey, kids! Remember Grimace, the beloved character from the McDonaldland commercials? Well, he’s dead now. He got bit by a snake and he died.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/18/17

Just to show you where I’m at with Rex Morgan, M.D., emotionally, every once in a while a strip comes along where I can sort of visualize a potentially interesting story direction if I squint at it, but I don’t talk about here, but then it turns out soon afterwards that nothing actually interesting is going to come of it, and then I do talk about that here. So, like: yesterday, June’s old pal Margie, who’s shown up after having not seen June for many years, casually mentioned that her son and Michael Morgan were born on the same day, which … how could she know that??? Possibly because she’s been stalking the Morgans for a long time in prepration for some long-term grift or Single White Female situation? Anyway, turns out nope, it’s just that June sent a birth announcement to her hometown paper for some reason. Boring! I promise to keep you up to date as this situation singularly fails to develop.

Dennis the Menace, 7/18/17

“The trouble with Dennis is that he arrives more often than he leaves, in violation of the Law of Conservation of Dennises. With each new ‘hello’ without a corresponding ‘goodbye,’ another iteration of Dennis exists in the house. I’m not sure if this is just straight-up time travel or something much more complex involving the nature of causality, but our local section of the space-time continuum is definitely feeling the strain!”

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Mark Trail, 7/8/17

Oh, huh, I’m actually a little disappointed that Lesley’s fancy Escalade was only bashed into rubble by a she-walrus in paroxysms of panic and labor pain. My true hope was that the upholstery had been ruined by massive amounts of walrus placenta. I’m not a biologist, but I assume walrus afterbirth smells extremely bad.

Dennis the Menace, 7/8/17

This panel elicited a genuine laugh from me, because “we took our car for a boat ride!” is exactly the sort of entirely banal incident that would nevertheless completely blow Joey’s feeble mind.

Gasoline Alley, 7/8/17

I have absolutely zero interest in explaining whatever the hell it is that’s happening in Gasoline Alley right now. I just wanted to share the final panel with you, in which a leering, bearded, one-eyed (?) man announces to no one in particular that fish “will be even better tastin’ in my mouth!” HAPPY WEEKEND EVERYBODY