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Judge Parker, 8/9/10

Well, it turns out that Sophie’s cheerleading-driven powers of all-knowingness only give her universal access to cold, hard facts about whose ex-boyfriends are back in town, and whom those ex-boyfriends have divorced. The underlying motivations behind those circumstances are as opaque to Sophie as ever, and it’s kind of heartening to see that the youngest Spencer-Driver foundling is still an unsettling android-child, despite her makeover into a tween fashion plate. “NEDDY-UNIT: THE SOPHIE-UNIT DEMANDS INFORMATION ABOUT LOVE AND THE EXPERIENCE THEREOF! WILL LOVE OVERLOAD THE SOPHIE-UNIT’S CIRCUITRY IF SHE ATTEMPTS TO INCORPORATE IT INTO HER TOP-LEVEL ALGORITHM? THE SOPHIE-UNIT WILL INITIATE THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘IRRITATION’ (SUCCESS OF IRRITATION-INSTIGATION SUBROUTINE ESTIMATED AT > 95%) IN THE NEDDY-UNIT UNTIL THE DESIRED INFORMATION IS GIVEN!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/10

Ha ha, the chicken has fallen in love with Snuffy, whose main source of food is the chickens that he steals and eats! This has the potential for being one of the funny pages’ great tragic love stories. Let’s hope the artists don’t shy away from the heartbreaking beheading scene!

Dick Tracy, 8/9/10

Wow, usually we don’t get to see the badly decomposed corpses until the end of the Dick Tracy storyline. What exactly is that lump floating atop the body in panel one — is there an alligator lazily feeding on the poor sap, with Officer Hugepelvis gingerly sneaking up on it with plans to taser it? This could be the greatest Dick Tracy plot ever, if by “greatest” you mean “with the highest body count,” which is really the only metric I can think of that fans of this strip would respect.

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Dick Tracy, 7/28/10

I have to admit that I enjoy Dick’s second panel dialogue: “His movies can be viewed in 3-D without glasses — thus his riches.” Part of it is that I of course wish that someone would use “thus his riches” to end a sentence outlining one of my achievements (“He created the #1 Mary Worth fan site on the Internet — thus his riches”). But I also just like the rhythm of it. I’d call it poetry, but poetry and the decadent so-called “artists” who produce it are loathed by Dick with a righteous passion.

I am a little disappointed by panel three, though; traditionally the strip never misses a chance to translate police jargon like “lifted” for the civilians in the audience.

Judge Parker, 7/28/10

At last we learn why Sam is so fond of Jules, despite his previous outrage over the young man having the sex relations with his adult daughter: he recognizes in him a kindred spirit, an artiste crushed by parental disapproval! The fact that Sam was forced into law when his true passion lay elsewhere might explains his overall emotional numbness and inability to love. He pushed his musical past down so deeply into his soul that this is apparently the first his own wife has heard about it, and he’s apparently required two beers just to work up the nerve to broach the subject.

Luann, 7/28/10

Oh, look, Brad and Toni are going to a restaurant called Something Stone, or perhaps the Stone Somethingry, so named because the building that houses it is of stone construction. See, these are the things you focus on, to avoid thinking about the sex banter. Maybe all the food on the menu is made of stones! Ha ha! Then they’ll eat them and die, and the banter will stop.

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Wizard of Id, 7/24/10

If you need an enormous interpanel onomatopoeia representing an action that is essentially silent in order to make your joke clear, perhaps you should just start over from scratch.

Crock, 7/24/10

The new edgier Crock is also experimenting with narrative forms: today we see the waiter who is enraging Grossie by flirting with her friend instead of taking their order, while behind him we can already see the the blood that will soon festoon the walls when Grossie acts on her anger.

Dick Tracy, 7/24/10

Dick Tracy is tired of his little bon mots going unappreciated by his wife, and so is just going to thought-balloon his gnomic tough-guyisms from now on.

Marmaduke, 7/24/10

Do you really want to draw attention to what’s going on here, Mr. Lifeguard? “Four local children eaten by shark” would be an awful headline, but at least it falls into a realm that people can understand. “Four local children eaten by nightmarish demon-hound pretending to be shark” would be so incomprehensibly terrifying that it would be certain to set off a total panic.

Ziggy, 7/24/10

Ziggy’s dog has been aggressively stalking Jim Davis, for some reason.