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Slylock Fox, 11/16/15

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say the answer to today’s mystery is a little grim. “When the animals rose up and seized human civilization, they gained control of our machines without fully understanding the legal and social safeguards we had built up to protect ourselves from the dangers of what we had created! In the first few years of the Forest Government regime, the roads were littered with corpses.”

Apartment 3-G, 11/16/15

Hey guys, a certain extremely handsome comics blogger was quoted in a New York Times from last week; the author of the article also managed to get a definitive statement from King Features that Apartment 3-G is going away at the end of the week. Now that you know that, aren’t you glad that the strip is spending at minimum a seventh of its remaining time in newspapers resolving the whole thing where Margo’s mom was being swindled by a psychic wedding planner? WE CAN SLEEP EASY NOW.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/16/15

Good news! The board has rubber stamped Heather’s Milton’s decision to not sell the company, and is about to expel Hugh to boot. This is actually good for him, because as an outsider he’ll have an easier time suing the entire board for corporate malpractice, when it becomes public that all the stuff he’s saying about his father being medically unfit and the company being run by a nanny are completely, 100% true.

Mark Trail, 11/16/15

OK, we all had fun with all the punching last week, but I’m going to go ahead and say that Ken calling his fist a “lullaby machine”, because it renders so many people unconscious by inducing brain trauma, is a little disturbing. I’m assuming that while Mark is prattling on about shoes in panel two Ken is kissing each of his knuckles, one by one.

Hi and Lois and Family Circus, 11/16/15

Billy and Ditto are generally depicted as nothing but surly and unpleasant in these strips, so I’m just going to assume that all of today’s dialogue is extremely sarcastic.

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Family Circus, 11/11/15

The “Keane Kid looks disheveled and drops his stuff on the ground and leans back on the door as he arrives home from school” is a bit of visual shorthand for “tough day” that the Family Circus deploys a lot. I’ve always had minor practical gripes with it (don’t the kids all come home from school together? are Jeffy and Dolly outside pounding on the door trying to get in?) but today it occurred to me that it also kind of looks like Billy has run desperately into the house and is trying to keep out someone — or something. Something that stalked and devoured the children sitting on either side of Billy in his classroom. But he made it out alive, by remaining absolutely silent.

Spider-Man, 11/11/15

So this lady who straight-up bashed in the Atlantean guard’s helmets with a club of some sort is … just some random doctor? Who wanders the docks of New York, looking for fish-children to forcibly rescue? I did a cursory Google search for “Liz Bellman” and “marvel” and have satisfied myself that this isn’t the secret identity of some random long-standing Marvel superhero/villain who I’m not familiar with but who will be starring in a Netflix original MCU series in 2017, but please be sure to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong!

Marvin, 11/11/15

Marvin, you’re starting a bank to bilk babies out of money they don’t have and your hobby is shitting yourself. Please don’t try to pop-shame your father.

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The Lockhorns, 11/3/15

INT. – UNDERGROUND HACKER HQ – NIGHT

Dozens of malicious HACKERS sit around a conference table in a murkily lit room. All have laptops in front of them; banks of computer servers with blinking lights line the walls.

HACKER #1
Gentlemen, I’ve summoned you here today to present you with … some disturbing content.

HACKER #2
Please. We’re the kings of the dark web. We’ve seen and heard things that would send normal people’s minds spinning into insanity.

HACKER #1
That may be, but this is horror of a different kind. I want you to turn your attention to today’s Lockhorns.

HACKER #3
You mean the comic? From the newspaper? I didn’t know they were still making those.

HACKER #1
Please point your browsers to the “Comics Kingdom” website, where you’ll be able to find the most recent panel.

HACKER #2
But it’s a paywalled site! How can we see it without paying?

All the HACKERS laugh uproariously as they effortlessly HACK the site with a few keystrokes. Their laughter ends abruptly as they see today’s Lockhorns panel.

HACKER #2
My god.

HACKER #3
They made a “dark web” joke.

HACKER #4
In a newspaper comic strip.

HACKER #2
Does this mean…

HACKER #1
Yes. Hacking is over. Being a hacker, knowing about the dark web … it’s not cool anymore. None of it.

The hackers close their laptops and begin smashing them to bits with HAMMERS.

HACKER #3
So, anyone else have any life skills?

HACKER #2
I waited tables for a while.

HACKER #4
I can do some bookeepping.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and The Family Circus, 11/3/15

Here in the United States it’s Odd-Numbered Election Year, which is important to voters in a few states (enjoy, Louisiana!) but mostly pretty low-key. That hasn’t stopped a couple of longstanding legacy comic strips from getting political, though — specifically, from expressing outright contempt for the whole concept of electoral democracy. How did the dinosaurs come to rule the earth? Through some fair election process? Don’t be a chump. They seized control of the planet with their teeth and claws. Maybe the piddling political issues of the day can be resolved by voting, but when it comes to basic questions of species dominance, we still live in the constant war of all against all. Snuffy’s neighbors might feel smug about performing their so-called “civic duty”; but Snuffy knows he’s doing the real important work, which is preventing our planet from being overrun by fish-men.

Mary Worth and The Phantom, 11/3/15

oh

HAPPENING