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Dennis the Menace, 9/10/20

Well to be honest does anybody actually read Blondie, 9 Chickweed Lane, or Judge Parker?

Judge Parker, 9/10/20

Oops, I guess somebody does! Ahem so it looks like Ronnie Huerta is headed back to L.A. without Neddy, who has rediscovered the charms of room and board on Abby’s dime in rustic Cavelton. But I’m torn. On the one hand, Ronnie was the sassy gf who called Neddy on her copious B.S. — an endless, unpleasant, and valuable public service. But on the other, she’s one of a class of characters in Judge Parker and Sally Forth who daily undermine, hijack, or derail everything the main characters say. You never really finish a conversation with her, Norton, Toni Bowen, Sally’s team at the office, or Ted Forth without them steering it off into some metanarrative, stunt, non sequitur, distraction, hallucination, or wisecrack. Look, she’s doing it right up there! It’s annoying, and it mucks up the pace, which in the case of Judge Parker is legendarily slow to begin with.

So c’mon, Ronnie! Let Neddy gush about Cavelton for a few insincere minutes before you shut her down and hug it out. It’s probably the last thing you’ll do before you flicker out of existence forever, so make it a good one! Say hi to Aria, Chad Duncan, and the Thorp kids!

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/20

Idiot rustics attempt some extremely low-stakes con, part XXVII.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/20

With any luck, your corpse will be Board certified!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/30/20

Slylock seems pretty confident that Count Weirdly is lying about being anointed King of Earth by a powerful alien civilization, based on a firm belief that, as described by special relativity, the speed of light is in fact the upper limit at which information can travel. Of course, Count Weirdly has a working time machine, which you’d think would prove that ordinary physical laws don’t apply to him. You’d also think his powers to bend time itself would help him establish his rule over our planet without needing alien intervention on his behalf, but that’s a debate for another time.

Gasoline Alley, 8/30/20

Gasoline Alley is, along with The Simpsons, the last media franchise on Earth still trying to squeeze laughs out of Frank Nelson’s character from The Jack Benny Show. This Nelson-ish fellow has been annoying the Gasoline Alley crew intermittently over the years, and today has proven that even death can’t stop his antics. Still, we shouldn’t let the appearance of this beloved (?) figure distract us from the true horror here, which is that Walt, who was almost finally freed from his cursed, interminable earthly existence and was ready to receive his reward from his Creator, is being dragged back down to the plane of the living on the orders of a cruel family that simply will not let him die.

Shoe, 8/30/20

In the Shoe world of sapient birds, there is no pan-avian solidarity. Different bird species still see themselves in competition, and boast that they would certainly never be dismembered and eaten at human-run fast food restaurants! The fact that whole international businesses exist to murder and cook intelligent creatures isn’t the problem, the problem is actually that some of those creatures are too inherently dumb to avoid getting captured and processed into lunch. Pretty grim, if you ask me!

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/9/20

Oh, God, sorry to be the insufferable Los Angeles geography knower but a week ago we were told this fire was called the Point Dume fire, presumably because it had started around Point Dume in Malibu, and today we’re told it’s reached the “Hills of West Hollywood,” by which I guess they mean the hills just north of West Hollywood, there are no actual hilly neighborhoods in the city of West Hollywood proper but never mind that. Anyway, there’s really only one problem with this, which is that if a fire had spread from Malibu to West Hollywood, probably no newscaster would be standing just feet away from it because it would be a thirty-mile wall of flame that managed to jump two freeways, destroy the Getty Center and several extremely wealthy neighborhoods, and just generally be an insane catastrophe that would send literally millions of people fleeing pell-mell from the destruction!

Anyway, this post is mostly for my mom, who’s very convinced every time there’s a fire in LA that our house is on the verge of burning down. Our house isn’t gonna burn down, mom! We’re way too far from any natural vegetation for that to happen. The way LA’s gonna kill us is from the car exhaust from the massive freeway interchange half a mile away, which is not as dramatic.

Curtis, 8/9/20

You know what filled me with absolute, unalloyed delight in today’s comics? Bugsy, the fly who understands what you say! This is insane and kind of out of character for this strip and I love all of it — the big cute eyes on Bugsy, the way he he gestures with all six of his limbs, the overwrought reactions from all his victims! I’d actually argue that he doesn’t just understand when you’re talking about killing him: he also knows what you value most, which is honestly much creepier.

Gasoline Alley, 8/9/20

As far as strips in today’s comics where the characters watch a deranged commercial go, Gasoline Alley is sadly a distant second to Curtis. What exactly is the implication of the exchange in the final panel? Is Rufus planning on shitting in the cans? Is that it?

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/9/20

Oh, finally, America’s #1 medical soap opera comic is going to actually grapple with the biggest medical crisis in the last century! Unfortunately, based on the “Lockdown Stories” title, I suspect we’ll be seeing less of Rex telling nurses from across the room to turn patients over onto their stomach and being given 10,000 doses of remdesivir without asking for or really needing them, and more Buck working from home trying to sell music and art from guys who were famous 30 years ago over the internet while his wife takes care of his newborn son and very quickly comes to loathe him.