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Funky Winkerbean, 9/2/15

Ha ha, remember Coach Stropp, who used to cruelly mock Les’s athletic ineptitude, back when this strip was funny? Well, he’s dead now.

Hagar the Horrible, 9/2/15

Ha ha, a Viking always pays his final respects to his enemy. After he’s dead! Like that guy is about to be. Hagar’s sword didn’t slice through the flesh of his face, but the blow to his head was probably hard enough that his brain is already starting to hemorrhage.

Heathcliff, 9/2/15

Ha ha, those birds have a feeling of impending doom! Probably because Heathcliff is about to kill and eat them, hopefully in that order.

Mary Worth, 9/2/15

Well, at least nobody’s dead or about to die in Mary Worth, as Toby prepares to stride purposefully out into single life wearing a purple tracksuit and electric blue jacket, and … wait, what’s that? Over on the bookshelf?

OH MY GOD IT’S THE ASHES OF A DEAD DOG, PROBABLY! Fido has never appeared as a beloved Cameron-pet in the thirteen years I’ve been reading this strip; possibly Ian owned the pup before he even met Toby. I sincerely hope tomorrow we see Ian lying in bed, weeping and reading Toby’s note for the fourth time, clutching this urn of dog cremains like his favorite teddy bear. “You understood me, Fido,” he sobs. “You’re the only one who ever understood me.”

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Mary Worth, 8/21/15

One of the complaints about the modern-day movie industry is that studios don’t seem to produce midrange movies anymore; everything is either a tiny indie film made on a shoestring or a huge blockbuster action movie or broad comedy. Mary Worth, as usual, steps up to fill the market that Hollywood is ignoring. Sure, the strip provides big hits like Aldomania or Wilbur’s Illegitimate Not-Son; but it also provides smaller, quieter, but still utterly engrossing plots like Ian Kisses Up To His Boss And Toby Remembers She’s An Artist And They Seethe At Each Other About It. I am hooked and I am not ashamed to admit it!

Anyway, today we learn that Toby’s art show, which features a range of greyscale blobs and quadragons, is downtown, and I’m really glad to see the local artist community is helping gentrify a neighborhood that used to be a dangerous hellhole. Maybe it’ll soon be safe enough for even Mary to go there! Meanwhile, Ian realizes that he’ll have to choose between sitting through a boring and presumably outdated lecture from Hilton Berkes about whatever subject he used to specialize in before he took a cushy administrative job and going to Toby’s show and hopefully seeing that warrior in the background of panel once coming to life and murdering everybody.

Heathcliff, 8/21/15

Heathcliff sure had been into surfing jokes lately, huh? Yes, what if a cat were a surfer. And some aliens saw him. And the aliens were also surfers. That would be truly radical, and also whimsical, would it not? God, this makes me exhausted just looking at it.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/1/15

Oh, boy, as noted by Uncle Lumpy, deranged industrialist/nanny-marrier Milton Avery is back in the strip! When we last saw Milton a few years back in a plot I seem to have not covered in particular depth, his heart was on the verge of exploding because of his tightly wound business asshole lifestyle. After being vaguely threatening towards Rex for no good reason, it turned out that his real worry wasn’t over his heart, but his brain, which he was convinced was failing him. “You don’t have Alzheimer’s Disease until Rex says you do,” Heather declared, and I don’t remember if Rex weighed in one way or the other but today it’s pretty clear that he has Alzheimer’s Disease, or at least some other flavor of dementia. Looks like we’ve already found the excitiment of this new plot: can a senile and extremely wealthy man’s legal team keep him out of jail after he stabs a household employee to death?

Heathcliff, 8/1/15

Ha ha, yes, phones certainly do have a soporific effect that can smooth out conflict but also the passion of a life truly lived in the moment and OH MY GOD WHY IS THERE A PHONE IN FRONT OF THAT WEDGE OF SWISS CHEESE? Is the cheese alive? Has the Heathcliff creative team decided that, since all animals, predator and prey, are fully sapient in the strip, why not extend this to inanimate objects? Is every Heathcliff panel full of individual consciousnesses embedded in everything, fully aware, unable to communicate, and screaming?