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Mary Worth, 6/12/19

“Hmm, I think I’ll have this dish they call the ‘Hunky Tech Millionaire.’ That’s not a phrase that has any particularly unpleasant associations for you, is it?”

Hi and Lois, 6/12/19

Bad news, Trixie! The very slim chance that this strip was going to pivot to a For Better Or For Worse-style aging in real-time drama vanished long ago. Your audience is 100% nostalgics now, and those nostalgics only want you to be a baby, so you’re going to be a baby … forever.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/12/19

You know, sometimes the point of this blog is for me to have an outlet for my creativity and analysis using the daily newspaper comics as a prompt, but sometimes the point is that I shouldn’t have to suffer alone, and today is one of those days when we tip towards the latter. If I have to know that the theme of today’s Funky Winkerbean is “the Funky Winkerbean characters are horny,” then so do you, by god.

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Slylock Fox, 6/3/19

Since the early days of this blog, I have cruelly mocked legacy strips’ tendency to shamelessly recycle content. So perhaps it is a fitting comeuppance that I, having in nearly fifteen years of blogging become something of a legacy feature myself, sometimes get sucked into the repeats, compelled to comment on the same recycled strip with variations on the same joke! Sometimes I catch myself and sometimes I don’t, but I suppose it makes sense that the same strips would draw me in, since they’re presumably activating the same parts of my comics-mocking brain. Still, it’s I enjoy contemplating the differences in how I react to the same strip, to try to understand how my own mind has changed over the years. For instance, back in 2011, I found it sad that Slylock could only correct some physics facts as this poor stork-lady’s business collapsed around her. Today, I’m reading this and thinking — did she call the cops because her candles were melting? Couldn’t she get ahold of her landlord, or, like, an HVAC repair person? Does she run a candle store and somehow not have an HVAC repair person on retainer? She’s taking up valuable police time! Slylock and Max could be out there finding Slick Smitty guilty of something that isn’t even a crime rather than coming up with ways to save this careless merchant’s inventory! It makes me sick.

Hi and Lois, 6/3/19

Wow, Hi and Lois looked genuinely shattered that their daughter is doing a perfectly normal, if irritating, baby thing! “Oh, Hi! We raised our kids in stultifying suburbia specifically so that they’d respect the sanctity of private property from birth. And we failed! She’s an anarchist, Hi, a damn anarchist. What have we done?”

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/27/19

Oh, hey, remember how Cindy decided her next big project should be a documentary about silent movie legend Butter Brinkel, who I guess is supposed to be a thinly veiled Fatty Arbuckle, which is definitely a subject the youth-obsessed audience at Buddyblog will be into? To track down the “real story” on this disgraced movie star, she’s talking to Cliff Anger, former HUAC Blacklistee and the subject of her last documentary, which was nominated for an Emmy, thank you very much. Since Cliff was in the Merchant Marine and/or the Communist Party USA as of 1940, that puts him in his late 90s today, at minimum; but since Arbuckle’s big scandal happened in 1921, that still makes Cliff too young to have known him at the height of his career. But I guess in a world where the Brown Derby continues to be a going concern decades after the last one went out of business in real life, we can’t expect the flow of history to match up with reality as we know it. Anyway, I’m hoping “he was my kemosabe” is coded silent era slang for gay stuff, but it’s probably just a reference to a wildly racist costume Cindy is going to find photo evidence of soon enough.

Hi and Lois, 5/27/19

Not sure if we’re meant to read Lois’s statement in panel two as “I feel bad for Thirsty and am not going to go along with Hi in freezing him out” or “I actually find Hi’s cooking unappetizing and can barely scarf down half of one of his burgers, so why let it go to waste” or “I’ve been ‘sharing’ my ‘burger’ with Thirsty for a while now so I suppose it’s time all the men in my life were updated on the situation,” but I appreciate the way the kids are staring at the adults gobsmacked, waiting for the drama to fully reveal its details.

Slylock Fox, 5/27/19

Count Weirdly has blown it again, but you have to give him credit: “Oh, he was just here, because, uh, the ice cubes are still in his drink,” is exactly the sort of bullshit Sly thinks is like DNA-level case-solving evidence.