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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.

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Hi and Lois, 5/25/19

The best part about today’s strip is the expressions of pure delight on Ditto and his friend’s faces in panel two. This clearly isn’t the first time Thirsty has overshared the contours of marital woes with them, but now things have escalated to the point where he’s been thrown out of the house, and so they’re settling in for some tales of truly outrageous tales of domestic depravity.

Beetle Bailey, 5/25/19

Fun fact! “Knasen,” which, depending on which possibly incorrect auto-translation service you use, is Swedish either for “knees” or “the knot,” is what Beetle Bailey is called in Sweden. And since we all know that Swedish Beetle Bailey is just straight-up porn, that means that Plato has been spending his off hours getting aroused reading about the adventures of Scandinavian alternate universe versions of him and his friends, who get to actually have sex.

Not fun at all fact! Sarge often viciously beats up Beetle in public for the slightest irritation, and nobody ever stops him.

Dustin, 5/25/19

Hey kids, remember Dustin, the comic that doesn’t really know what Twitter is or how it works? Well, here’s some exciting news: it has even less of a grasp on Instagram.