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Hi and Lois, 5/30/16

Wow, the Flagston kids are easily impressed. I don’t even like salad, but as far as I’m concerned, Hi didn’t come close to upstaging his wife’s ultra-local meal. Did he raise adorable calfs and pigs in his yard until they were juicy, delicious adults, then slaughter them in an abattoir of his own design and grind the byproducts into delicious hotdog-slurry with a hand-cranked slurry grinder? Is their home splattered with bits of blood and bone and viscera that will never wash out, all so the kids can enjoy a few fleeting moments of meaty deliciousness? No? He just bought some meat at the store, like a chump? Give me a break.

Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 5/30/16

Ugh, fine, I guess I’ll pay attention to the Funkyverse’s time-jump-spanning crossover antics. Over in the past, which is also the present, Jeff is about to get dumped by his therapist for being so irritating. (You can tell it’s the past because Jeff’s health insurance has paid for enough sessions to get him to this point.) In the future, which is also the present, Jeff and Pam discuss the fact that Pam’s irritating parent still lives. (You can tell it’s the future because there’s only one print newspaper, and it’s just called The Paper, and it’s only 16 pages long.)

Pluggers, 5/30/16

I love the wild disparity between today’s caption and today’s cartoon. I’m sure the Whitneys are just kinda tickled by the fact that their car’s “check engine” light’s been on forever with no ill effects and wouldn’t actually give a hoot if it went out, but Dog-Man seems be seized by absolute panic over the sudden reversal. “OH MY GOD! THIS IS IT! WHAT WE’VE ALWAYS WORRIED ABOUT! IT’S FINALLY HERE! I’M GOING TO OPEN MY DOOR AND ROLL OUT, YOU DO THE SAME! IF WE DON’T MAKE IT, I’LL SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE VEIL! WE HAD A GOOD LIIIIIFEEEEEEEEEEEE”

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Shoe, 5/17/16

As America’s #1 Blogger Who Thinks The Bird-People Of Shoe Should Behave More Like Actual Birds, my immediate reaction upon reading this strip was to Google “can birds digest gluten?” While evidence is inconclusive, by which I mean I couldn’t find anything on the first page of results, I did learn about “angel wing syndrome,” which, according to a web page with disturbing pictures I found on the Internet, is when baby birds eat too much bread because people like to feed bread to adorable baby birds, and as a result their wings don’t develop properly. But are underdeveloped wings only the first stage in the bird de-evolution caused by eating processed carbohydrates? Is this colony of grotesque bird-people, featherèd and beakèd but also clothèd and handèd, simply the result of too much gluten? Is Roz’s customer not a goof on current dietary fads, but rather a brave soul trying to set her children free of the trap from which her generation can never escape?

Crock, 5/17/16

Hey, guys, remember when Crock’s creator’s son decided he didn’t want to do the strip anymore, back in 2012, and there was going to be maybe a couple years of reruns and that was it? Welp, it’s 2016 and Crock is still happening, at least on King Features’ website, and who knows if its in repeats or what. Like, a beeper joke would be about 20 years out of date, but a lot of jokes in Crock seemed 20 years out of date even when new strips were being produced, so! Anyway, assuming this is a repeat, it’s a good example how the passage of time can totally change the effect of a piece of art: whereas in 1995 or whatever the point of this strip would have been “Ha ha, the kids today, they take their beepers with them everywhere,” today it serves as a eulogy for an important technology that was rapidly displaced before it had a chance to become truly ubiquitous.

Hi and Lois, 5/17/16

Irma’s tragedy is that the day when the American suburb was a hotbed of sexual experimentation has long passed, but the ennui of suburban alienation has endured.

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Crock, 4/6/16

Ha ha, “downloading” is definitely a word related to computers in some way, and “the recycle bin” is definitely part of the desktop metaphor used in the popular Windows operating system! “Download that to the old recycle bin,” that’s what the kids say, when they’re surfing on their PCs and such. Hilarious! In other news, due to the inexorable march of mechanical efficiency, this domesticated camel is no longer needed by its human masters, and so it will be released into the wild to inepty fend for itself, or possibly just killed so its carcass can be processed for a number of industrial uses.

Judge Parker, 4/6/16

Speaking of the inexorable march of efficiency, I’m very excited to hear that Neddy’s half-baked plan to out-compete Chinese labor by extracting the last few useful labor-hours out of government-subsidized old people has now become a “movement.” And look in that gleam in Foster Chubb’s eyes! This is a man who thought he could grift the Spencer-Parkers with comically stagy wound dressings, so sure, he’s 100% on board with this “groundswell of support” that will somehow defeat basic economics.

Six Chix, 4/6/16

Definitely if I had died, and my immortal soul had been misplaced in some mysterious subvoid for an uncountable age, and then I was yanked out of that only to be shepherded into an even more unknowable afterlife, that’s the dazed, terrified expression I’d have on my face.

Hi and Lois, 4/6/16

Hey guys, uhhhhhh, it turns out Trixie can read? This has a number of unsettling implications that I’m reasonably sure aren’t going to be pursued.

Mary Worth, 4/6/16

“I mean, I could tell after one class that Harlan Jones doesn’t know jack shit about art history, and he still got a job here, so there must be something to it!”