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Spider-Man, 7/14/11

Oh boy, this bespectacled lady wants to capture Spider-Man, in photographic form! This is delicious, because of course taking pictures of Spider-Man is, as far as I can make out, Peter Parker’s sole source of income. One of Newspaper Spider-Man’s least attractive qualities — and lord knows there are lots to choose from — is his continuing macho panic at the idea that his wife makes more money than he does, despite the fact that his wife is a successful actress and he’s a stringer working in the dying newspaper industry (and also a superhero, a role that you’d think would be enough to boost his fragile ego, until of course you see how he goes about filling it). Anyway, my bet is that this woman will humiliate Peter further by displacing him from his pathetic job; I assume that her pictures of Spider-Man will be better than his, both because it’s tricky to stage photos of yourself and because Peter is an incompetent who’s no good at anything.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/14/11

Haw haw, looks like Jughaid’s startin’ to hallucinate! He’s probably sufferin’ from heat stroke, no doubt because he insists on wearing a fur hat in the middle of summer.

Family Circus, 7/14/11

Dolly, nothing in your current life might match up with the sanitized fairy tales in that book, but surely the Brothers Grimm or Russian folklorists have recorded stories of a quartet of terrifying, stunted gnomish things locked away in a compound by their horrified parents.

Hi and Lois, 7/14/11

This is the first Hi and Lois I can remember laughing at. Ha ha, it’s funny because the innocent little baby is learning about disappointment! Oh, I’m a terrible person.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/10/11

“’Cause if there’s one thing we city slickers and country folk can agree on, it’s that we wish women wouldn’t talk! Haw haw!”

Dennis the Menace, 7/10/11

“He is peeing all over the floor, though. Why’d you tell him you were going to take him out and then not do it? Jerk!”

Hi and Lois, 7/10/11

Based all the all-too-regular shape of the font in the last two panels, I’ll guess “comics letterer at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC” is another job that’s been taken over by machines.

Panel from Beetle Bailey, 7/10/11

At last we know why General Halftrack is forever in charge of Camp Swampy, the Army’s least prestigious posting: his pacifist leanings render him unfit for front-line service.

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Dennis the Menace, 7/5/11

After years of biding his time, Dennis has finally decided to go into environmental menacing. “Once those mountains have been leveled so we can get at the coal underneath them, and the forests have been stripped and replaced by endless cul-de-sacs filled with vulgar homes far too large for their lots, this will be a vista worth looking at, by God.”

Mary Worth, 7/5/11

It turns out the only thing Drew finds more unsettling than a lady claiming to be his girlfriend when she isn’t is any indication that not everyone considers a career in the healing arts to be the pinnacle of human achievement. “You mean … she left her medical job … to pursue a career as some kind of common peddler of trinkets? How gauche!”

Hi and Lois, 7/5/11

As the fireworks of America’s Independence Day holiday fade, it’s up to each of us to ask in seriousness: What does freedom mean? To Trixie, clearly freedom denotes the ability to void one’s bladder or bowels without having to worry about minutes or hours spent sitting in a soiled diaper. Babies are disgusting, in other words.