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Hi and Lois, 7/1/19

Oh, man, take that, corporate fast food chains. Real America, as represented by the Flagstons, our most iconic artistic depiction of the suburban middle class, is sick of your bullshit. Burger King? More like Burger PEASANT. McDonald’s? More like McGARBAGE. Don’t even get them started on “fast casual quick service restaurants” or whatever people are expected call Chipotle and the various “Chipotle but for non-burrito foods” places. From now on, the only good kind of fast food is hot dogs sold at shockingly low prices served out of wooden carts that are grandfathered out of health department oversight. They will not come with any packaging, or any napkins.

Mary Worth, 7/1/19

FINALLY, our long national Estelle-Arther-Wilbur nightmare is over and we’re moving on to a … Dawn plot? Um. I’m not quite sure this is what we’ve been begging for, but since she makes it clear she’s not taking classes this summer, that means she’s got lots of free time that could in theory lead to wacky hijinks. Today we get a glimpse into how Dawn has matured over the years: despite the high-end education she’s getting at UC Santa Royale, which includes very personalized attention from the faculty, she’s polite enough to just smell Mary’s roses and not condescendingly explain what a metaphor is.

Slylock Fox, 7/1/19

Slylock is doing some basic math to prove that Wanda’s average speed since leaving the diner is higher than the posted speed at one specific point along her route, which, if you think about it, doesn’t add up to anything that would hold water in court, at all, but I think it’s even more important to point out that Wanda is an actual witch with the power of flight and maybe the car just flew most of the way there, you know? Speed limits only apply to the ground! What are you, in charge of sky law now, Slylock? You’re not, you hear me? You’re not in charge of sky law!

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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?”