Archive: Judge Parker

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Judge Parker, 3/1/14

I was going to apologize for not keeping you up to date on the conversation between April and her dad, but then I realized that it’s literally lasted two weeks and can be easily summed up as follows: April’s dad is on the run from some Romanian weapons-smugglers he’s fallen out with, and now they’ve managed to plant a tracker on April’s car and are on their way to this impregnable jungle fortress/cancer research facility, presumably travelling via heavily armed helicopter gunship. Good times appear to be in the narrative hopper, though, if the sinister grin of bloodthirsty mercenary/cheerful groundskeeper “Abbott” as he promises that April and Randy’s wedding ceremony will not be unduly disturbed by the endless screaming of their enemies is any indication.

Blondie, 3/1/14

Nobody in this strip is what you’d call “introspective,” so I guess Elmo is as likely a candidate as any to stumble onto self-reflective questions of ontology. Dagwood, who can only dimly grasp the philosophical thought processes this line of questioning has provoked in his young pal, is probably wrong about what’s going on in that closet; it’s more likely that Elmo is just using the dark, warm space to go into a fetal position, having arrived much too quickly at the “why is there something instead of nothing” problem.

Spider-Man, 3/1/14

It’s good to see that New York’s criminal element has a clear-eyed perspective on exactly how much of a threat Spider-Man is to them (namely, not much).

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Archie, 2/13/14

Good lord, Pop’s facial expression in that last panel chills me to my very core. “That’s right, Archie, Mr. Lodge doesn’t like you,” he thinks. “None of the adults in this town like you. Your time as a teenager, during which social convention demands that we be halfway pleasant and encouraging to you, is almost over. Prepare yourself for adulthood. Prepare yourself for … the shunning.

Judge Parker, 2/13/14

So we’ve finally met April’s mysterious dying-of-cancer dad and he’s … one of the greatest things Judge Parker has ever seen? I’m not sure if he’s based directly on Hunter S. Thompson or if he’s been filtered through Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke, but he’s fantastic and I want him in every panel from now until the heat death of the universe finally brings this storyline to a close. My only regret is that April has actually drawn attention his tarantula companion; I sort of wish that it had just sat there on his shoulder, unexplained, for the next few weeks’ worth of strips, with everyone he meets reacting to it with silent but visible disgust.

Mary Worth, 2/13/14

Yep, Tommy’s coming back to Charterstone, all right! By the expression on her face you can tell Mary is almost as excited as I am.

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Shoe, 1/31/14

Comics and other media that present us with a world of anthropomorphic animals generally elide the problem of what that universe’s relationship between predator and prey is like. But it’s hard to avoid if you spend any amount of time thinking about it. Take the birds of Shoe, for instance: the Perfesser is an osprey, according to this unsettlingly detailed chart on the strip’s Wikipedia page. What about the sea life that forms his natural diet? Did they have hopes and dreams? Did any of those fish or mollusks have mothers that they loved? Did they ever feel the stirrings of romance or the icy breath of their own mortality? Today we learn the awful truth: that the squid do indeed have their own independent society, an undersea counterpart to the Shoe gang’s Treetops, and that its leaders are happy to lead predator birds to the regions of that nation where the most vulnerable take shelter. The poor, the mentally ill, the squid who fall through the cracks? They aren’t Squidtown’s problem. They’re food for someone else. And if the squid leadership looks the other way, then the rest of their culture is left alone. This is the worst kind of nightmare.

Apartment 3-G, 1/31/14

Speaking of the worst kinds of nightmare, who on earth could look at the awful top half of that deer head and think “she’s beautiful” and not “AHHH AHHH AHHH GET IT AWAY FROM GET IT AWAY FROM ME”? To be fair, Lu Ann used to be (still is? who even knows) a kindergarten art teacher at a fancy Manhattan school, which means that she probably needs to be very good at smiling and saying nice things about little monsters.

Judge Parker, 1/31/14

Ha ha, look at Judge Parker Senior’s face in that last panel! I’ve decided I’m just going to stop worrying and learn to love his hilariously oblivious privilege-stumble through danger. Car chases? Whee! Snakes? Lovely! Forming an uneasy alliance with narco-terrorists? Charming! It’s not like he’s in the law enforcement game anymore, is he?