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Slylock Fox, 9/12/10

We’ve all wondered exactly how the justice system in Slylock-world works, what with the same criminals being repeatedly captured but then turned loose on the streets to perpetrate annoyingly overcomplex scams again. Today we see the consequences of a society judged by soft-on-crime owls. An injured Slylock meekly offers some sad little animal facts to try to put his assailant away, while the the grinning Brick Bull and his sleazy rat-lawyer know that he’ll be out on the street randomly goring more innocent passersby before you know it.

Judge Parker, 9/12/10

So Neddy has spent most of this week making a last tearful and moderately smoochy goodbye to her first love, Mark. And what has current boyfriend been doing while all this goes on? Why, just putting the finishing touches on his scheme to scam $3 million from the rich and gullible Sam Driver. Hopefully Ned will respect him now, for his initiative!

Apartment 3-G, 9/12/10

Wow, so all this time I’ve been assuming that Lu Ann’s miscolored “rich brown curls” were a result of problems at the syndicate colorists, but the comics artists tend to be more in charge of coloring on Sundays so, uh, yeah. Is “rich brown” a new code-phrase for “red” these days, to combat anti-ginger prejudice? Or is this whole “reality show” just being put on by the inmates of an insane asylum, like the play-within-the-play in Marat/Sade?

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Judge Parker, 8/9/10

Well, it turns out that Sophie’s cheerleading-driven powers of all-knowingness only give her universal access to cold, hard facts about whose ex-boyfriends are back in town, and whom those ex-boyfriends have divorced. The underlying motivations behind those circumstances are as opaque to Sophie as ever, and it’s kind of heartening to see that the youngest Spencer-Driver foundling is still an unsettling android-child, despite her makeover into a tween fashion plate. “NEDDY-UNIT: THE SOPHIE-UNIT DEMANDS INFORMATION ABOUT LOVE AND THE EXPERIENCE THEREOF! WILL LOVE OVERLOAD THE SOPHIE-UNIT’S CIRCUITRY IF SHE ATTEMPTS TO INCORPORATE IT INTO HER TOP-LEVEL ALGORITHM? THE SOPHIE-UNIT WILL INITIATE THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘IRRITATION’ (SUCCESS OF IRRITATION-INSTIGATION SUBROUTINE ESTIMATED AT > 95%) IN THE NEDDY-UNIT UNTIL THE DESIRED INFORMATION IS GIVEN!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/10

Ha ha, the chicken has fallen in love with Snuffy, whose main source of food is the chickens that he steals and eats! This has the potential for being one of the funny pages’ great tragic love stories. Let’s hope the artists don’t shy away from the heartbreaking beheading scene!

Dick Tracy, 8/9/10

Wow, usually we don’t get to see the badly decomposed corpses until the end of the Dick Tracy storyline. What exactly is that lump floating atop the body in panel one — is there an alligator lazily feeding on the poor sap, with Officer Hugepelvis gingerly sneaking up on it with plans to taser it? This could be the greatest Dick Tracy plot ever, if by “greatest” you mean “with the highest body count,” which is really the only metric I can think of that fans of this strip would respect.

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Blondie, 8/7/10

Ha ha, Dagood is a philistine who only appreciates books for their physical qualities, not for the wonders of storytelling contained therein! Of course, the third-panel payoff should have been evident from the beginning of the strip, as nobody selects a whole bookshelf’s worth of books with identically colored covers for their literary qualities. (Longtime readers of this blog will remember the day Dagwood made this mass sham book purchase.)

Judge Parker, 8/7/10

Oh my goodness, now we know why Sophie was so keen to become a cheerleader; she’s gone from being a mere know-it-all to being literally omniscient.