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Archive: Judge Parker

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Various narrative takes on crime fighting

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Judge Parker, 10/6/22

Oh, were you excited about Sam’s old partner Steve making a triumphant return to the strip? Well, too bad, it’s been less than three weeks since he showed up and he’s already been brutally murdered by the crooked cops or the meth gangs or the crooked cops and the meth gangs working together, who can say. At least this means that Gloria, who was a very longtime beloved character in the strip until she quit her job as Sam’s secretary to skip town with Steve, might need to come crawling back to Sam for a job now that she’s tragically widowed! She’ll probably spend all her time being dramatically sad, which fits in with the current vibe of the strip, and also with the fact that Sam won’t be able to pay her very much.

Dick Tracy, 10/6/22

If you needed a single strip to explain current vibe of modern-day Dick Tracy, you can do worse than this one, in which a typical Tracy-style mutant gangster gets enlisted in a scheme to help his nephew land a part in a stage play about old-timey comic strips.

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Sam and Detective Yelich are doing shots of Tang, I see

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Judge Parker, 10/1/22

Look, Sam is being yanked out of years of tedious domestic drama and thrown back into his derring-do role kind of abruptly, so I respect that he’s resisting it a little bit. Like, what if there isn’t any mystery to solve and he doesn’t actually have to do any work? Maybe the kid did do it! We don’t know! What reason do the cops have to lie about it? Other than the fact that the tough-on-crime judge whose family just got killed apparently considers police corruption to be a crime? Probably they’re not mad about that! Seems like Sam should just go back to Steve and tell him “the kid did it, actually” and then tap out. Maybe the crooked cops or the meth gangs will end up killing Steve, but, let’s be real, Sam didn’t really seem that thrilled to see him in the first place, now did he?

Mary Worth, 10/1/22

“Yes, Mary, don’t minimize your impact! Like, remember when you told my daughter’s distraught best friend that she should change the past just by altering her memory of it? That was real fucked up! If I had done something that harmful, I would have my license revoked. But there’s no license for what you are, and that’s terrifying.”

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Some Thursday soapers

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Judge Parker, 9/29/22

Now that Sam Driver is extremely divorced, he can really get back to his roots as a character, by which I mean solving mysteries and doing other feats of derring-do while Judge Parker spends his time doing boring judge stuff, which is why Sam was introduced into the strip in the 1960s in the first place. Meeting one of your police contacts at some out-of-the-way bar is a classic mystery-solving move, of course, though traditionally I think you’re supposed to be at a grimy dive bar where nobody you know would think to look for you, not some well-appointed hipster place that charges $18 for [squints] ketchup.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/29/22

Oh, yeah, I can’t remember if I’ve actually mentioned it, but Hank Jr.’s big plane trip is to see his long distance girlfriend, who is the daughter of his dad’s high school sweetheart, who owned the diner they’re in now, until she died, and Hank Jr. picked up his new girlfriend at said high school sweetheart’s funeral. I could’ve worded that all less confusingly, but trust me, you don’t really need to know the details, because as you can tell from this strip Hank Jr.’s gonna be dead of a massive coronary by next week at the latest.