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Judge Parker, 10/24/21

OK, I just want to establish a few facts here. The reason Abbey is so upset is that, now that the mayor is publicly accusing her of insurance fraud, the whole town is turning against her and she got yelled at when she went up to the local Starbucks or equivalent. And yet look at what’s in our heroes’ hands: it’s Sam who’s drinking out of a paper to-go cup while Abbey is using a regular coffee mug she probably got out of the cabinet. In other words, even though she’s filthy rich, she’s happy to just drink drip coffee from the machine in her kitchen, while Sam insists that he simply must have his daily half-caf mocha frappuccino or whatever put together by a barista for $9. So, isn’t he the real villain here, for making Abbey brave the hostile public so he could get his dumb caffeine milkshake? I mean, Abbey sucks, but let’s not let that distract us from the ways that Sam also sucks.

Six Chix, 10/24/21

Keeping you up to date on “Six Chix is occasionally good in an opaque and baffling way” news: Today’s Six Chix is good, in an opaque and baffling way. Ha ha, the tunnel is full of fish! She won’t even be able to navigate her little rowboat in there, because it’s packed so full of fish! What a delight.

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/24/21

“Plus people find you weird and off-putting. They don’t want to be around you and definitely don’t want you at their wedding!”

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Gasoline Alley, 10/22/21

So Gasoline Alley is meandering along with one of its typically shambolic plots about a park ranger’s kids (the same ones who had to deal with sexually aggressive talking frogs) who are scared of a local abandoned house and so their mom thinks that maybe that would be a good spot for Halloween festivities, except oh whoops it seems there’s a realtor at the house and it’s just been sold so it’s not abandoned after all! That all is … certainly not particularly interesting, but I am a little charmed that the park ranger lady is willing to go there when it comes to really playing out the consequences of what would happen if some kids got horribly injured at an unsafe haunted house. If you went to some farmer’s cooperative all decorated with fake ghosts and stuff, but then you tripped and fell onto a pitchfork and it impaled you and you died and your actual spirit was condemned to haunt the building for all eternity, as a warning for those who don’t follow proper safety protocols for children’s events, that would be pretty ironic, I would think!

Judge Parker, 10/22/21

Hey Abbey! Has it occurred to you that maybe these people are willing — nay, thrilled — to think the worst of you and blame you for all their problems precisely because they’ve known you all their lives as the haughty rich lady who lives in the giant “ranch” that takes up half the town? Just putting that out there!

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Mary Worth, 10/6/21

“Bonjour, mes amis! Eet ees your old friend Pierre here, and today I find myself in a conundrum that would baffle even my countryman Jean Baudrillard! For what, in zees strange parc chien, is real, and what is a seemulacrum? Zees fire hydrant, for instance: nowhere close to any beeldeengs, presumably not connected to zee plumbing, existing only as a wheemsical reminder of zee urban spaces zees park dwellers have rejected! Where once dogs, like people, lived in embedded in a shared urban landscape and repurposed its functional artifacts for their own uses — making water, in zee case of zee hydrants — now we reside in a suburban form, in which activities are segmented by geography, and space has been set aside only for dogs to run and peess. And yet some part of zees people, zees new breed of Homo suburbicus, longs for the city they can only deemly remember, and zo zey put up zees false fire hydrant as a sort of memento mori for a lost way of life! And zees other dog, zees lady Frenchie — uncannily like myself, as eef my very essence was captured, copied, fleeped 180 degrees, recolored, and given some feminine seegnifiers! Truly a baffling experience, like barking into a mirror! At least it is deestracting me from Weelbur’s flirting. When the man adopted me, I thought, ‘Surely I will never have to weetness this man making love to another human being,’ but I may have been meestaken! A troubling prospect, non?”

Daddy Daze, 10/6/21

This may be my favorite Daddy Daze yet, in that it gets to what I believe to be the true heart of the strip, which is that the Daddy Daze daddy is in fact a sad, lonely man slipping into insanity and the Daddy Daze baby is really beside the point, except insomuch as his mother will have to care for him full time once his father goes truly around the bend. Note that in today’s strip there’s not even a pretense that the Daddy Daze baby is using his “ba” language to participate in whatever madness his father has going on.

Judge Parker, 10/6/21

Hey, remember when April went to prison? And then later, when Judge Parker senior went to prison? Well, what if everybody in this strip goes to prison, eventually?