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Funky Winkerbean, 10/6/19

Oh, ha ha, the thing he was wearing: his football helmet! His football helmet, which this highway patrolman yanked off his corpse to present to his widow. Do you think there’s some blood and brains and stuff inside there? Probably at least a little, right?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/6/19

I guess I’m kind of surprised that a newspaper comic did a strip about how undeveloped rural communities often turn to unsustainable extractive industries for short-term economic survival because they don’t have the luxury to consider the long-term consequences. But now that one’s here, I’m not at all surprised it’s a Snuffy Smith.

Judge Parker, 10/6/19

Were you worried that Marie’s new gig with the Spencer-Drivers wouldn’t entail a bunch of emotional labor? Well, good news!

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Judge Parker, 10/5/19

Hey, remember back in April, when Marie quit her job as the Spencer-Driver compound’s primary servant so she could go to grad school? Well, turns out grad school’s expensive, so it looks like she will once again be taking on a job as a Spencer-Driver compound servant, only this time to “work part-time at” the ill-advised B&B Abbey launched in a fit of aimless mania, and by “work part-time at” we mean “do 100% of the management of as Abbey immediately stops paying attention to it once Marie shows up to bail her out.” Fortunately, Abbey is so far removed from the little people and their financial concerns that Marie will be able to write a truly staggering number of zeroes on that post-it note, safe in the knowledge that the Spencer-Driver money guy will just sigh heavily and sell a certain percentage of the family’s krugerrand reserves after Abbey hands it to him without ever having looked at it.

The Lockhorns, 10/5/19

The Lockhorns is not a strip known for its verisimilitude, but it is absolutely true that every single comedy club has a name that sounds like someone was held at gunpoint and forced to come up with twenty “funny” nonsense names for comedy clubs, and then they used the twentieth one the poor victim came up with, the one that came only after five minutes of them crying and begging to be allowed to see their family again someday. So, yeah, I absolutely believe that the place Loretta would try to drag Leroy into in an attempt to be able to spend time with him without talking and maybe have him get made fun of by touring comic who’s not at all happy to be there would be called “Cachinnation’s,” and I find the font believable as well.

Pluggers, 10/5/19

Pluggers have long centered their identity around living in exurban communities that are so completely built around the automobile that pedestrians are considered cultural aberrations, but it’s honestly surprising to me that they’re being so up front about it.

Mary Worth, 10/5/19

So … it looks like Mary Worth has chosen, over the next several weeks, to show us, in a very deliberately paced series of strips, Wilbur and Estelle having sex? I guess … I guess we deserve this, for something we did, somewhere along the line.

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/2/19

Usually Hagar and his men are depicted sailing off to raid distant lands like France and Italy, where the society and the economy is more segmented and greater riches are to be found in the fortified estates of kings and dukes. But let’s not forget that in the anarchic Norse states, the kings held only tenuous control over the various Viking bands, who also engaged in quick smash-and-grab raids against local jarls who couldn’t muster adequate forces to defend themselves. In the less unequal Nordic cultures, those petty nobles might be of essentially the class as the Viking raiders just a step or two below them in the hierarchy, and they may have known each other from childhood. But that won’t protect them from the extractive, predatory violence that allows chieftains like Hagar to keep control of their power base, and they’ll be forced to muster counter-raids if they want to maintain their own position.

Judge Parker, 10/2/19

Hey, remember when Sophie’s main interest was how a global hegemon could deploy a secretive force of missile-carrying drones to impose its will on the world without having to incur the domestic financial and political costs that would normally arise from open-ended wars? It’s probably for the best that she’s now become obsessed with disrupting the B&B sector or whatever.