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Judger Parker, 5/4/19

I’m trying to remember exactly to what degree Sam and/or Abbey’s fingerprints would be on any aspect of the Great Norton Caper (in which, just to remind you, Judge Parker Emeritus helped April’s dad fake his death) that’s about to be revealed in a tell-all book, and honestly? I’m not sure that there are any! Which is great — for Sam. He can just quietly hang up the phone and then go back to planning how to charge the rubes $250 a night on AirBnB to stay in Marie’s old servant’s hovel ($175 if they just want to sleep in the horse barn), and start practicing saying “Judge Parker? Judge Parker? Doesn’t ring a bell.”

Mark Trail, 5/4/19

God bless Mark Trail for dedicating an entire day’s strip for establishing how theatrically sleepy all its characters are! The only one missing is JJ. I certainly hope come Monday he gets a whole strip to himself to stretch ostentatiously.

Gil Thorp, 5/4/19

Not gonna lie, folks: I personally relate to few people in the comics more than the guy in panel one, who tried to come up with something complimentary to say to a pretty, popular girl on the softball team and ended up blurting out “Way to … mash … the ball” as he awkwardly high-fives her in the hallway. He’s gonna be thinking about that for years to come.

Hi and Lois, 5/4/19

Hi, she’s … she’s right there, man

I’m pretty sure she can hear you

Not cool

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Judge Parker, 4/29/19

“The question is what will we do next?” briefly interested me, because often when one half of a couple abruptly quits their job, that results in hard financial choices that need to be made, especially when the other half of the couple is already retired and they’re both already rather, er, free-spending. But this, of course, is the Drivers we’re talking about, where fat royalties from Judge Parker Senior’s inexplicably universally beloved book and the occasional slot machine jackpot supplement Judge Parker Senior’s comfortable pension from whatever level of the judiciary system he worked in, which in turn is just icing on the cake of what I feel I’m safe in assuming is his substantial generational wealth. So don’t worry, Alan will never have to give up his absolutely enormous home office desk or his scowling Lincoln bust or any of that, and instead this tense discussion is about how the Parkers did bad things and now they might have to suffer some kind of consequences for it (SPOILER: they won’t).

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/29/19

The sad thing here is not that Snuffy has decided unilaterally that it’s Loweezy’s turn to sacrifice some of her dinner to feed the dog; no, it’s that she’s got practically a full plate of food in front of her and he’s putting on his hat to head out for the night. Presumably he wolfed down his food while she was still tidying up after cooking for him, and now he’s going to go steal chickens or cheat at cards or whatever it is he does for fun. At least she still has Ol’ Bullet for company!

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Curtis, 4/11/19

Far be it for me to criticize another man’s curmudgeoning, but I think that Greg has the escalating affronts to his sensibilities in the wrong order here. The elder Wilkins is generally depicted as being obsessed with how much Better Things Used To Be, in the Past, despite the fact that he’s a middle-of-the-cohort Gen Xer, at oldest, but anyway, what is a podcast if not the modern-day equivalent of an old-timey radio show? Shouldn’t Greg be pleased that this ancient art is being recognized and turned into movie franchises, just like the old radio serials of old? His reaction seems way, way over the top: as he begs his Creator to take him away from this fallen world in the final panel, he appears to have taken the admonishment in Matthew 18:9 to heart, plucking out his own eyes so that he can’t see the abomination that is a Sir Patrick Stewart-voiced poop emoji. But you can still hear the podcasts, Greg. You can still hear the podcasts.

Shoe, 4/11/19

I can’t decide if this strip is an indication that the Shoe creative team has suddenly remembered that their characters are all birds, or have forgotten so profoundly that they made this joke entirely on accident.

Judge Parker, 4/11/19

Two days later, Marie was murdered by the mafia. Sam and Abbey never noticed that she failed to visit over the holidays, because [rolls dice] Neddy [rolls dice again] was sad because she lacked direction, and that took up all their energy.