Archive: Judge Parker

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Hi and Lois, 1/28/16

“Why can’t we ever have a sleepover?” Trixie thinks. “Why can’t the sun remain forever in the sky, quickly warming our side of the globe beyond the ability of any life to survive, until the seas boil and the air burns away, while the other hemisphere is locked into eternal, icy night?” Fortunately, she isn’t one of those babies who have God-like powers to control time and space with her mind. She can just form adult sentences and concepts but can’t verbalize or act on them, so we really dodged a bullet here.

Judge Parker, 1/28/16

You know, I poke a lot of fun at the Spence-Drivers for their vast wealth and privilege, but let it never be said that they don’t deal with hardships! For instance, Abby spends so much time on her vast, lucrative farm that she’s no longer physically capable of smelling horse shit. Give Sam a few months in his new home office and his nose will be similarly damaged!

Marvin, 1/28/16

Meanwhile, Marvin’s friends, in defiance of all medical logic, are still fully able to experience the toxic miasma that surrounds him at all times. Today, though, the cold weather has caused whatever foul brew is in his diapers to freeze solid. This seems like it would be bad for him, health-wise, so it’s a good thing I don’t care about his well-being.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/28/16

“So you see, honey, I get to decide who lives and who dies and I have an excuse to ignore you while we eat. It’s what grownups call a ‘win-win.'”

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Mark Trail, 1/13/16

Gabe, I’m sure you’re a very distinguished chiropterologist, and your skill at delicately plucking bats off of cave walls is unsurpassed, but you don’t know anything about selling magazines, OK? If America’s magazine-reading public (mostly airline passengers and people who accidentally clicked the “auto-renew” box on Magazines.com six years ago) see a big story in Woods and Wildlife about a healthy bat colony, they’re not going to think “Oh no! We need to act now to fight white-nose syndrome, probably by allocating millions of tax dollars to whatever university has Gabe on the faculty!” No, they’re gonna think “Wow, look at all those plump, healthy bats. Plenty more where those came from. Bet we could eat ’em, or mine ’em for coal, somehow.” If you want to move hearts, you need to show some full-on bat devastation. I dearly hope this plot climaxes with Mark carefully calibrating his punches to only stun the bats for the photographer, who then daintily daubs talcum powder on their noses for a heartrending but entirely fraudulent cover shoot.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/13/16

At one point in Alan Moore’s Watchman comics series, the psychopathic vigilante Rorschach is captured and arrested. Physically slight, he’s hassled on his first day in prison, but swiftly and brutally ends his first fight by grabbing a pan of hot grease from the cafeteria line and dousing his attacker’s face, leaving him screaming in agony. As the other prisoners look on in horror, he growls his most memorable line: “I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me!” I just thought of that when reading this strip, probably for no particular reason.

Gil Thorp, 1/13/16

Gil Thorp’s basketball season plot has been snoresville so far, but is it about to involve some mid-game pantsing? I could get behind a rash of tit-for-tat pantsing leading to a new record for technical fouls in the Valley Conference.

Judge Parker, 1/13/16

Sorry, American “linguist”! You’ve no doubt done seen and done awful things in the name of protecting your country from the shadows, but Katherine wants that step-grandchild real bad, so it looks like you’ll be dying alone in a Serb prison!

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Judge Parker, 1/12/16

Oh, hey, remember back in October when April said she had just one last war crime to commit in the Balkans at the behest of her shadowy taskmasters, and then she’d come home and start churning out the next generation of Judges Parker? Well it turns out that it isn’t quite so easy to walk away from the murderous world of undercover intelligence work. Can the Parkers get April to give up the dangerous, exciting world that she loves and get domestic? Can they convince the U.S. intelligence establishment to let her go? Will several large checks make this problem, like all other problems that afflict the Parkers, go away?

Crankshaft, 1/12/16

I’m … pretty sure the joke here is that Pam calls Jeff “Jeffrey” during sex, and has for years, and is suddenly only now being made aware that this is also something his mother, who lives with them, calls him, and that he hates it when she does. Has their entire sex life together, presumably spanning decades, been an awful, Oedipal punishment for him? No, don’t worry, he assures her, when she calls out his full name while they have sex, it’s … kind of sweet. Kind of sweet! I guess that’s better than “when I’m inside you I see my mother’s face on your face,” right?

Hi and Lois, 1/12/16

OH MY GOD DAWG HAS EVOLVED OPPOSABLE THUMBS

RUN, FLAGSTONS, RUN

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES