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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/3/21

For a brief moment, Snuffy realizes that he’s harvesting worms that he’ll use to catch fish that he’ll presumably eat, which is a little too close to productive economic activity for comfort! Fortunately, he soon turns the whole exercise into yet another opportunity to further drain his household’s rapidly diminishing resources, which is much more his speed.

Dustin, 10/3/21

I’ve gotta say, I do enjoy the few Dustins that don’t focus on the strip’s generation-war shtick. Today there’s no hint of conflict between Dustin and his dad, just a young man giving in to heavy-lidded bliss at the thought that soon he’ll be devoured by this pack of hungry raccoons and all his troubles will be over.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 10/3/21

Leroy retreats to his mind palace, imagining watching the news with his wife and seeing yet another coastal city flooded by a category 5 Hurricane Loretta, the fifth storm with that name this year. “That’s what the mall looks like when you’re done with it,” he says, as scenes of ruined homes and stores flash on the screen. And she can’t do anything about it! It’s the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, that’s naming them, not him!

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/3/21

I’m sorry, Cassandra is a cat burglar and also an actual cat, so no, I don’t think she’s going to sheepishly reappear in the lobby once she realizes she got in an elevator that only goes up. She’ll be climbing down the side of the building within minutes, or maybe just leaping from rooftop to rooftop to make her escape. The only “error” she’s made is getting those severe bangs.

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Daddy Daze, 9/12/21

Guys, look. I never wanted to have a non-trivial percentage of my waking hours haunted by thoughts of what caused the marriage of the Daddy Daze daddy and the Daddy Daze mommy to unravel. I didn’t ask for this life. And yet here we are! This pair had this baby, who is … well, I’m still not entirely certain how old the Daddy Daze baby is supposed to be, but he literally can be cupped in one of the Daddy Daze daddy’s hands, so he can’t be that old, and so they were clearly together (or at least “together,” nudge wink) not that long ago! And obviously they’re modeling a good amicable post-divorce co-parenting situation for the readers at home, but I for one am not buying it! What’s the drama here? Does the Daddy Daze daddy want to get back together with the Daddy Daze mommy? Today’s strip certainly points in that direction, in my opinion! Does this mean the whole thing where he purports to interpret his infant son’s babbling as coherent language is nothing more than a bit to amuse his ex and maybe, maybe, worm his way back into her heart? I had always assumed that this ongoing pantomime got its start when some combination of loneliness and sleep deprivation had simply shattered his mind, but this is quite frankly an even more depressing and pathetic explanation.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 9/12/21

This is actually a decent joke, but I frankly don’t think it fits Leroy’s character very well. I refuse to believe that even in high school he was either earnest enough to join the marching band or socially skilled enough to make friends.

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So ends the 2021 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser! Thank you, everybody!

Mark Trail, 9/4/21

It’s charming that with Mark’s long-running Woods and Wildlife gig at an end, Rusty and Cherry act as guides to his new wilderness of freelance work, relationships, and social media. And reassuring that Cherry never, ever shows him Twitter.

Lockhorns, 9/4/21

Loretta, it’s like you haven’t been paying attention the past fifty-three years.

Gasoline Alley, 9/4/21

Oh look, it’s Boog and Aubee, scions of the dead-eyed Skinner couple, Rover and Hoogy, recapping the story of Aubee’s sylvan birth. “Aubee?”, you ask, “What kind of name is that?” Well, upon delivering her, “Chipper” Wallet, who by the way is a PHYSICIAN’S ASSISTANT, exclaimed, “Well I’ll be! You have a beautiful, healthy baby girl.” Hoogy immediately named her daughter “Aubee,” because she pays as little attention to her children as we’d like to.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/4/21

Gah, it is so on-message for a high school in Funky Winkerbean to have a teachers’ “workroom” instead of a lounge, even though we’ve never seen anybody doing anything more strenuous there than drinking coffee, nor more intellectually demanding than complaining with those mopey little half-mouths of theirs.

Anyway, the white-haired guy with the lame bon mot is Jim Kablichnik. Everybody knows somebody like Jim Kablichnik. It’s a shame, really.

Dick Tracy, 9/4/21

Now I’m no history scholar like Josh, but I’m pretty sure history will still be a thing of the past even when we get better tools to investigate it. But don’t let me rain on Ace’s parade: he’s an official cigar-smoking member of The Apparatus at last!

— Uncle Lumpy