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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/20

Just to show you what it’s like to be me, a guy with a head full of random trivia, I read “homeowner’s rates” and thought Alice was using the British term for property taxes, which made me wonder if the Mitchells had relocated to the UK so that Dennis could take on his actually much more menacing rival. But a little Googling shows that sometimes people say “homeowner’s rates” when they mean “what I pay for homeowner’s insurance,” which sounds very strange to my ear but feel free to sound off in the comments if this is part of your everyday speech and you think that I, personally, am an idiot. The important thing here is that Dennis would not have any possible impact on the Mitchells’ property taxes, but could very well be the source of their skyrocketing insurance premiums, because he breaks so much stuff.

Dick Tracy, 2/12/20

Good news, everyone! Mysta escaped from Mr. Robot’s clutches and defeated him using her Lunarian powers, so now we’ve got a new story, about the origins of a bad guy called “Shakey,” because he shakes. Few things in recent comics history have made me laugh more than today’s Dick Tracy, in which the narration box says little Shakey “quickly learned the Golden Rule” and depicts him beating the shit out of other kids and stealing their money. There’s not even an attempt to make some kind of pun or wordplay on “Golden Rule!” “Here’s your Golden Rule, kids: just absolutely terrorizing people with violence is a great way to make a lot of cash.”

Mark Trail, 2/12/20

Ah, yes, it’s an all-too-common story: a sad, isolated person — say, an newly disabled man who isn’t sure who he is anymore — gets big on Twitter and gets a chance to reinvent himself — say, as a guy whose leg was eaten by a yeti. How often do we have to hear this tale before we learn its lessons? Anyway, Minga and Pemba are watching all this from afar, probably wondering if anybody is going to be able to pay them, now that the guy who hired them is dead.

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Slylock Fox, 2/10/20

You ever think how lucky Slylock and the Glorious Animal Regime are that their rogues gallery never uses its resources to their full potential? Think of the havoc that you could wreak with the ability to create an android so lifelike that a policeduck could extensively interact with it and still not be able to tell that it’s artificial! Weirdly could be building an army of android warriors, as intelligent as any human (or animal) but indestructible and willing to destroy his enemies and make him a god-king, but instead he’s just deploying them as decoys while he goes on the lam. Anyway, the real reason you can tell that’s not a bio-Weirdly is that if it were a bio-Weirdly, that cave would be full of Weirdly poop.

Mark Trail, 2/10/20

“Look, Mark, I just want to make this absolutely clear: yes, I indulged and even helped promote Harvey’s bizarre, delusional story that his amputation, which had an entirely normal and reasonably explanation, was the result of a yeti attack, but we weren’t fucking, OK? Do you think I’m a weirdo or something?”

Six Chix, 2/10/20

Ahhh, it’s time to celebrate Valentine’s Day, Six Chix-style: Getting wine-drunk and vomiting up an entire box of chocolates so violently that you completely jam up your toilet! LOVE IS IN THE AIR, people.

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Mark Trail, 2/8/20

Oh my god, “Harvey completely made up the story of a yeti ripping his leg off and actually he just had juvenile diabetes” is a so much better ending (?) to this story than I could have possibly imagined. I don’t know what I want more for Monday: Harvey digging his way out of the avalanche and yell-growling “The yeti was a METAPHOR! … a metaphor for JUVENILE DIABETES, my greatest foe!” or just a smash cut back to the cabin in Lost Forest with Mark saying “Yes, Rusty, I did see some unusual animals in Nepal!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/8/20

Oh my god, I had forgotten that June mentioned Aunt Tildy had been married to a man “she called the Count, but he didn’t seem to be rich.” Shoutout to Rex Morgan for surprising me for the first time in literally years: “Andrzej and Tildy are destined to be together” seemed so obviously set up that I entirely missed “Andrzej and Tildy were together once and will be in the future, time is a flat circle, all of this has happened before and will happen again.”

Judge Parker, 2/8/20

Oh my god, what if Sophie decides to not run the campaign of her old family friend but instead puts her considerable political skills to the service of one of his rivals? From what we’ve seen of it, Alan’s campaign is focused on prison abolition and left-leaning NIMBYISM from a perspective of noblesse oblige, and I’m interested to see if his opponent, aided by Sophie’s inside information and all-around smarts, attacks him from the left (“Alan Parker should be put in jail as a class enemy”) or the right (“Alan Parker should be put in jail as an actual criminal, who broke several laws”).

Crock, 2/8/20

Not to be all “poor me” over here, as making fun of comics is something I obviously enjoy and I appreciate getting to earn part of my income from it, but let me just tell you that I read this strip and thought “Huh, I bet conditions on the plantations where they grow pepper are pretty dire, I wonder if there’s some joke to be made out of that,” and ended up opening multiple browser tabs, learning that, for instance, the bottom has fallen out of the Vietnamese pepper market, and that India attempts to protect its native pepper industry with tariffs and price controls but this has led to a a pepper smuggling pipeline from Vietnam via Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, big American companies like McCormick are investing in sustainable pepper operations, at least according to this advertorial “hosted by” The Guardian. I wasn’t really able to mine a lot of laffs out of all that, unless you count the meta-explanation of it I’m doing in this post, but I 100% guarantee that I put a lot more thought into this than was put into this joke.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/8/20

The Smifs have lost track of their baby as he crawls through the knee-deep trash that completely covers the floor of their filthy hovel! Ha … ha?