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Slylock Fox, 11/6/17

I’m pretty sure this is the first ever case of Slylock adjudicating a human-on-human crime? Admittedly, he’s mostly intervening to stop a fellow canid from being falsely accused, because otherwise he’d probably be happy to let the hairless two-legs finish each other off in whatever walled ghettos the remnants our once-proud species have been forced to live in. Also, if you’re like me your first though on reading the solution was “Wait a minute, can foxes see red?” According to this website with some extremely 1999-era web design, they can’t, which totally makes sense in context here. “Wait, red jellybeans? I don’t even know what that means. Smitty, you’re under arrest.”

Marvin, 11/6/17

If you’re going to do a strip where sapient dogs and cats exist in a world pretty much like our own, you’re going to have to grapple with some narrative difficulties. For instance, the fact that cats have natural instincts to bury their waste that dogs don’t share has to be recast as cats being “allowed” to potty indoors in a way that dogs are not, despite the fact that they want to. After all, a dog that can think in complete sentences could figure out how to use a litter box, ha ha! Anyway, there are some ways around this difficulty, such as, just for example, not doing so many jokes that revolve around pissing and shitting, for the love of Christ, though I recognize that sadly that technique is unavailable to the Marvin creative team, who have to write poo poo and pee pee jokes constantly, possibly because they lost a bet or are under a curse.

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Dennis the Menace, 10/25/17

There are no recurring adult characters in this strip other than George and Martha Wilson. Instead, we see an endless parade of one-off adult visitors to the Mitchell home, with the implication that Henry and Alice are desperately trying to normalize their lives by making friends more or less their own age, only for Dennis to alienate them by saying the darndest things — or, more often, repeating a darndest thing that one of his parents said behind their acquaintance’s back. If that’s starting to give you a picture of the real reason for the Mitchells’ stunted social life, consider today’s installment, where Alice, hungry to sup on human misery, has brought Dennis to some random new mother’s house, so he can make fun of her parenting skills just because her little kid does what little kids do. And sure, Dennis is kind of a dick about it, but whatever! He’s, what, five? Look at Alice in the background in the second panel, a subtle but cruel smile on her face. The menace doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Marvin, 10/25/17

Like many sassy cartoon characters, Marvin goes through life with a heavy lidded expression meant to convey detachment and ennui. In panel two, we learn what it takes to snap him into a state of alertness: the possibility of being prosecuted for war crimes.

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Dick Tracy, 10/18/17

Awww, yeah, the Space Coupe is back! And maybe with it some of the batshit energy of the 1970s Dick Tracy — no more of this “fake Abe Lincoln audio recording” crap that was the focus of the recent storyline. I’m not sure if there are multiple Space Coupes or if this is the same one where villains from three years ago suffocated to death. Maybe this blue dude is some space alien who found their corpses and decided to joy ride their spaceship back to its planet of origin for a little light interplanetary conquest. Looks like he’s already discovered one of Earth’s finest products already: delicious tobacco! Like all spacecraft built in the ’70s, the Space Coupe came equipped with a designated Camel Containment Unit, to ensure that the mildness levels in the astronauts’ T-Zones didn’t drop to unhealthy levels.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/18/17

Man, that’s … not was doxxing is? Doxxing is when someone who was previously anonymous or pseudonymous online has their real identity revealed, or when you post personal contact information for someone who doesn’t want it posted. Posting fake news articles about someone is … well, it probably has some other dumb fake Internet word for it, but “doxxing” isn’t it. The future is stupider than anyone could’ve possibly predicted.

Marvin, 10/18/17

Look, we spend a lot of time dwelling on the poop jokes in Marvin, but there’s something else important about the strip to keep in mind, which is that over the past decade or so it’s expanded beyond the core Miller family to add new characters (grandparents, talking pets, grandparents’ talking pets), all of whom, without exception, are embedded in a mutual web of loathing for everyone who’s ever appeared in the strip.