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Shoe, 7/23/16

The absolute best part of today’s Shoe is how damn happy Shoe’s interlocutor looks here. “Fastest-moving parade I’ve ever seen,” Dexter says. “Because we all had to shit!” He beams. “Basically we ran through that parade route. Because we had to get to the end quickly, because otherwise we would’ve pooped our pants.” He’s overwhelmed with a sense of nostalgia for the day. “We had eaten all these prunes, you see. Prunes make you have to go to the bathroom. So all of us in the parade really had to take a dump. That’s why it went so fast!”

Mary Worth, 7/23/16

I’d be pretty happy if we just spent, like, a whole ’nother week on Tommy just lying around in bed enjoying the groovy feelings that Vicodin put into his body. I mean, just look at how happy he is! Don’t you want Tommy to be happy? Look at him gazing lovingly at the pill bottle in panel two as he sweats out the toxins! He doesn’t need to take more pills right now! He’s not a fiend. He just likes to know that they’re there. The bottle is comforting to look at. Ahhhhh! Sweet sweet Vicodin.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/16

It’s hard to remember now, but Funky Winkerbean used to be a fun, whimsical strip that included exaggerated, cartoonish elements, like Les serving as a hall monitor in a machine gun nest, which readers did not immediately assume meant that he had finally snapped and planned to gun down the whole town. The current plotline, involving Darrin and Mopey Pete raiding a cargo ship off the coast of Los Angeles to get a crate of Darrin’s favorite pens, seems to harken back to those days of yore, but mostly just makes it clear that you can never actually go home again. These strips are embedded in the current hyper-realistic, hyper-pessimistic version of Funky Winkerbean, and all I can think about while catching up on their hijinks is their inevitable rendition to Guantanamo Bay and trial before a military tribunal for violation of various Laws of the Sea.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/20/16

From the look on Samanthy Jane’s face, it seems that she alone is beginning to question Hootin’ Holler’s political order, in which citizens attempt to decipher the will of a hereditary line of dogs as the basis for government policy.

Judge Parker, 7/20/16

“No, no, let’s do the unpaved road thing! It’s a totally normal and efficient shortcut, and definitely not through the property of some crazed murderous friends of my dad who will kill everyone but Derek and then lock him up in their art cave, where only I’ll be allowed access to him!”

Mary Worth, 7/20/16

“Has your brother considered switching from booze to pills? I understand they’re extremely relaxing.”

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Mary Worth, 7/19/16

Guys. Guys. Guys. We’ve been waiting a long time for post-jail Tommy to reach the amazing heights he achieved twelve years ago, in his first appearance in the strip. Back then, of course he was trying to sell drugs, and only dabbled in smoking some low-grade “whatever” occasionally, but now the drugger will become the druggee. I am sincerely thrilled to watch his rapid downward spiral into addiction, which begins as he, like all pill-crazed maniacs, flings the precious, precious caplets into his mouth all at once from eight inches away.

Dick Tracy, 7/19/16

I’m not an expert on the long history of Dick Tracy, which may explain why I’ve been kind of meh on the new-look Dick Tracy, which seems to mostly focus on reviving various characters from the strip’s long history. Anyway, this new plotline may get similarly bogged down with baffling references, but for today I’m going to enjoy it, as it appears to be about something that I choose to call “Car-Navor: The Car That Only Eats Other Cars.”