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Beetle Bailey, 7/24/16

[holds flashlight under chin] And in those days … people … did not have constant access … to erotic images … whenever they wanted it! they had … to walk … to a different room … sometimes in an entirely different building!!!!!

[everyone gasps]

[the flashlight is my phone]

[we’re not in a campground, we’re in an underground city, because this is the future and we’ve badly polluted the surface of the earth]

[everyone goes back to looking at porn on their phones]

Mary Worth, 7/24/16

Oh, wait, now I get where they’re going with this. It’s not “drugs are bad,” it’s “people who attempt to manage their emotional problems without asking Mary for advice will inevitably screw it up and become pill addicts.”

Funky Winkerbean, 7/24/16

I’m not sure if the joke here is that “you could raise a child and send them to college for what it costs to buy a life-size statue of Doctor Doom” or “women don’t have sex with men who buy life-size statues of Doctor Doom.” Either seems pretty accurate, though!

Hi and Lois, 7/24/16

I was going to go on a long diatribe about how promoting a campaign to get more people to play golf is the most legacy-newspaper-comic-strip thing you can possibly do, but then I got to the last panel and found out that I’m three years older than Hi from Hi and Lois, so excuse me while go lie down with a pillow over my face for the next six to fourteen hours.

Mutts, 7/24/16

I know I don’t talk about Mutts on this site very often, but then again Mutts doesn’t usually do a joke in which the lovable lisping cat fantasizes about capturing his owner in a giant web, to eat.

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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.”