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Mark Trail, 7/9/22

Hey everybody, remember Sassy? He was Rusty’s adorable little puppy (distinct from Andy, Mark’s big macho dog), and he was always prone to getting into trouble, just like Rusty! He sort of faded away in the past few years of the strip but now he’s back! … just in time to die horribly from whatever gross skin disease is afflicting Lost Forest. RIP Sassy, 1981-2022, you will probably not be missed.

The Phantom, 7/9/22

Man, I’m barely even going to try to explain the current Phantom plot, which has been very, very long and difficult to follow but is mostly a series of nesting narratives from Old Man Mozz explaining how the Phantom will ruin his life if he tries to bust his former flirtation partner Savarna out of prison, and it’s never quite clear if we’re watching the big guy actually doing this stuff or just hearing Mozz spin a what-if narrative about it, but the point is that you can apparently show a couple guys just straight-up dying from taking a bullet to the chest, right here in the funny papers! It’s Saturday, I guess? You can show dudes getting shot to death, on the weekend? And maybe if it’s just a story-within-a-story told by a wise old sage and not something really happening in the strip? Do the practices and standards departments at major newspaper comics syndicates take into consideration the layer of narrative distance at which a violent murder happens?

Mary Worth, 7/9/22

“I mean, I’m definitely going to have a lot of different opportunities to explore once the state Physician Assistant Board finds out about our extremely inappropriate relationship and I get my license taken away!”

Slylock Fox, 7/9/22

Welp, let’s take a look at the details here and see if we can guess the six diffOH MY GOD, is that a human femur, is that GRANDMA’s femur, oh my GOD

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Six Chix, 3/23/22

One of those things that I never thought about until I learned it and then I thought about it all the time is that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is it stated that he’s an egg, yet this is, universally, how we envision him. The main theory explaining this is that the rhyme was originally conceived of as a riddle: “humpty dumpty” was a general slang term of abuse for the short and squat, and so the joke was something like “Sure, seems weird that some little fat dude fell off the wall and broke into pieces … but what if we told you that actually, he was an egg? Eh?” Humor, notoriously, does not translate well across eras, and this is a pretty good example of that in play! You know what does play well across eras, though? Body horror! That’s why I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the Six Chix reboot of the Humpty Dumpty mythos, in which the Humpty Dumpty was deliberately taunted into hurling himself to a horrifying death so that his “inner bird” could be set free. Each bird in this grim world must convince other beings to die in order to perpetuate their species. It’s grim stuff!

Crankshaft, 3/23/22

If you “run” Montoni’s pizza through “the pipeline” (of your digestive tract), you’ll experience any number of unpleasant side effects, at both ends and the middle, which might in some sense be interpreted as “saluting”. Sorry you had to visualize that, but the motto of this blog long ago shifted from “I read the comics so you don’t have to” to “I involuntarily contemplated Ed Crankshaft’s pizza-farts so now you’re going to have to as well.”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/22

I know, in theory, that the teens in the first two panels have just finished a practice, and it’s only in the second panel that we’ve zoomed in enough to see that Parnit is sweating as one normally does after such exertion. But what it looks like is that Pranit has been told that he’ll be allowed back in the lineup after being suspended for his little “I accidentally became a bookie and hired an enforcer” oopsie and has immediately broken into a frenzied, manic sweat of excitement. He might have a problem not messing up between now and the game! Looks like he’s gonna mess up right there, to be honest!

Judge Parker and The Phantom, 3/23/22

Sorry I have not been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker and The Phantom, but I did want to point out that they’re both drawn by Mike Manley but written by two different people, and I would like to imagine that Manley enjoyed getting the scripts this week and finding out that he would get to do two explosions on the same day.

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Arctic Circle, 9/1/21

Arctic Circle started out as a nice little fish-out-of-water joke-a-day strip about three penguins (Ed, Oscar, and Gordo, from left to right) stranded in the Arctic, sort of a cold-water Boner’s Ark. It has evolved into a 24/7/365 environmental catastrophe sermon, with some version or other of “ain’t it awful?” in the final panel. But today’s seems to suggest that we mass-murder insects to reduce pesticide use on soybeans, raising the question: how?

Phantom, 9/1/21

Hey, remember the last time we saw Savarna eight years ago, Old Stripey was lecturing her about their “incompatible methods,” how her “killing days end here,” and taking away her weapon? Yeah, well, looks like that ship has sailed.

And as a long-time Phantom/Savarna ‘shipper, let me add—are those eyes really empty behind that mask, or do I detect the subtle BRAKOOOOM of LOVE?

Sally Forth, 9/1/21

“That thing I do, the one that looks like it stems from reciprocal affection and a shared sense of impending loss? It’s hatred, Hil, and resentment! I’m a sociopath! Welp, great summer, girlfriend, see ya around!”

Luann, 9/1/21 and 3/17/2010 reprint of 3/18/1985

Where, oh where, will Luann be in 30 years? Let’s just look back 36 years and see if we can establish a regression line!

Hmm. Not “regression,” exactly, but hardly progress. Better get to changing those media stereotypes, Bernice, or at least the sheets.

Family Circus, 9/1/21

And if Billy starts avoiding Bibles, speaking dead languages, and smelling of brimstone, it’s ’cause he ate those deviled eggs.

Is “Venmo” a verb? Try it and see!

— Uncle Lumpy