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Judge Parker, 10/5/19

Hey, remember back in April, when Marie quit her job as the Spencer-Driver compound’s primary servant so she could go to grad school? Well, turns out grad school’s expensive, so it looks like she will once again be taking on a job as a Spencer-Driver compound servant, only this time to “work part-time at” the ill-advised B&B Abbey launched in a fit of aimless mania, and by “work part-time at” we mean “do 100% of the management of as Abbey immediately stops paying attention to it once Marie shows up to bail her out.” Fortunately, Abbey is so far removed from the little people and their financial concerns that Marie will be able to write a truly staggering number of zeroes on that post-it note, safe in the knowledge that the Spencer-Driver money guy will just sigh heavily and sell a certain percentage of the family’s krugerrand reserves after Abbey hands it to him without ever having looked at it.

The Lockhorns, 10/5/19

The Lockhorns is not a strip known for its verisimilitude, but it is absolutely true that every single comedy club has a name that sounds like someone was held at gunpoint and forced to come up with twenty “funny” nonsense names for comedy clubs, and then they used the twentieth one the poor victim came up with, the one that came only after five minutes of them crying and begging to be allowed to see their family again someday. So, yeah, I absolutely believe that the place Loretta would try to drag Leroy into in an attempt to be able to spend time with him without talking and maybe have him get made fun of by touring comic who’s not at all happy to be there would be called “Cachinnation’s,” and I find the font believable as well.

Pluggers, 10/5/19

Pluggers have long centered their identity around living in exurban communities that are so completely built around the automobile that pedestrians are considered cultural aberrations, but it’s honestly surprising to me that they’re being so up front about it.

Mary Worth, 10/5/19

So … it looks like Mary Worth has chosen, over the next several weeks, to show us, in a very deliberately paced series of strips, Wilbur and Estelle having sex? I guess … I guess we deserve this, for something we did, somewhere along the line.

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Shoe, 9/18/19

So many Shoe punchlines are met by goggle eyes of horror, and honestly there’s plenty of justification for that, but I really like the expression Roz is wearing here, which is sort of a grim, sly smile. “That’s right,” she’s thinking. “Marci went to Las Vegas with her man and they totally had sex. Procreative sex.”

Gasoline Alley, 9/18/19

In a development somehow even more baffling than the weeks and weeks and weeks Gasoline Alley spent on scrapbooking, Gasoline Alley has decided to spend God knows how many weeks discussing the very real and fascinating condition of synesthesia by focusing on a new character, a physician’s assistant who claims his synesthesia allows him to feel his patients’ ailments, which isn’t even close to being a real thing. Still, if it’s an avenue for this strip to get into some “the HUMAN MIND is the ultimate trip, baby” visual territory like it is today, I’m willing to forgive a lot.

Mark Trail, 9/18/19

“Kathmandu isn’t the primitive, out-of-date city the world thinks it is! Is it still a little naive? Possibly. Has the mayor been convinced to pay a substantial portion of the annual budget to promote the city’s modernity in what he’s been assured is a widely read and universally beloved American comic strip? Well, yes. But ‘primitive’? Definitely not!”

Pluggers, 9/18/19

The primary facts you need to know about a plugger’s family members in order to keep abreast of their lives are the various ways in which their aged and ill-treated bodies are falling apart.

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Marvin, 9/11/19

Sometimes, faithful readers, I have to take a good, hard look at myself and acknowledge that I’ve spent a decade and a half — more than half of my adult life — regularly getting angry online about how the popular widely syndicated comic strip Marvin just makes jokes about shitting, day after day after day, right in public where everyone sees it. Sometimes I feel like I do it too often and should save my righteous fury for days like today, which features a strip that’s not only about Marvin shitting but actually demands that we get into the weeds of the mechanics of the whole thing. Like, isn’t the whole deal with Marvin that he doesn’t care about getting his diaper changed? Wouldn’t he be more likely just to shit himself and the keep eating, having just made more room in his stomach, to the disgust of his fellow competitors and everyone around him? Anyway, damn you, Marvin, for making me contemplate this today, and also several times a week, forever.

Pluggers, 9/11/19

Pluggers at least has the courtesy to leave the digestive distress this plugger’s about to experience largely in the realm of the imagination. Will he endure a mere gurgle or two from chowing down on the long-expired canned food alone in his kitchen, or suffer the full-on runs? The details aren’t as important as the overall gist, which is that pluggers are cheap, lazy, and so depressed that they honestly don’t care whether they live or die.