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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/24/16

I can’t stop laughing at “I’m an English governess and I know how babies are made.” “They’re made by s-e-x, June! P in V! Only English governesses are privy to this knowledge, while the rest of you lot believe your myths about the stork or the cabbage patch or what have you!” Or maybe this relates to June’s implication in the final panel; as an English governess, Heather knows that aristocratic British men can sire bastard children with their servants, but the wives of the wealthy can never do the same, no matter how badly they want to. What June is telling her is that it’s a new world now. Why, even British princesses have equal rights to inherit the throne as their brothers. Go for it, Heather. Jordan is waiting for you.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/24/16

I assumed that the newspaper clue was not the crossword barely visible at bottom right, but the paper sitting out on the chair at left, which Max had created with a laptop and some desktop publishing software that was also locked in the closet with him. Surely — surely! — Max’s disappearance would not be front page news. Definitely not banner headline front news. Definitely not cleverly composed photo front page news. Inside pages of local section, at best.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/16/16

I’m going to warn you, in case you ever meet me in person: I’m terrible with names. I’ll meet someone, maybe on multiple occasions, and I’ll have lots of positive interactions with them, and I’ll remember all sorts of details about their life that they’ve told me, but for whatever reason the name doesn’t stick, and it eventually gets to the point where it’s too embarrassing to ask. Once, during my ill-starred time in grad school, I was in a seminar with a new student, and one day a friend and I were hanging around the department office when this new guy spotted us and started walking towards us, and my heart dropped because I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name, and I knew that the rules of propriety demanded that I introduce my friend to him, and when he came up to us I literally started saying “Hey, this is–” having no idea how I was going to finish that sentence, when suddenly the new guy cut me off and said, “Don’t bother,” and proceeded to tell us, with relish, how grad school was a sham and he was quitting to join a dot-com startup. He walked off and it was one of the greatest feelings of relief I ever had or would experience. Anyway, I have to imagine that this is how Rex felt, as he opens the conversation about tuition in panel one. Obviously he has to bring it up, he knows this is a private school, he’s no dummy, but surely … I mean, not Sarah … not the Morgans … they can’t expect us to dirty our hands … oh, Sarah’s tuition is paid for forever by blood-soaked mob cash? Excellent! What could possibly go wrong?

Six Chix, 1/16/16

Ha ha, it’s funny because that alien is alive and sapient and then we watch the cat straight up murder and eat it.

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Mark Trail, 1/13/16

Gabe, I’m sure you’re a very distinguished chiropterologist, and your skill at delicately plucking bats off of cave walls is unsurpassed, but you don’t know anything about selling magazines, OK? If America’s magazine-reading public (mostly airline passengers and people who accidentally clicked the “auto-renew” box on Magazines.com six years ago) see a big story in Woods and Wildlife about a healthy bat colony, they’re not going to think “Oh no! We need to act now to fight white-nose syndrome, probably by allocating millions of tax dollars to whatever university has Gabe on the faculty!” No, they’re gonna think “Wow, look at all those plump, healthy bats. Plenty more where those came from. Bet we could eat ’em, or mine ’em for coal, somehow.” If you want to move hearts, you need to show some full-on bat devastation. I dearly hope this plot climaxes with Mark carefully calibrating his punches to only stun the bats for the photographer, who then daintily daubs talcum powder on their noses for a heartrending but entirely fraudulent cover shoot.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/13/16

At one point in Alan Moore’s Watchman comics series, the psychopathic vigilante Rorschach is captured and arrested. Physically slight, he’s hassled on his first day in prison, but swiftly and brutally ends his first fight by grabbing a pan of hot grease from the cafeteria line and dousing his attacker’s face, leaving him screaming in agony. As the other prisoners look on in horror, he growls his most memorable line: “I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me!” I just thought of that when reading this strip, probably for no particular reason.

Gil Thorp, 1/13/16

Gil Thorp’s basketball season plot has been snoresville so far, but is it about to involve some mid-game pantsing? I could get behind a rash of tit-for-tat pantsing leading to a new record for technical fouls in the Valley Conference.

Judge Parker, 1/13/16

Sorry, American “linguist”! You’ve no doubt done seen and done awful things in the name of protecting your country from the shadows, but Katherine wants that step-grandchild real bad, so it looks like you’ll be dying alone in a Serb prison!