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Herb and Jamaal, 8/1/12

Herb’s mother-in-law Eula, who both lives and works with him, is always on his case, constantly. One could write this off as just part of the eternal conflict between a mother-in-law and her child’s spouse, or, perhaps more accurately, as a tired, stereotypical retreading of the supposedly eternal conflict between a mother-in-law and her child’s spouse. Or, as today’s strip demonstrates, it could be that she’s terrified by Herb’s obvious emotional and sexual connection to his “best buddy Jamaal,” and will do anything to distract him from it, in the vain hope that she can keep her family together.

Lockhorns, 8/1/12

Call the Lockhorns hackneyed if you must, but it can still take us to depths of relationship hell that we never imagined existed. I mean, just think if you were at a place in your marriage when you thought, “God, I wish we had gotten that murder-suicide pact nailed down when the time was right. But what’s the point, now?”

Marvin, 8/1/12

It’s Marvin’s 30th anniversary, and from this day forward, I will no longer think of him as a horrible brat-child glorying in his inability or refusal to poop in a toilet. Instead, I will pity him as a victim of a capricious creator who for whatever perverse reason delights in forcing him to stew in his own excrement.

Shoe, 8/1/12

You may be alarmed to learn that Shoe is having sex with his golf clubs. Personally, I’m even more unsettled to discover that he’s getting emotionally attached to some of them.

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Gil Thorp, 7/18/12

At last, this summer’s wacky Gil Thorp storyline comes into focus! And it involves … one of Gil’s former students, who joined the military and then was physically maimed and mentally scarred in combat, and has become a recluse? Damn it, that’s not wacky at all. Though surely whatever non-board-certified tough love therapy Gil will unleash on him will be good for a laugh or two. One also wonders if the particular nature of the poor young man’s injury is meant play to the strip’s artist’s strengths, since there’s guaranteed to be one fewer hideous flipper-hand per panel whenever he makes an appearance.

Pluggers and Marvin, 7/18/12

Ha ha, old people, they sure hate the computers and the social networking, right? Oh, wait, that just seems a little at odds with all the old people I know who love Facebook and the many pictures of grandchildren it provides to them. Anyway, mostly I would like to point out that (a) these pluggers have found reporting of plugger-esque exploits on the society pages, which in most newspapers are usually dedicated to fancy parties thrown by the wealthy and beautiful, which means that in Pluggerville there are people even lower on the social ladder than these guys; and (b) I would like a comic about Marvin’s grandpa and his cranky old friend cruising for sexy grandmas in the park a million times better than Marvin’s current Marvin-pooping-focused iteration.

Shoe, 7/18/12

Whoops, looks like Roz served the Perfesser a meal intended for one of the many insectivorous birds who patronize her diner! Also, she is extremely sarcastic.

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Slylock Fox, 7/9/12

Because my brain doesn’t work the way one might want it to, I have a terrible time remembering my family’s birthdays without programming them into my phone’s calendar, but upon reading this strip I instantly remembered that it was the not the first Slylock Fox whose solution revolved around anteater toothlessness. At least this one’s an actual anteater! In a world of anthropomorphic animals, many of which are carnivores, I expect Slylock needs to resolve exactly this kind of dispute relatively frequently. “Waah, the birds ate my pet worms! Waaah, Cassandra Cat ate my sidekick!” This is what comes of overthrowing humanity, animal-rabble! Not the eating of other animals of course, but the ultimately unfulfillable sense that there ought to be some kind of justice to how it happens.

Shoe, 7/9/12

Shoe generally has its characters wildly overreact to punchlines with goggle eyes of horror, which makes the Perfesser’s numb, heavy-lidded stare in the second panel here all the sadder. “Yeah, I guess I should have expected that my attempt at serious emotional intimacy with a good friend — and my attempt to understand how other people find fulfillment in romantic relationships, something I’ve tried and failed at all my life — would be deflected with a dumb joke about HAW HAW AGING STRIKES TERROR INTO WOMEN’S HEARTS. Welp, back to silently dying inside!”

Spider-Man, 7/9/12

Speaking of facial expressions, it should have been obvious to everyone that Clown-9 is a crazed maniac bent on revenge against everyone who’s ever wronged him. Thus, I’m assuming that MJ’s look of shock in panel three is not a reaction to Peter’s suggestion that she might be on the target list, but is rather justified horror at the image in panel two of Peter making a sullen, hideous kissyface and jabbing a chunk of blackened meat at his lower lip.

Apartment 3-G, 7/9/12

I feel like I’ve been spending too much time dwelling on the weirdly off material in this storyline about attitudes towards and medical knowledge about childbirth, and not enough time discussing the fact that Tommie, Scott, and Nina are all wearing identical white shirts. So, Tommie, Scott, and Nina are wearing identical white shirts, everybody! Are they in a cult? Probably yes — specifically, a cult that practices human sacrifice via botched home births.

Crankshaft, 7/9/12

“Used to be you could make a gal cry by showing her your wang whenever you felt like it! Now you’ve gotta have one of them telephones you carry around with you, I guess.”