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By the time comics — with their six-week lead times and Eisenhower-era worldviews — get around to acknowledging hard times, it’s hard times. Let’s see how they’re taking it:

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/11/11

The recession forced little Sarah Morgan to grow up fast — looks like she’s about thirty in panel three there. Rex sees it as his chance to regress, and turns his cap around like one of the Cool Teens. Pssst, Rex! Not Coors — Pabst!

Funky Winkerbean, 10/11/11

Ha, it’s funny because books are antiques. And the store owner got steamrolled by technology. And looks like Funky. Sucks to be you, Book Guy.

Shoe, 10/11/11

In hard times, it’s human nature to point the finger at something like the stock market — even when you lack human nature, or fingers.

La Cucaracha, 10/11/11

Big Peanut seems an unlikely villain, but OK. One quibble, though: for young and old, rich or poor, Spam® alone is Spam, absolute and irreducible.

Judge Parker, 10/11/11

And I think we know who’s really to blame.

Mark Trail’s Greatest Hits – a Fall Fundraiser special, part 2

Mark Trail — 1/21, 2/13, 8/5, 10/3, 11/21/06

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Family Circus, 10/6/11

Does Ma Keane really feel a need to apologize that her crying infant is showing emotion? “Sorry, Billy, we can’t all be eerily affectless soul-dead monsters like you.”

Gil Thorp, 10/6/11

I want to briefly dip into the already dullsville Gil Thorp fall plot — seriously, it involves the football team’s quest for a kicker, a quest that will inevitably end with the forcible recruitment of the mysteriously squirrely Brody Abro — to point out that Milford actually has a soccer team, one that I don’t believe we’ve ever seen mentioned in the course of a strip ostensibly dedicated to high school sports. I assume that this is because the team isn’t coached by a Thorp, which in turn probably explains why the team is in contention for a championship.

Mary Worth, 10/6/11

Meanwhile, in Mary Worth, the entire week has been dedicated to the trials of leaving a phone message for someone at a hotel. Taste the excitement!

Shoe, 10/6/11

“Ha ha! No, but seriously, we live in a monstrous dictatorship with no respect for human rights.”

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Shoe, 9/21/11

Here’s the thing about jokes of the form “you put the X in Y,” where X represents one or more syllables in Y: the humor only works if the X makes up a part of Y even though the two words are not related semantically. For instance, if your significant other had travelled into orbit as part of the U.S. space program, it would be funny if, after admiring their attractive backside, you said, “Baby, you put the ‘ass’ in ‘astronaut.'” However, if you were dating an Olympic champion, you shouldn’t say, “Baby, you put the ‘win’ in ‘winner,'” as that would sound very, very stupid. “Crank,” in the sense of an eccentric, obsessive person, is actually derived from “cranky,” so the level of wordplay here is pretty disappointing to say the least.

(OK, I admit that I launched into that etymological and linguistic lecture entirely because I’m particularly proud of the “you put the ‘ass’ in ‘astronaut'” joke I thought up.)

Anyway, I do enjoy the cranky old Biz character in Shoe despite the fact that he’s being linguistically ill-used here. I particularly like the fact that he’s angrily berating Roz for always serving him tasteless tasteless food, and yet he nevertheless comes to Roz’s to eat all the time. Isn’t there some other bird-restaurant where the bird-people of Shoe eat? I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of snooty place where they serve fancy bird-French food. Maybe Biz can’t afford it, on his bird-Social Security.

Spider-Man, 9/21/11

So, just to keep you up to date, Peter Parker is insisting that, because a bunch of sick kids are expecting Spider-Man to visit them at the hospital, he must go to the hospital, even though the police are after him and also know that he’s planning to visit the hospital. Because if there’s one thing those sick kids want to see, it’s their hero getting arrested.

Apartment 3-G, 9/21/11

Ruby has heard you complaining about how her hair is dumb, and has responded by dying it Manic Panic red! That … that’s what you wanted, right?