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Slylock Fox, 12/9/07

Oh, Cassandra! Your attempts to snare Slylock’s heart grow ever more transparent — and ever more pathetic. “Accidentally” leaving the heel of your shoe behind? Come on. Staring brightly ahead as you wear that prim little pastel outfit isn’t going to fool anyone.

Getting a lineup together in world shared by many kinds of sentient animal life isn’t easy, but the crew assembled by Officer Duck today is particularly motley. The two creatures of indeterminate species on either side of Cassandra look like they’re hoping that this will be their big chance to break into movies, or at least reality TV. If I were Slylock, I’d start looking into the background of the elephant lady at the far right — she looks guilty as hell, and presumably has got some kind of home counterfeiting business or meth lab set up back at her trailer. The pink-haired bunny, meanwhile, is way, way too stoned to care.

(If you wish Cassandra would “steal some files” from your “office”, you obviously need some Bob Weber Jr.-designed Cassandra Cat gear from the Comics Curmudgeon store!)

Crankshaft, 12/9/07

You might chalk this up as a garden-variety generation gap comic, but with young chinbeard and his sister watching their parents turn into their grandparents and worrying about turning into their parents in turn. But recall that the grandparents in question are rageaholic Crankshaft and the somehow even more loathsome Ukrainian hate machine. The kids probably thought that they’d at last be free once their grandparents kick off, but now are worried about enduring their post-transformation parents. Junior is right to look so terrified.

Family Circus, 12/9/07

Note the bit that I’ve highlighted. Billy is clearly in the “Anyone but Obama” camp for the 2008 elections.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 12/9/07

Yeah, osmosis! Osmosis and time travel.

(Yes, I know there’s a neo-swing scene that’s alive and well today in New York and elsewhere — but the kids today out doing the Lindy Hop tend to be young hipsters like these. Tommie and Gary are soooo very much not hipsters; and I don’t care how old they’re supposed to be, I refuse to even qualify them as “young”.)

Panel from Shoe, 12/9/07

It’s not like I’m in love with the word “barmaid”, exactly; I just think “bartenderness” sounds kind of creepy. “Come on, baby, I’ve been lookin’ at you all night; show me a little bartenderness.”

Site meta-note: I’ve decided that I’m going to start doing the comment of the week/ad love posts on Monday instead of Sundays. I often don’t even get to Saturday’s comics until Sunday, and doing the Sunday strips takes me longer than usual because I can’t easily see them all at once on the Chronicle site, so often doing blog work eats up a good chunk of what oughtta be a weekend day of rest and relaxation! So, Trilobite’s comment gets an extra day of glory thanks to the shift.

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Shoe, 11/11/07

“These are perilous times to be refinancing your mortgage, Cosmo.” Ah, an auspicious beginning to any light-hearted journey into the Sunday funnies! But at least the Perfesser’s encounter with his mortgage lender is fairly straightforward. See, his name is “I. M. Usurious”! Which indicates that he is usurious! Ha! It’s a sharp and subtle commentary on modern mores. He’s also a buzzard, you’ll note. Because banks metaphorically feast on the flesh of the dead and dying, you see! (Or is it metaphorical? The world of Shoe, so much like ours but with anthropomorphized talking birds, always straddles the line between metaphor and nightmare.)

Family Circus, 11/11/07

The post-modern emotional desert in which the Keane kids gasp for sustenance is starkly illustrated today, as they can only interpret mom and dad’s attempt to have a genuine moment of romantic intimacy through the lens of the horrible pop cultural products of late-stage capitalism. A more realistic thing to shout at them might have been, “Hey, no getting frisky, you two! You can barely afford to feed all of us now as it is.”

And, just for the heck of it, let’s check in to see what’s going on over in Rex Morgan, M.D.!

On second thought, maybe let’s not.

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Shoe, 10/21/07

As the funnies have repeatedly taught us, there’s nothing better for tickling your funny bone as you read the paper over a leisurely Sunday breakfast like a lonely, depressed bird trying to deal with his empty life by drinking alone. Usually it’s the Perfesser whose ruined, emotionally dead existence gets put on display for our amusement, but today’s it’s Shoe, because, hey, why the hell not. He wants to drink whiskey until his vision is impaired! His psychic wounds are so deep that no amount of substance use can put an end to the pain! Normally this is the stuff of depressing black-and-white European cinema, but there’s a cute pun here and a reference to a classic movie star that 75 percent of the strip’s readers have never heard of — plus, as mentioned, the poor depressed alcoholic and his enabler are birds — so in this case it’s a God-damned laugh riot.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/21/07

I have to admit that I found this strip both sweet in and of itself and a decent way to frame the Great Funky Winkerbean Leap Forward. However, I do wonder exactly what dialog preceded “…and so that’s what happens to people when they die.” If this were the Family Circus, there probably would have been some treacly description of God taking you up to a beautiful shiny white paradise where you get to look down from above on a cloud, but in this strip I’m guessing Les provided a detailed description of the typical sequence of organ failure, followed by a chemistry-heavy discourse on the decay of organic matter. Similarly, in a cutesier strip, little Summer’s heartwarming gesture in the first panel of the second row would indicate that Lisa will live forever in her heart, but it’s more likely that Les brought her to Central Park so she could dig up some of her ashes and eat them.

Judge Parker, 10/21/07

Yeah, Red, wait! Stick around! I can’t imagine why you’d want to leave. Is it just because one of your hosts got drunk and tried to shank you with a steak knife because you pointed out that he got himself into his own mess? Nice little egging on there from Sam — “Wish you hadn’t sad that, counselor! Don’t make Mullety Flatop angry — you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry!” Why, if you storm out now, you won’t get to see Trudi break that wine bottle on the edge of the table and go after her knife-wielding brother. Should be a hoot!

Oh, and note to Keith: Don’t all shysters have law degrees by definition? Also, I know it’s your house and all, but you really shouldn’t try to stab people with the flatware.

Dennis the Menace, 10/21/07

Ha ha, look at Dennis’s pissy face in the last panel! I know what he’s going to be when grows up: sullen and unemployed!