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Shoe, 3/22/16

I’m not a fan of either playing or watching golf, but after reading this article, I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that what most people think of the particular artificial landscape created for golf courses is actually an attempt to reproduce the natural environment of coastal Scotland where the game was invented in the 1400s. You can see another strange echo of the now worldwide game’s connection to a particular place in today’s Shoe, in which a bird-woman is wearing a tam o’shanter. This is, I suppose, to provide a setup for the feint that produces the strip’s punchline. Did she purchase this faintly absurd hat, which Americans probably primarily think of as a goofy thing you wear ironically while playing golf, as a part of her decision to try to share her husband’s passion for the game? No. Her marriage is a nightmare nest of suspicions and deceit, but the hat is unrelated to any of that, and we’ll probably never know why she’s wearing it. Its inherent whimsy now merely serves as a sad counterpoint to the bird-woman’s depressing home life.

Dennis the Menace, 3/22/16

To maintain some poor soul in a rapidly decaying flesh-prison, to create a ghastly living portrait of Dorian Gray, in order to grant yourself an ageless existence as a sinister, eternal child — I would be hard pressed to imagine something more menacing than that. “Please, you’ve got to believe me!” Mr. Wilson gasps, smelling the stench of decay arising from his own flesh. “I’ve been bewitched by his foul magic! I’m only 35 years old!”

Plugger, 3/22/16

You’re a plugger if the only thing in your sad, plodding existence that can inspire you to muster up any sense of occasion or formality is when someone dies.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/29/16

FYI, guys, Rex Morgan, M.D., isn’t just about people giving Rex and his family money. It’s also sometimes about wacky old people! Like remember when a pair of demented seniors wandered away from a nursing home and made a small-time drug dealer’s life miserable? Or when an elderly brother-sister pair won the lottery, with hilarious results? Anyway, it looks like Rex has finally been bullied into buying that house in town, and sure, it’s in the leafy, huge-mansion part of town, but it’s also in the cranky, argumentative old people part of town! The next few days should give us plenty of the great Grimacing Rex Reaction Shots I crave.

Mary Worth, 2/29/16

[Mary Worth at the airport newsstand]: “People? Oh, my, dear, between you and me, it’s very difficult to keep up with multiple celebrities these days. Who has the time, really? No, one copy of Person, please.”

Hi and Lois, 2/29/16

I mean, you don’t want to do it so often that it becomes Funky Winkerbean-esque self parody, but if you want to end your gag-a-day strip once in a while with a son snidely reminding his father about the grim banality of his adult life, and the father just stares sullenly into space with his arms crossed across his chest, I’m not going to complain.

Marvin, 2/29/16

“I pee on it! I pee all over my phone! My phone is covered in urine. I’m a baby, but I’m depicted as having adult-level cognitive abilities, and, for some reason, I own a mobile phone, but I still pee and poop in my pants!”

Shoe, 2/29/16

“Ha ha, get it? Because of the ice cream flavor? Anyway, the actual story is that I was very drunk.”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/7/16

Congratulations to Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for deftly handling this reveal, this sudden shift in perspective revealing that those we see as bestial have their own way of looking at the world, and that our actions through their eyes are truly monstrous. It’s right out of the classic sci-fi horror novel I Am Legend, and it’s sad that this century-old comic strip created to make fun of hillbilly stereotypes manages to pull off this nuanced narrative twist better than, say, any of the movies the novel was turned into.

Shoe, 2/7/16

OK.

Your comic strip characters are all bird-people and they live in trees and sometimes they fly but they never, ever acknowledge “Oh, we’re genetic freak shows that look like birds but wear clothes and talk and have jobs.”

Fine.

I get it.

But if you’re going to go down this road

don’t

birds