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Crock, 1/27/15

“Crude” is kind of a polite way to describe what the art in Crock is like, but you have to admit that it gets the job done here. I’m assuming that the “job” in question is to show a couple of sapient animals grinning dreamily about how if they just urinate on things, they own them. Cool, right? Fun how that works out. Just cover it in piss, and it’s yours. Buy some booze so you pee more and increase your landholdings. It’s enough to give you a faraway look in your eye as you contemplate what a wonderful world this is that we live in.

Six Chix, 1/27/15

In less fun sapient animal news, these two goldfish are going to be forced to share extremely cramped quarters with their friend’s bloating corpse for who knows how long. “Is it possible that the water we need to live was too wet?” they babble nonsensically, trying to distract themselves from the horror.

Apartment 3-G, 1/27/15

The Story Of The Breakfast Eaten At The Friendly Neighborhood Cafe Which Is Also Just Two People Standing Around On The Sidewalk … continues! In today’s installment, Margo revels in her local celebrity status. Her boast of “owning that new building down the block” is interesting; this as near as I can tell picks up a vaguely remembered plotline from more than a decade ago, which established that the girls (and perhaps all the other residents?) collectively own the building they lived in, and that said building isn’t new at all but actually old enough to include a hiding place used by slaves fleeing to freedom on the Underground Railroad. If Margo’s managed to spin things so that she’s famous as the sole owner of a newly constructed Manhattan apartment building despite all available evidence, I may have to re-evaluate my low opinion of her as a publicist.

Mary Worth, 1/27/15

Say what you will about Apartment 3-G’s weird story-art disconnect, but at least it doesn’t expect us to learn about its characters’ digestive lives in excruciating detail.

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Momma, 1/7/15

MaryLou’s love life has always been depicted as sort of dull and hapless, which is why today’s strip comes as kind of a shock. Who knew that she was out there having hot affairs in which she’s being emotionally manipulated by married men? I’m also reasonably sure that we’ve never seen her depicted with high heels before today; I assume they’re a half-assed attempt to make her suddenly convincing as a character with a sex life.

Rhymes With Orange, 1/7/15

Speaking of sex lives, did you know that pastries want to fuck each other, constantly? It’s true!

Six Chix, 1/7/15

Today’s Six Chix isn’t so much about sex lives as it is about mapping romantic love and its associated jealousy onto other kinds of relationships, but mostly I’m interested in the liquid drops beneath the cat’s chin. Are those supposed to be tears? Within context, you’d think they’re tears, but cats don’t cry (or get jealous when you look at pictures of other cats, I realize), but they do sometimes drool. Have you ever encountered a drooly cat? They are equal parts adorable and disgusting. Anyway, if you think your cat is crying because it loves you too much, probably it’s just drooling. Don’t flatter yourself.

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Hi and Lois, 12/16/14

I’ve never been entirely clear on how we’re supposed to understand the Thurstons’ class position relative to the Flagstons. I mean, they live in identical houses next door to each other and Hi and Thirsty work in the same office but Thirsty and Irma’s lives just always seem a little shabbier, somehow. Anyway, I own a number of thrift-store clothing items and feel that nobody should be ashamed of shopping at such places, so I’m pretty resentful about Lois’s super-smug facial expression in panel two. “Haha, guess you wouldn’t have to wear my grubby hand-me-downs like a poor person if your husband weren’t a drunk, eh, Irma? We’re ostensibly best friends!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/14

Oh my God, you guys, Rex Morgan is finally following through on a plot it set up literally five and a half years ago: Becka’s husband Peter worked with a sexy nutritionist, and Becka was jealous! Her suspicions were apparently fully justified despite Peter’s attempt to convince her otherwise. So see, she never particularly cared about academic independence over at the old community college or whatever the dumb faculty intrigue plot was about; she just had her heart broken! Also, in case you’re not reading along at home, Becka is telling all this to June as a way of explaining why she’s quitting her job at the clinic. A good thing to do when you’re emotionally devastated and restructuring your financial life after separating from your spouse is to give up your main source of income!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/16/14

Let’s say that, years ago you named someone in your comic “Funky Winkerbean,” to denote the happy-go-lucky nature of the character and the strip. It was the ’70s, so maybe drugs were involved. I’m not gonna judge! And then say that over the decades your strip became a charnel house of sadness and your character became a bloated, angry jerk. I think it’d probably be a bad idea to have anyone in the strip refer to him by a nickname like, for instance, “The Funk Man.” It’d just make everyone think about the name more, you know? You don’t want people thinking about the name.

Mark Trail, 12/16/14

“Say, Justin, this gives me an idea: what if you still built your titanium mine near the swamp, but then once you got the titanium out of the ground, you just admired it for a bit and then put it back? That’s a reasonable centrist compromise we could all agree on!”

Momma, 12/16/14

So Santa is an immortal magical being whose lifespan lies outside of time as we know it, and Momma is … roughly forty years younger than him? Sounds about right.

Heathcliff, 12/16/14

I like that, even in the iconography of his terrifying cult of personality, Heathcliff looks pretty bored.

Six Chix, 12/16/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because her mother died from melting, and they’re never going to hear from her again!