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Slylock Fox, 7/6/23

I have come to accept that, in the post-Animalpocalypse world of Slylock Fox, one of the Transformations is that the relative sizes of the various vertebrate creatures seems to have changed in inconsistent and inscrutable ways — so that, for instance, Slylock Fox and Cassandra Cat are more or less as tall as the few remaining humans, while Max Mouse remains a tiny rodent, albiet one wearing shorts and an adorable little hat custom-made for his tiny noggin. But what still unnerves me are the giant insects. I didn’t care for Count Weirdly’s mega-bee and I don’t care for whatever dog-sized bug is marring this otherwise idyllic scene. Not into it! Not into it at all!

Six Chix, 7/6/23

A fun fact is that verb forms like “hath” used to just be how normal people talked but once they fell into disuse and were only encountered by most people in Chaucer or Shakespeare or the King James Bible, they got coded in our collective minds as “literary.” What I’m trying to say is that there ought to be a better way to mark out this chicken as a lover of literature. Maybe you could just show him reading a book?

Mary Worth, 7/6/23

“I’m going to go down to the station and update them on all the wild, evidence-free speculation we’ve been doing over the past few days and demand they take action based on it. Cops love that shit, is my understanding!”

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Six Chix, 7/3/23

I like this one! I like this one because it implies either that crabs are the undersea equivalent of Americans, or that in the far future, Americans will evolve into crabs and take to the sea in order to escape our blighted surface but still retain a dim memory of the national habits and holidays of their distant ancestors. Either way, they exist in some sort of celebratory symbiosis with the jellyfish, a relationship that (I hope) is mutually beneficial.

The Lockhorns, 7/3/23

I’m really loving these two dudes sitting at the bar with big smiles on their faces. They’re all in the Hate Wife Club! Leroy is their new best friend and tonight they’re gonna tear this town up (have three more cocktails, get morose, the other two are going to call their wives up and beg for forgiveness and go home and leave Leroy with the beardy bartender who gets increasingly pointed as closing time approaches and Leroy continues to refuse to make eye contact).

Pluggers, 7/3/23

C’mon, man, that’s not a possum, that’s a bear! Oh, wait, he’s just playing possum. Anyway, c’mon, man, he’s not pretending to be dead, he’s actually dead! Been dead for hours! Kangaroo lady’s going to figure it out soon and it’s gonna hit her like a ton of bricks!

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Blondie, 6/30/23

The idea of being put in a situation where you respond to someone awkwardly in the moment and dwell on it later is of course relatable. I would think that a fun way to grapple with that situation in an art form like the comics would be to think up a snappy response at your leisure and then write up a little scenario where you get to use it in the moment, rather than doing a strip where you flop and then are embarrassed and resentful for the rest of the day. I guess that’s why I’m just a humble critic and not actually the writer of a widely syndicated newspaper strip (I also did not inherit a widely beloved syndicated newspaper strip from my father, which may be a factor there).

Family Circus, 6/30/23

I’m really enjoying Ma Keane’s little smile here. “Should I tell him it’s dead now, and watch his little face crumble? Or would it be more fun to see him walking around with a dead bug in a jar for the rest of the day?”

Hi and Lois, 6/30/23

“People like getting bombed, kid. Why not ask Mr. Thurston about it? If he’s not ‘asleep.’”

Six Chix, 6/30/23

The crotch is next, folks. The crotch is next