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Slylock Fox, 2/10/20

You ever think how lucky Slylock and the Glorious Animal Regime are that their rogues gallery never uses its resources to their full potential? Think of the havoc that you could wreak with the ability to create an android so lifelike that a policeduck could extensively interact with it and still not be able to tell that it’s artificial! Weirdly could be building an army of android warriors, as intelligent as any human (or animal) but indestructible and willing to destroy his enemies and make him a god-king, but instead he’s just deploying them as decoys while he goes on the lam. Anyway, the real reason you can tell that’s not a bio-Weirdly is that if it were a bio-Weirdly, that cave would be full of Weirdly poop.

Mark Trail, 2/10/20

“Look, Mark, I just want to make this absolutely clear: yes, I indulged and even helped promote Harvey’s bizarre, delusional story that his amputation, which had an entirely normal and reasonably explanation, was the result of a yeti attack, but we weren’t fucking, OK? Do you think I’m a weirdo or something?”

Six Chix, 2/10/20

Ahhh, it’s time to celebrate Valentine’s Day, Six Chix-style: Getting wine-drunk and vomiting up an entire box of chocolates so violently that you completely jam up your toilet! LOVE IS IN THE AIR, people.

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Arctic Circle, 1/31/20

Another one of the new strips I’m reading, in addition to weird tales of stir-crazy dads, is Arctic Circle, and before you smugly say “Hey, what are these penguins doing in the Arctic,” know that their migration there is part of the bit. Anyway, the strip mostly seems to be the penguins looking on his horror as ecological collapse leads to narwhals savagely impaling each other, so it should be a hoot to follow!

Pros and Cons, 1/31/20

Pros and Cons, meanwhile, promises to extend the Law and Order model by including not just cops and prosecutors but defense attorneys and psychiatrists in its examination of the criminal justice system. Or so the King Features site would have you believe; this week features people who without that intro would read as generic white collar professionals making extremely broad social commentary in various eating and drinking establishments. Still, you can see the strip’s highbrow aspirations here: where else on the comics page will those fat cat modern architects, who greedily demand payment for the professional services they provide, get what’s coming to them? In Blondie? In Hi and Lois? I think not.

Dennis the Menace, 1/31/20

Damn, this strip is having a particularly non-menacing week. “America’s lovable late night clown prince, Jimmy Fallon, is keeping me from getting the rest I need to excel at school” isn’t quite as non-menacing as “These onions are bullying my eyes!”, but it’s pretty close.

Six Chix, 1/31/20

As a certified public transit enthusiast, I’m very glad the influential comic strip industry is weighing on one of my pet peeves. While many people who don’t routinely take transit focus on point-to-point speed, they fail to take waiting time into consideration, and often don’t see the point of funding frequent service. [low muttering] But headways low enough to allow passengers to “show up and and go” at the time of their choice [muttering grows louder, shouts of “get him off” become audible] are often more important [I am physically dragged off stage, but break free] than express service when it comes to [a net falls over me, leaving me unable to flee] the passenger exper[a single tranquilizer dart hits home and I lose consciousness]

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Six Chix, 1/10/20

Folks, I’m honestly impressed by how much “a lot going on here” this relatively sparsely drawn Six Chix packs in today. Let’s start with all the ways in which the ostensible “joke” doesn’t actually work: the term “red-handed” is a reference to a murderer being caught with literal blood on their hands, not a reference to the color of human hands themself, most of which are not what you’d call “red”; nevertheless, I guess the punchline here is supposed to be that gray poodles tend to have gray paws, which is severely undermined by the colorist’s choice to make the arrested poodle yellow. Unless there’s some kind of … gray evidence of crime that dogs are known for? Pretty sure dogs don’t have gray blood, though I admit I’m not a scientist or anything. Anyway, I feel bad because all this distracts from what I think is the real horror here: it’s normal for animals to not wear clothes, and it’s fine if your anthropomorphized animals wear clothes, but if you have an animal wearing only a hat and a police badge, I’m going to imagine him as functionally equivalent to a naked person wearing only a hat and a police badge, and honestly the way this dog’s tongue is hanging out and his tail is wagging really isn’t helping with the whole vibe.

Crock, 1/10/20

Speaking of colorist errors, I kind of like that whoever was coloring today’s Crock decided “look, Crock takes place in the desert, we always make the ground bright yellow sand, and I’ll be damned if I figure out what the inside of a salt mine looks like, you hear me? I’m not Google image searching this shit, life is far too short!”

Marvin, 1/10/20

Gotta give credit where it’s due: could you spend the last 38 years, as the comic strip Marvin has, coming up with increasingly weird and off-putting scenarios in which the title character makes eye contact with one or both parents while shitting? I’ll bet you couldn’t. I’ll bet you don’t have the stamina.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/10/20

Whoops, looks like in addition to having a big personality and a tendency to show up unannounced, Aunt Tildy is … a comical drunk? More on the exasperated facial expressions Rex makes about this as events warrant.

Mary Worth, 1/10/20

“Please, doctor! I’m literally melting from panel to panel! Test that thyroid and test it now, with all your might!”