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Gil Thorp, 9/9/16

Welp, looks like despite my best efforts to fool myself, summer is actually over in Milford, and football (both the American and foreign versions) season is getting underway! Panel one gives True Standish, the beloved (?) driving force behind many of the last couple years’ plots, an affectionate sendoff as he leaves the strip forever, or at least until he blows his knee out in a scrimmage a year from now and starts hanging awkwardly around Milford again. In panel two, Coach Kaz is the only person on the field wearing sunglasses, proclaiming his intention to let the whinges of his student-athletes blow harmlessly past him like “The Ride of the Valkyries” in the classic Maxell tape commercial. And in the final panel, a Lady Mudlark soccer player is experiencing one of the most valuable lessons that high school athletics has to offer: a keen insight into one’s own essential mediocrity.

Six Chix, 9/9/16

Shoutout to Six Chix for really committing to a strip gag where two vultures hang around talking about how much they love eating rotting animal carcasses! What really impresses me is that the artist gave that dead dog or whatever it is a face. Just two little closed eyes, but still, it crosses the line from “dead thing in the abstract” to “a creature that once lived and loved but then got hit by a car or maybe died of exposure and now its rotting corpse is a delicacy for these carrion-eaters to devour,” which, just to reiterate, is a joke that we’re expected to laugh at.

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Dennis the Menace, 9/2/16

I like that Dennis isn’t sitting in his usual rocking chair, but standing up, ramrod straight. And he’s got his arms folded defiantly across his chest. This isn’t him meekly accepting his punishment; this is a menacing act of civil disobedience. STAY STRONG, DENNIS.

Six Chix, 9/2/16

I was going to say that if you’d heard of “man buns” and decided to do a comic about them, you should probably do at least a quick Google Image Search to make sure you know what they look like, but I guess if you’re determined to do a comic where the punchline is “man buns look like pug tails,” it’s probably in your best interest not to.

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Six Chix, 9/1/16

There are 67 days left until the U.S. presidential election, and one of the few things I’ve been thankful for is that there haven’t really been any politics-related blowups in the comments of my site yet. I’m actually not against political discussion per se, but I like to think that my comment section is the last actually good comment section left on the Internet, and that’s because people don’t get into fights there, and if there’s one thing that causes people to get into fights, it’s politics. So maybe steer clear? For more guidance, please see the posting and discussion policies, which basically boil down to, “Don’t start fights with people, and don’t be a dick,” and know that I will ban people on the slightest provocation, I don’t even care. I used to give more leeway on this, but now that we all have access to a million different social media sites on which to fight about politics, I don’t feel like people have even the slightest need to do it here, so, sorry, but not sorry, don’t do it.

I’m actually a fairly political person myself (you wanna hear me make jokes about politics? come to Twitter!), but I try to avoid jokes specifically about electoral politics here precisely to avoid getting people riled up. I also try to avoid non-specific jokes because then you get into fairly toothless “ha ha, the election, it is bad” territory like today’s Six Chix. But honestly, what really bothers me terribly about this strip is that the labelling: it makes it look like the ice bag is the headache, and that you’re causing the headache by putting it on your head. Which, since most people today have never actually seen one of those bags outside of an old movie or TV show, maybe that’s … how the artist thinks headaches work? That’s not how they work, Six Chix!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/1/16

I’m having a really hard time following the stream of thought in today’s Snuffy Smith. My best guess is that the Barlows, with whom the Smifs are engaged in a generations-long feud, stole Bessie. Loweezy and Snuffy talk about this in code: she wants Li’l Tater to remain innocent just a little longer, but Snuffy knows that in Hootin’ Holler, disputes over property are settled in blood, and the sooner a Smif learns that, the better.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/1/16

This is the part of a new Funkyverse descent into misery where I stop resisting and just enjoy the fresh pain the plot is visiting upon longtime characters. In that spirit, I’ll say that I’m very pleased that Bull’s abortive, failed attempt to live out his greatest dream also contributed to the condition that, years later, would destroy his mind before killing him outright.