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Slylock Fox, 7/9/12

Because my brain doesn’t work the way one might want it to, I have a terrible time remembering my family’s birthdays without programming them into my phone’s calendar, but upon reading this strip I instantly remembered that it was the not the first Slylock Fox whose solution revolved around anteater toothlessness. At least this one’s an actual anteater! In a world of anthropomorphic animals, many of which are carnivores, I expect Slylock needs to resolve exactly this kind of dispute relatively frequently. “Waah, the birds ate my pet worms! Waaah, Cassandra Cat ate my sidekick!” This is what comes of overthrowing humanity, animal-rabble! Not the eating of other animals of course, but the ultimately unfulfillable sense that there ought to be some kind of justice to how it happens.

Shoe, 7/9/12

Shoe generally has its characters wildly overreact to punchlines with goggle eyes of horror, which makes the Perfesser’s numb, heavy-lidded stare in the second panel here all the sadder. “Yeah, I guess I should have expected that my attempt at serious emotional intimacy with a good friend — and my attempt to understand how other people find fulfillment in romantic relationships, something I’ve tried and failed at all my life — would be deflected with a dumb joke about HAW HAW AGING STRIKES TERROR INTO WOMEN’S HEARTS. Welp, back to silently dying inside!”

Spider-Man, 7/9/12

Speaking of facial expressions, it should have been obvious to everyone that Clown-9 is a crazed maniac bent on revenge against everyone who’s ever wronged him. Thus, I’m assuming that MJ’s look of shock in panel three is not a reaction to Peter’s suggestion that she might be on the target list, but is rather justified horror at the image in panel two of Peter making a sullen, hideous kissyface and jabbing a chunk of blackened meat at his lower lip.

Apartment 3-G, 7/9/12

I feel like I’ve been spending too much time dwelling on the weirdly off material in this storyline about attitudes towards and medical knowledge about childbirth, and not enough time discussing the fact that Tommie, Scott, and Nina are all wearing identical white shirts. So, Tommie, Scott, and Nina are wearing identical white shirts, everybody! Are they in a cult? Probably yes — specifically, a cult that practices human sacrifice via botched home births.

Crankshaft, 7/9/12

“Used to be you could make a gal cry by showing her your wang whenever you felt like it! Now you’ve gotta have one of them telephones you carry around with you, I guess.”

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Slylock Fox, 6/25/12

One of the great strengths of Slylock Fox is its ability to create little self-contained stories with only a single panel and a few sentences; still, I think today’s installment could have used a bit more fleshing out, particularly when it comes to how Benny Beaver (aka the “Toothy Tumbler,” a nickname he presumably only earned at this precise moment) came to just fall out of a plane without a parachute. More to the point, why is he taking a flight in tiny airplane with Max and Sly in the first place? We all know that Slylock’s world is a dictatorship where the power of police is not restrained by any kind of independent judiciary, so my first instinct was that Benny was a political dissident that Slylock was eliminating Argentine junta-style, but Slylock’s showy rescue obviously eliminates this possibility. Unless it’s elaborate theater, an attempt (one that Slylock will deliberately botch) to show that he tried his best to rescue the clumsy water-rodent, despite Benny’s known subversive attitudes towards the benevolent Slylockian state? Anyway, since Max appears to have been left alone in the airplane — an airplane with controls that he is far too tiny to operate properly — Slylock may be taking care of several of his rodent problems at once here.

Blondie, 6/25/12

I would find this clerk’s befuddlement more believable were it not for the fact that he’s working in some kind of vintage electronics store, what with the countertop ad for a flip-phone with an antenna and the clearly visible Apple Newton and handheld VHS cameras in the display case.

Archie, 6/25/12

I keep meaning to tell y’all: If you are interested in some of the really quite fetching clothing designs that have appeared in Archie Comics over the years, you owe it to yourself to check out the Betty and Veronica Fashions Tumblr. I bring it up now because if there were some kind of evil mirror-universe version of this Tumblr that focused on hideous, ill-drawn outfits from the mid-’90s reruns in the Archie newspaper strip, Reggie would totally have earned a place in it by wearing whatever the hell it is he has on here.

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Spider-Man, 6/17/12

You get to a point with these Newspaper Spider-Man villains where you just give up on them ever being actually fearsome and embrace their camp value. Thus I was genuinely delighted to see that Clown-9, in addition to being a goofy dope who drives a duck car and thinks a high-powered squirt gun is threatening and has no higher ambitions of evil than disrupting a Broadway play, also thinks “not” jokes are funny.

Still, the final panel worries me, delightful as it is to see “SPIDEY: 0” written out explicitly. Is Clown-9 suddenly transforming from a lovable weirdo into something truly terrifying? Is he gaining super-strength, Hulk-style? Is he unveiling some kind of super-weapon? Is he renouncing “not” jokes, which Spidey loves almost as much as he does?

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/17/12

Whoops, sorry about the permanent injury you suffered from being dragged around by the ears, wholly innocent rabbit! I guess the lesson here is that you shouldn’t act twitchy around cops in Slylock’s thuggish police state.