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Gil Thorp, 8/29/11

Call it foolish optimism if you must, but despite years of decidedly non-wacky Gil Thorp plots, my heart races a bit as each new season dawns, as I anticipate some glorious insanity to come. If I’m interpreting the first two panels correctly, I may be in luck: it appears that a pair of space aliens have arrived in Milford, determined to infiltrate the hu-man society via the high school athletics activity that seems so important to the Earth dwellers. These beings have chosen the name “Abro,” which is almost but not quite like one that humans would use. “Off to the junior high school?” asks the mother-unit, her use of definite articles just a smidge off. “Come back before the cows come home!” she adds, her use of folksy sayings significantly wider from the mark. “What cows?” asks her “son” “Brody,” who’s too busy fishing his football from the Plaything Materializer to grapple with the niceties of the locals’ English.

Meanwhile (or as the narration box would have it, “while”) at Gil’s, some poor kid who’s come looking for advice and mentorship has worn out his welcome. “Of course you have to go, Mark. Stop apologizing! Seriously, just get the fuck out.”

Slylock Fox, 8/29/11

And the best candidate for the long undersea mission is … the panda? Because he doesn’t mind loneliness? How about, oh, I don’t know, the damn fish? The Ocean Research Institute could save an awful lot of money on supplies if it hired a researcher who doesn’t require a separate oxygen tank. “Please, pick me!” the fish begs with its eyes. “Or at least throw me back in the water! For the love of God, I’m suffocating out here!”

Crankshaft, 8/29/11

As predicted, “Special Collectors Edition Crankshaft: Cayla’s Origin Revealed!” has in fact revealed the origin of Cayla’s baffling attraction to Les: She accidentally killed someone during a softball game, and, wracked by guilt as a result, came to believe that she doesn’t deserve any kind of happiness in life.

Narration box from Judge Parker, 8/29/11

This is pretty much the most believable narration box in a soap opera strip that I’ve seen. I too would be surprised to hear that someone likes the idea of buying a motor home!

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/28/11

There are a number of things that I find dubious and hilarious about today’s Slylock Fox mystery, chief among them being Slylock’s withering and unwarranted contempt for Count Weirdly’s mad science skills. “Even if Weirdly did have a working time machine”? You mean, like the working time machine you yourself used to journey back to the Cretaceous Era? Oh, sure, when you get a jones to go look at some dinosaurs, you’re all like, “Hey, Count, we’re buds, right,” but when other people are around it’s more like “Whatever, you’re guilty and probably your time machine doesn’t even work, pssht.” What a user!

Plus, with Weirdly in command of a device that can interfere with the very timeline, Slylock’s smug array of historical facts are completely meaningless. Sure, Thomas Edison didn’t make the world’s first phone call … in our universe. But what would keep the crazed Count from traveling to the 1870s and feeding young Thomas Edison information about telephony, to ensure that this important invention would be born here in USA America and not cooked up by some beardy Scot lurking on Canadian soil?

More to the point, seeing as Weirdly is at the controls of a time machine, he automatically has a perfect alibi for everything. He could have easily burned Farmer Bear’s crops 10 minutes ago, spent a leisurely year or so in the 1700s hanging out with Voltaire, then returned to the present instant. Basically, he now has unstoppable powers and Slylock’s ratiocinating will be wholly incapable of stopping him, so we should all adjust ourselves to life on Planet Weirdly pretty quickly if we know what’s good for us.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/11

Seeing that Hootin’ Holler is completely cut off from the mainstream of American cultural and economic life, I’m saddened to discover that it’s somehow still been thoroughly infiltrated by the fad diet industry. Still, I kind of like the way Loweezy invites poor Lureen inside to break the news to her in private that there’s no quick route to weight loss. She even takes care to close the door behind her, something that probably takes a bit of effort, as the first panel in the second row clearly indicates that it’s not attached to the house via any sort of fancy flatlander hinges.

Judge Parker, 8/28/11

Ha ha, sure, Sam and Abbey will just head out on a journey in their luxurious Sex Winnebago, leaving the groundskeeper or whoever in charge of their 14-year-old daughter, who’s announced her plan to win some pasty-face boy’s love by any means necessary. What could possibly go wrong?

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Mark Trail, 8/13/11

Oh, that Bill Ellis! He’s been told repeatedly by Woods and Wildlife’s financially beleaguered parent corporation that subscription numbers and ad rates are falling, so for God’s sake get some material in the magazine that women won’t find actively abhorrent, but he doesn’t actually respect women or know what they want, so it always goes horribly awry. He once famously sent Kelly on an assignment to an “outdoor fashion show”; now he hasn’t even gotten to whatever insulting proposition he has for her before interrupting himself to take a phone call. “Sorry, Kelly, you’ll have to excuse me, this might be someone with a penis!”

Oh also COMICAL ETHNIC JOHNNY MALOTTE AND SEXY TROUBLESOME KELLY WELLY ARE GOING TO BE IN THE SAME STORYLINE THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWEEEESSSSOMMMMEEEE

Apartment 3-G, 8/13/11

So I knew this woman once who briefly worked as a cop, and one of the things you get stuck doing if you are a female cop with very little seniority is pretending to be a prostitute in sting operations to arrest johns. And one thing that happens while you’re doing this is that you meet and chat with actual prostitutes, and you get some great stories to pass on to later acquaintances. For example: one woman had this regular customer who paid her well to spend half an hour in a bathtub full of ice, then come out and lie completely motionless and silent on the bed while he had sex with her, so he could indulge in his necrophilia without actually violating a dead body. This is a story that for obvious reasons has stuck with me, so while I assume that this series of “oh gosh, it’s so hot in New York, wouldn’t a cool bath be erotic” strips in A3G were written during one of this year’s several soul-crushing heatwaves, you’ll forgive me if I don’t find them sexy.

Slylock Fox, 8/13/11

Every once in a while Slylock Fox offers us a flashback glimpse of apocalyptic war in which the animals finally decided that enough was enough and seized control of the planet from the humans, creating the animal-ruled society we see in most of the strips. Today’s entry shows up one of the mopping-up actions of that genocidal conflict, and you can see that, despite the enthusiasm of the smaller creatures looking on, at least one bear has grown weary of the killing. “Ho, hum, another pair of wild hairless apes who haven’t figured out yet that we’ve mastered tool use. I guess I’ll just climb this ladder and disembowel them as they beg for their lives. Hasn’t our mission been accomplished? When will I be able to return to my mate and cubs back at my cave?”