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Slylock Fox, 6/2/11

This is definitely one of the more aggressively bonkers things we’ve seen in the Island of Dr. Moreau meets Encyclopedia Brown world of Slylock Fox in some time. One of the strip’s lower-level police-dogs has harnessed an elephant with an S&M collar and is using him to drag a shark in a tank up to a motley gaggle of animals. I’m not exactly whether the beasts at the right end of the panel are supposed to be sentient or not, but they look extremely dubious about the presence of this shark, probably assuming that one or more of them is about to become its food. I’m guessing that before the editors forced a last-minute change to this “letter T” business, the original question was “What the fuck is going on here, exactly? Anyone?”

Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/11

The second of Les’s paramours has declared love for him in as many weeks, and in both cases Les responded as any man would: with emotionless silence. Cayla, of course, is the more together of his two hapless not-girlfriends, so all she did was dump him and stalk off in a huff. Since Susan tried to kill herself the last time Les rejected her love (back when she was his student, in high school), the next two days should be extra-cheery, as Les watches the carnage in detached befuddlement. “Unring a bell” is generally used in legal contexts, when jurors learn information that should not have come out in a trial, so hopefully this presages a killing spree to come.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/2/11

It appears that the Vikings have plundered the coasts of Britain and the Frankish Kingdom so throughly as to have snuffed out the brief Carolingian Renaissance, and their depredations have now brought them to the Mediterranean, where they’ve been savagely destroying the last remains of classical civilization. The legacy of Roman literacy must have already been wiped out by the time Hagar’s war-band got to Italy, presumably by terrifying fires that mindlessly consumed the libraries and monasteries, so he had to settle for just enslaving one of the locals.

Apartment 3-G, 6/2/11

This Tommie plot has meandered along aimlessly for way too long, but I’ll be willing to forgive a lot if it ends with Margo gradually teaching Tommie about hard drugs.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/2/11

Ack! I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the doings in Rex Morgan, M.D.! Long story short: the evil strip club owners lured Dex to a hotel where they’re holding him captive, and now they’re planning to hire a safecracker to break into the Morgans’ clinic and steal the winning lottery ticket. Dex has the bad fortune of being held in the only hotel in America where the doors to the room can only be locked and unlocked from the outside; fortunately, though, his captors made the mistake of locking him in the only room in the hotel with a window.

Slylock Fox, 5/2/11

Those tiny prey mammals are right to look nervous. Once the predators find them guilty of trumped-up charges based on circumstantial evidence, they’ll be sentenced to immediate death by devouring. All the while, Max Mouse stands guard at the door, the Uncle Tom.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/2/11

The antique that Jamaal is holding panel three is a perfect metaphor for both Herb and Jamaal, since it’s bizarrely shaped and serves no apparent purpose.

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Slylock Fox, 4/22/11

Everyone knows that the quickest way to make something adorable and kid-friendly is to make a li’l child version of it; this is the logic that produced Muppet Babies and Animaniacs, to great success. Still, when you’re dealing with a mummified corpse reanimated via the ancient magic that still lingers in some musty tomb, a child version seems less cute than terrifying and soul-crushingly sad. Look, the little damned soul is about to taste its first dessert since he died sometime during Egypt’s 19th Dynasty! Too bad his tongue is going to crumble to dust in his mouth the moment it touches that ice cream.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/22/11

Ha ha, yes, I’m always up for a good joke about Mary Worth showing off her vagina, but still … still, this is kind of the moment when you realize, “Wow, I don’t think the people at the syndicate are actually reading the comics anymore before they just ship them off to America’s few remaining newspapers,” what with jokes that only make sense in the context of, “Hey, remember that movie in the ’90s, where you saw that lady’s vagina?”

Pluggers, 4/22/11

Pluggers are too respectful to call their teachers by their first name, but never could get their head around all these crazy ethnic names they have these days, like “Van Pelt” or whatever Dutch craziness.