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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/15/10

Poor Slylock! He’s an expert at fancy deduction and ratiocination, and a savant at picking out seemingly insignificant details from a crime scene that may be important, but it appears he’s not cut out for the rough and tumble of real crime-fighting. For instance, some member of the strip’s rogues gallery — Harry Ape? Slick Smitty? Reeky Rat? — has trashed Slylock’s home, sending a message that he’s not safe anywhere. And yet all Sly can do is obsessively try to figure out the exact time when this act of intimidation took place. Do you think whatever thug wakes you up tomorrow with a well-placed fist to the snout is going to be impressed by this, detective? You’re officially in over your head.

Apartment 3-G, 8/15/10

Oh, dear, we appear to have reached the point in the storyline that I most feared, when the makeover would reveal the limitations of Frank Bolle’s ability or willingness to depict clothes worn by human females in the year 2010. The dress Margo is holding up in panel four would in fact make Lu Ann look old, and not cute, if by “old” we mean “a reanimated zombie of a woman from the 1910s in her burial dress.” And speaking of age, Tommie’s dress in the final panel looks more to me like “overdramatic prom dress” than “sophisticated thirtysomething professional.” At least her facial expression of forced sultriness barely masking profound discomfort is pretty accurate.

Blondie, 8/15/10

Here again is an instance of a Sunday strip whose top row of throwaway panels changes the narrative’s entire complexion. In those papers where the strip appears without the throwaway panels, it’s just a dumb joke about Dagwood getting a bowling ball stuck on his hand. With the throwaway panels, it’s a poignant story about a man whose best friend doesn’t remember his birthday, and tries to make up for it by just giving him some bowling ball he found in his basement, the finger holes clearly drilled for somebody else.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/25/10

It seems my earlier suspicions — that this strip’s implacable torment has shifted from Les to Funky — has now been confirmed. Thus Les’s sheepish smirk in the final panel: he knows that every car accident or cancer diagnosis Funky is involved in means one less pregnant daughter or dead spouse for him. Holly is grinning like a maniac mostly because she knows Funky will be dead soon, and then she’ll be free, free.

Family Circus, 7/25/10

I think my favorite of the “Ma Keane is irritated by her children” panels here is the one at the lower right. In most of the other ones, she’s just intervening in momentary crises so as to prevent her arrest for child neglect and/or public nudity ordinances. But it’s when she’s forced to play some stupid ball-toss game with her feeble little daughter that the rage lines really begin to radiate from her head. “Damn it,” she thinks, “Does she never get bored with this inanity? I’ve been trying to work my way through this damn novel for the last eight years!”

Slylock Fox, 7/25/10

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen Slylock mediate in a human vs. human dispute. It goes to show how low the status of H. sapiens has fallen in this nightmare world of bipedal talking animals that the Josh family would be willing to turn to a canid law enforcement. If I were Slick Smitty, my defense would be that I was trying to protect the boy’s delicate mental health, as waking up every morning to find that piggy bank grinning at you like that is a guarantee of nightmares and insanity.

Meanwhile, in the six differences, a little boy has extorted some free cake out of the local diner by bashing one of the counter’s stools with a baseball bat. “Hand over the cake or this clown in the hat is next,” he growls.

Beetle Bailey, 7/25/10

As part of its atonement for years of making light of sexual harassment, Beetle Bailey has begun putting out a series of PSA pamphlets on social and relationship issues. This one is called “How to tell when you’re in an abusive relationship.”

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Apartment 3-G, 7/10/10

OMG YOU GUYS TRIPLE MAKEOVER! At long last, the A3G girls will be returned to their sexy, sexy glory days, after they are transformed into such visions of fashion-forwardness as … uh, Kat and Kitty here.

Seriously, this would actually be a pretty intriguing way to transition to a new artist, one with a sexier, more modern style. But I can’t find any information about such a shift of personnel online. Surely King Features would at least put a press release out about it, right? Or just hand-deliver it to me, since my blog is probably the only “media outlet” that would care?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/10/10

Aw, it looks like Funky isn’t dead or traveling through time to harass his younger self after all, just hallucinating from the agony of his body being shattered in a car wreck. “You’re going to be okay, buddy,” the paramedic says, knowing that in Westview, having your deluded mind living out fantasies within your mangled physical form is as “okay” as it gets.

Slylock Fox, 7/10/10

I’m a non-driver and a firm advocate for public transit, but even I will admit that taking the bus reduces’s one’s pimp-cred considerably.