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Slylock Fox, 5/3/10

Good lord, what sort of grim PSA is this? “Forest animals who would have normally gone off to their sweet reward in Death’s friendly bosom must now live on for decades inside their broken, shattered mortal shells, thanks to the tyrannical Forest Government and its so-called public safety legislation!” Of particular note are the expressions on the faces of our paramedics; the haunted eyes and spontaneous perspiration are presumably a horrified reaction not to the bear’s mild head injury, but to the condition of whatever poor beast is still trapped in that car. (Sorry, colorists: you can’t convince me that the fluid pooling around the overturned vehicle is motor oil.) Once the the jaws of life extract the mangled form of the gorilla or crane or what have you, the poor soul will have years in a hospital ward getting nutrition through a straw to look forward to, rather than Heaven. Thanks a lot, seat belts!

While the dull-eyed pink bunny is clearly just a run-of-the-mill accident gawker, I’m betting that dog in the suit is a lawyer with a pain and suffering case on his mind.

Mary Worth, 5/3/10

I hate to actually agree with Mary for once, but … has Bonnie actually heard from Ernie that he’s staying away from her neatly stacked clutter? I mean, she’s just narcissistically assuming that his decision-making is all about her. Maybe he just met some other woman during his business trip and has fallen in love and run off! Or, maybe he wasn’t wearing his seat belt and was killed in a terrible car accident, and right now his corpse is waiting unclaimed in some far-off morgue, just because Bonnie was too full of self-loathing to make some phone calls! Won’t she feel bad then, hmmm?

Say, you know what could really soothe those bad feelings? A little retail therapy, if you know what I mean!

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Slylock Fox, 4/4/10

I’m actually very pleased to read in the solution that our sassy lion hairdresser has been hypnotized, rather than just being an accessory to the crime. Though if we want any more proof of that, we need only check out Wanda’s hair, which is no better styled than it was when last we saw it. I’m sure he could do better if he had more time to work on her!

I’m also charmed to see that his supply cabinet contains a femur bone among all the hair-styling products. He is a lion hairdresser, after all!

Meanwhile, I don’t think “very happy” even begins to cover the severe chemical imbalance going on the brain of that little boy in the How To Draw feature at the bottom of the page.

Judge Parker, 4/4/10

Have you all been enjoying Luann’s “Mrs. Degroot is uncomfortable because someone wants to have sex with her adult son?” Then get ready for “Sam is achieving bug-eyed levels of discomfort because literally everyone wants to have sex with his adult daughter!”

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Mary Worth, 3/30/10

Longtime readers know that, while I may dabble with your Luanns and your Blondies, my heart belongs to Mary Worth above all. Thus, the beginning of any new storyline in this strip is a moment of great giddy excitement for me, even though “Wilbur meets his bastard not-son” will be hard to follow up. So far, we’ve gotten Mary foisting her friendship onto a pair of standoffish neighbors with her patented brand of hospitality. (I’m referring specifically to Patent No. 3087330, “System and method for establishing interpersonal relationships via taupe, oblong food-like products.”)

Bonnie and Ernie seem happy enough in panel one, contemplating the “nice spread,” the hilarity of the constituent shapes and colors of which I cannot emphasize enough. Who wouldn’t be all smiles when confronted with a big bowl of whipped potatoes, a tray of whipped sweet potatoes, a bowl of steaming whole unpeeled potatoes, another square tray of unpeeled potatoes, a tiny square tray of something white (eggs?), and a bowl of some mushed up vegetable of some sort? Mmm mmm good! But in panel two everyone’s facial expression has suddenly taken a turn for the grave, as if “getting to know [other humans] better” is something Bonnie and Ernie simply don’t do. Why? What terrible secret do they hide? This is why Mary Worth is so exciting! Because someday, in the next six to ten weeks, we’ll find out, and it will be blander than we can possibly imagine!

One sort of delicate point that I feel compelled to bring up is that Mary’s new friends are both pretty profoundly unattractive, even by the standards of a feature in which ol’ cross-eyes is the resident beauty. Since this strip is about as subtle as a frying pan beating you about the head and neck, forever, obviously their appearance reflects badly on their character; they’re no doubt going to be revealed to be perverts or scam artists, or monsters pieced together from human corpses and reanimated by a crazed scientist eager to play God.

Hi and Lois, 3/30/10

It’s all too appropriate that our blue-haired librarian is wearing a pink scarf. Thanks for destroying everything that’s good in the world with your terrible library, Fidel Trotsky-Tsung!

Spider-Man, 3/30/10

“And let’s hear it for lounging around the house in your underwear and high heels! And for cowardice! Sweet, sweet cowardice!”

Slylock Fox, 3/30/10

In panel one, a delightful band of puppies wants nothing more than to frolic and play with this laughing child. In panel two, the lad is about to be torn limb from limb by a vicious pack of feral dogs.