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B.C., 6/13/11

You know, as much as I rail against the practice of keeping the same 30 or so comic strips in every newspaper in America, despite the deaths of their creators, I do understand why people like having them around. There’s something tremendously comforting in seeing the same characters, day after day, year after year, doing the same things. You get so accustomed to their rhythms that you pretty much stop questioning the strip’s visual conventions, even those conventions were laid down years before you started reading and you’re never quite sure where they came from in the first place.

Take the clothes that the cavemen of B.C. wear, for instance. I guess they’re supposed to be kind of a loincloth thing? At one point they involved a shoulder strap of some sort, but now they’re just a black strip around the waist area. Johnny Hart no doubt came up with the character design fairly early in the strip run and then promptly stopped thinking about it. However, now his grandson is in charge and is playing around with things, which involves forcing us to contemplate the fact that the cavemen’s dangly bit are on full display under these “suits,” which, thanks a lot, I think I’d like to go back to the unchanging nostalgia now.

Gil Thorp, 6/13/11

Ha ha, look at how angry Gil is in panel two! He may not have given a crap when sinister Hobart threatened to slash school budgets and lay off most of his co-workers, but when people start talking about his drinking problem and his inappropriate fraternization with students, well, that’s when things get ugly.

Slylock Fox, 6/13/11

This is pretty much one of the most hilariously depressing Slylock Foxes ever. “Sorry Max, your idea is flawed due to your fundamental inability to grasp basic thermodynamics. What? No, I don’t have a better idea. All these candles are going to melt and and this poor lady is going to go bankrupt! Well, we really should be going.”

Marvin, 6/13/11

While I can’t blame Marvin’s family for turning to illegal drugs to deal with the fact that they’re related to Marvin, I’d have guessed that they’d go for alcohol or other depressants, which would dull the pain if only temporarily. But Jeff clearly finds that coke or speed or something along those lines helps him cope, and who am I to judge?

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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.