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Slylock Fox, 7/2/22

I was going to joke about Slylock being extremely high here but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, he is an honorable fox lawman (lawfox?) and simply would never abuse illegal substances for some fleeting artificial pleasure. No, he’s sitting there completely alone staring wide-eyed into the fire, experiencing the most potent natural buzz a sapient being can: knowing that he has helped bring the full, crushing power of the state down on any and all who dare to transgress against it in even the smallest ways.

Blondie, 7/2/22

You know, I speculate a lot on here about the weird relationship between Dagwood and Elmo. But what’s the relationship between Elmo and Blondie like? Well, it looks pretty wholesome, it turns out!

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Gil Thorp, 6/27/22

It’s that time of year again: the time when the baseball season plot keeps rolling ahead in Gil Thorp and you look at the calendar and think “Uh, hey, isn’t school over for the year … pretty much everywhere in the country? Shouldn’t some of these kids have graduated by now?” Instead, we have at least a week left until we get the possibility of a wacky summer storyline, and I guess we need that week to get Marty Moon involved in this somehow. He’s been MIA for months, but now that a questionable Coach Thorp coaching decision has resulted in a media circus (read: one guy with a camera), Marty’s hoping to cash in on that (read: he’s hoping whoever’s filming this will record some b-roll of him doing play-by-play inside his wooden crate that he can use on the page for the GoFundMe campaign he’s launching to buy a bigger crate).

Slylock Fox, 6/27/22

The old Hayes Code had strict rules about depicting criminals as enjoying the fruits of their ill deeds, and today’s Slylock Fox really shows why. Look at Shady Shrew! Who wouldn’t want to live this lifestyle: just chilling out, cooling off your feet in a swift-moving river that appears to be not terribly polluted despite being only a few feet from a major thoroughfare, enjoying a book, an ice-cold soda pop, and a couple of (ALLEGEDLY) stolen chocolate bars. This is what being “shady” gets you, and yet being an upstanding citizen and grocery clerk just results in you being stone cold furious all day. I know which option I’d pick!

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Gil Thorp, 6/6/22

Look, folks, I’ve never claimed to be particularly “baseball savvy,” so I apologize for failing to follow Saturday’s disjointed jargon about Ryne Duren. (Just as a side note, faithful reader/Twitter follower Windier E. Megatons pointed out that Ryne Duren is a classic guy for the Let’s Remember Some Guys genre of sport talk, which you’d think Gil Thorp would engage in more often.) Apparently the point was not that “You should get better glasses, like Ryne Duren did” but rather that “Now that your opponents know your vision is poor, you should ham it up and make it seem like you have very little control, like Ryne Duren did, so that they’re terrified you’re going to ‘accidentally’ murder them with a fastball to the face, something that a coach at the high school level would definitely just let happen.” Remember, kids, using a series of elaborate coded signals to compensate for your disability is the pusillanimous tactic of an effeminate coward and violates the rules of baseball. But pretending to be a true psycho/major legal liability for your school district? That’s all the game, fellas.

Slylock Fox, 6/6/22

A thing that I have noticed in my many years of Slylock Fox studies is that a great many of the “mysteries” simply involve a sapient animal who has been caught in some wrongdoing offering a transparently false alibi that Slylock easily sees through. Today it occurs to me that one of the things that distinguishes humans from (present-day) animals is our ability to imagine counterfactuals: ways that events could have, but did not, play out, or, alternately, explanations that we know to be false for actual events. Perhaps part of the great Animalpocalypse was the non-humans’ sudden ability to dream up counterfactuals of their own, but being so new to them, they find them difficult to refute. Only Slylock, one of the wisest of the new breed of animals, is able to keep is bearings on reality in this brave new world.

Pardon My Planet, 6/6/22

The comics pages are a small-c conservative institution heavily invested traditional institutions like the nuclear family. Only truly radical strips like Pardon My Planet are willing to speak the unpopular truth: raising children is exactly like your soul being condemned for your sins and tortured forever, in hell.