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Shoe, 9/18/18

OK, so, see, if Roz’s boyfriend collected trash, “The Garbageman” wouldn’t be a nickname; it would be a straightforward description of his job. Like “garbagemen” is definitely a word we use to describe sanitation workers, in American English! Though I guess I’m assuming Shoe is using “collecting” here in the professional sense. Maybe he thinks Roz is dating a hoarder, and is trying to be as cruel to her as possible about it! Jokes on him, it seems: in fact, she’s dating one of his fellow newspapermen — and one who doesn’t believe in the pious niceties of bourgeois, “respectable” journalism! Those are some well earned goggle eyes of horror.

Slylock Fox, 9/18/18

So dad is wearing … hairpants? Like a hairshirt, but pants? Isn’t parenting a child who he obviously holds in contempt self-punishment enough?

Gil Thorp, 9/18/18

Ugh, once again football season gets underway without the annual bonfire, a tradition that dates at least back to 2007 but seems to have abruptly ended after the 2015 season. I for one would’ve loved an entire wacky summer storyline about how the school board’s insurance company finally broke it to the athletic department that giant bonfires are incredibly dangerous and they can’t have them anymore, because it would’ve given Gil a chance to be hilariously indignant, would’ve probably ended in some laughable compromise, and would’ve at least acknowledged that this annual tradition stopped happening for some reason. There’s a slim chance that we’ll get a true bonfire before the first home game, but until then I’m going console myself that the jagged white shapes in the background of panel two are billowing waves of smoke rising into the sky from Milford itself, miles away from Oakwood and in the process of being burned to the ground in an orgy of Mudlark-supporting.

Spider-Man, 9/18/18

Ha ha! They were holograms all along! Just like we all figured! The old hologram trick! A classic bit.

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Slylock Fox, 9/3/18

It’s hard to deny that the new animal regime of which Slylock is the enforcer has a human problem. Humans make up a vanishingly tiny portion of post-animalpocalypse Earth’s sapient population, but it seems like Slylock is constantly being called on to deal with their petty crimes and disputes. Of course, the fact that humans are a despised, impoverished minority who just lost what must have been a bloody and devastating war to the regime has nothing to do with this, so the animals in their benevolence have decided to confine the humans to a beautiful rural area along with the few animals who never made the Change, where they can steal each other’s omelettes in relative peace.

Gil Thorp, 9/3/18

It’s time for the Gil Thorp fall storyline, and the Gil Thorp fall storyline is about insufferable cineastes. Remember a few years back when the local tattoo parlor used bootleg DVDs as a loss leader, except the DVDs turned out not to be bootleg after all? Well, by making cinematic entertainment seem “edgy” and “cool,” that long-departed tattooist planted the virus of cinematic appreciation in the minds of the local youth, and now the kids all have home theaters and 2001 posters and obsessions with mid-’90s indie films and whatnot. I desperately hope we see each and everyone one of these children get repeatedly stuffed into lockers by the football team, who just want to bring pride to the community by tackling people and don’t want to get drawn into tedious arguments about auteur theory.

Dick Tracy, 9/3/18

Hey buddy! I know when you got into the drug-dealing game someone probably said “this stuff sells itself!” but that’s a bit of an exaggeration. You have to at least tell the kids that you’re selling drugs before they’ll buy it. You can’t just lean against a pole thought-ballooning about it!

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/20/18

Time has, it goes without saying, not been kind to the core cast of Funky Winkerbean, the ones who were all in high school in the original, carefree iteration of the strip, and even though they look extremely wizened and beaten down, I guess they’re supposed to be at the oldest end of Gen X, now in their early 50s. This puts them squarely in what’s being called the “sandwich generation”: forced to simultaneously care for both their belligerent and confused Greatest Generation parents and their smarmy, unlikeable Millennial children. You’d feel bad for Funky and his cohort if not for the fact that they themselves are also completely and utterly insufferable.

Mark Trail, 8/20/18

Hmm, Rusty, did you ever think that maybe Becky is selling the copies on the black market as an elaborate sting operation to catch the artifact-rustlers who have been plaguing the Yucatan for far too long? I mean, she’s not, of course, because everyone in Mark Trail is exactly as villainous as they appear, but still! Anyway, I’m enjoying the vision of Becky spending years making and discarding two-dimensional copies by just jamming them into a photocopier, shaking her head and waiting for the day when technology finally catches up with her criminal ambitions.

Slylock Fox, 8/20/18

It’s bad enough that the animals rose up and largely exterminated humanity and then moved into our cities and took over our civilization as if it were theirs. But now they’re erasing our history, producing films that imply Cleopatra and her subjects were something other than full-blooded H. sapiens. I know casting minority actors isn’t always “convenient” for directors who have a core set of performers they usually work with, but I’m sure that Slick Smitty is available and more than willing to wear a wig.

Pluggers, 8/20/18

Oh no, I know this movie is nearly 20 years old and this point but it’s still avant-garde weirdness and pluggers will not be able to handle it. Abort, plugger, abort! Reruns of Matlock are on all afternoon, why not settle in for them instead