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Blondie, 10/8/18

If there’s any single ingredient we associate with Italian food like delicious lasagna, it’s tomato sauce, so it’s kind of ironic for the purposes of today’s joke that tomatoes are one of the plants that went from the Americas to Europe in the Columbian exchange. All that mass-produced Italian food, slathered in red sauce and dropped under the heat lamps on the buffet of some terrible gigantic cruise ship, would be entirely foreign to poor Columbus, though certainly wouldn’t be the thing that most left him unmoored and terrified by changes in technologies and social attitudes. Good luck, Chris! And though he’s a problematic historical figure, I think Dagwood could use some of his yen for exploring the unknown, as he’s apparently happy to just eat canned lasagna at Lou’s, the only lunch spot he ever goes to, rather than driving the extra five minutes to the Olive Garden that’s inevitably at the next strip mall over.

Slylock Fox, 10/8/18

Ugh, Slylock, water-powered interstellar travel is within your grasp! Finally, you and your compatriots will surpass the human civilization that you’ve been mindlessly imitating ever since you overthrew it! You don’t just hand over the ice and let them leave! And if your animal scientists aren’t smart enough to figure out how this alien craft works, this is the moment where you show up at the prison where they’re holding Count Weirdly and make a deal with the devil.

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Six Chix, 10/7/18

I get what this comic is going for here, I really do, but part of my job (“job”) as the proprietor and namesake of the Comics Curmudgeon is to spend more time than usual thinking about the premises of comic strips, and my friends, when you do that with this one it starts to get dark. Like, sure, it seems that your dog is sitting in your living room, watching squirrels scamper around outside for entertainment, and maybe at some level that’s true. But when you, a human, watch acrobats or lion tamers, you do it out of appreciation of their skills, and maybe get a thrill from imagining yourself in their place. A dog’s emotional arc in that scenario is very different, and when you factor that into the change of setting here — not one dog but a whole uncountable pack, not sitting in some domesticated space with a glass between them and the squirrels but out on the side of a country road in the middle of the night — well, you can’t help but wonder when the moment will come when, by some unspoken agreement, the audience descends on the performers in a howling frenzy and tears them to bits.

Dennis the Menace, 10/07/18

It’s pretty much absolutely necessary for the core Dennis the Menace shtick that he be allowed to wander around through the neighborhood unsupervised, as I’m given to understand that children of earlier generations were, so it can be difficult to remember that he is, canonically, five years old, and so probably in kindergarden. In the bygone days when five-year-olds were allow to roam freely and hassle the neighbors, were they also taught science and history in kindergarden? Anyway, another reason we often forget Dennis’s true age is because he’s so darn precocious, and you have to admit that telling your parents that your failure really represents their own shortcomings is some advanced-level menacing.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/07/18

Look at that pelican bait shop attendent, grinning like a big idiot! He doesn’t even realize that the only reason he isn’t being hauled away to an internment camp without trial right now is because Slylock happened to remember some nature facts about tides or whatever.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/2/18

So “Atomik Comix” (I think that’s the whimsical spelling they’re going with, I may well be wrong but please do not bother telling me if so) is running into some trouble, because apparently neither its founder, a wealthy comics-obsessive misanthrope and shut-in, nor its creative directors, who for some reason quit presumably lucrative jobs in the film industry to take this gig, could’ve predicted that a brand new comic book company trying to foist nostalgic-feeling superhero print books that nevertheless feature entirely new characters might not be so successful or profitable. So they’re turning to desperate and doomed techniques to boost sales numbers, like giveaway contests! Specifically, they’re giving away some nostalgic “atomic bomb rings” Chester found on eBay, which, I am reasonably certain based on today’s strip, will turn out to have been made in the ’40s or something with real plutonium, causing cancer, because everything comes back to cancer in the Funkyverse! Can’t wait for the massive lawsuit that will bankrupt this company and its unlikeable employees once and for all!

Dennis the Menace, 10/2/18

There’s just so much going on here that doesn’t quite gel into a coherent comic but I still kind of love it? Like, Mr. Wilson is standing on the scale, which we’ve previously seen is a soft spot for him that Dennis can poke at, but apparently Dennis, who’s outside the bathroom, has decided to go for the “haha, remember that time when you shat so much you fucked up the plumbing?” jugular instead. And Mr. Wilson’s so mad about it! Like, he probably went in to weigh himself and closed the door because he didn’t want the little neighbor kid who unaccountably keeps coming into his house to make a fat joke about him, again, so instead Dennis just humiliates him by yelling “Careful of those big ol’ turds, Mr. Wilson!” It’s grim, extremely grim.

Slylock Fox, 10/2/18

How long has it been since the animalpocalypse ushered in the Glorious Animal Regime in Slylock Fox, do you think? Five years, maybe? Ten? Anyway, we’ve apparently got to the point in its political development when the mass arrests start.