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Spider-Man, 7/22/17

Ah, Newspaper Spider-Man, always striving to be “hip” and “with it” but always falling just a bit behind! I’m sure over at Newspaper Spider-Man HQ it feels very of the moment to have MJ’s studio publicist svengali barking about a major blogger waiting, but since I’m a major blogger myself, let me assure you that blogging is pretty much over, and has been since about 2011. The new hotness is “influencers,” which is a code word for social media stars with 500,000 Instagram followers or 4,000,000 pageviews on each and every one of their YouTube makeup tutorials or whatever. Newspaper reporting has been over and done with for a lot longer than blogging, obviously, so a more accurate scene would just be this publicist talking about how he’s got three influencers waiting, and since they’re all millennials (or, what’s the thing after millennials? Gen-Z? UGH) their attention spans are notoriously short.

Dennis the Menace, 7/22/17

I love the knowing smiles that Henry and Alice are flashing here. I’m not sure what secret they’re sharing — that Henry is a terrible liar? that in the white-collar professional world, business and pleasure mingle on the golf course, helping consolidate the wealth of the upper class? that this “business trip” is an opportunity for them both to rendezvous with their secondary partners before reuniting and reaffirming their loving bond within the a context of consensual polyamory? — but whatever it is, it holds menace in the sense that it means that the world isn’t as simple as Dennis believes.

Slylock Fox, 7/22/17

Hey, kids! Remember Grimace, the beloved character from the McDonaldland commercials? Well, he’s dead now. He got bit by a snake and he died.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/16/17

It’s no secret that the last exciting thing that happened in Rex Morgan was Sarah getting hit by a car, but with each new story I allow myself to experience a frisson of hope. Sure, “June’s childhood best friend comes to visit” may not seem like it has a lot of meat to it, but the presence of her child has my “I’m planning on crashing with you indefinitely” sense tingling. Remember when June’s trashy cousin showed up and wouldn’t leave because she’d had a fight with her mom, and Sarah verbalized the class-based judgements that her parents were more subtle about, and then the cousin’s dumb boyfriend showed up too and Sarah made him hand over his skateboard as his price for laying low in the basement, but eventually he painted whales in his basement prison and June’s cousin got a job as a manicurist so everything worked out fine? That was great, and what I’m trying to say is that this lady and her kid better be fleeing a dicey domestic situation, or creditors, or the Irish mob, or something interesting, or else I’m gonna be real mad.

Spider-Man, 7/16/17

The amount of time Mole-Man spends justifying the plundering of Subterranea’s public treasury for his own private gain as he fled his former realm indicates that he knows exactly how unjustified the whole thing is. “Look, uh, I left most of it behind! My former subjects, who did all the manual labor to extract it, are welcome to it! If they depose my successor! The part I took was just a tiny, tiny bit! And what about strip-mining, huh? If it’s a crime for me to bring some precious gems out of the underground kingdom, where does that leave every mining company in the world, huh?” Still, his retelling of the story does provide the opportunity for him to both use the phrase “worm-mount” and to show us said worm-mount, a freakish lamprey-mouthed beast hundreds of feet long with treasure chests lashed to its back that Mole-Man is riding like a pony, so literally anything he does from here on out is forgiven as far as I’m concerned.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/16/17

THE ANSWER IS HE LICKED IT

HE JUST UP AND LICKED COUNT WEIRDLY’S SKI-DOO

I’M SORRY, “SUPER SKI”

I GUESS SKI-DOO IS A BRAND NAME

ANYWAY, HE LICKED IT, TO SEE IF IT TASTED SALTY

SLY, WE NEED TO TALK

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/4/17

It’s never entirely clear where Hootin’ Holler is supposed to be, but many places like it in the American South and border states, like Appalachia and the Ozarks, were hotbeds of pro-Union sentiment in during the Civil War, being mostly inhabited by poor farmers with no love of slavery or rich slavers. And so Hootin’ Holler has uniformly celebrated Abe Lincoln and the Union victory ever since — for the most part. Check out Loweezy there in the center of this image:

We don’t know her origins or her politics. Could she be trying to send a signal of her secret dedication to the Lost Cause?

Mark Trail, 7/4/17

Welp, I guess we really are going to get a blow-by-blow retelling of the Water-World Disaster shaggy dog story over the course of this week! I’m assuming it ends with an explanation of why Gil’s right arm is all shriveled up, possibly involving the process of extracting walrus twins from their mother’s birth canal in the midst of a raging fire started by an exploding boat.

Slylock Fox, 7/4/17

I don’t want young men getting the wrong idea from this cartoon. Guerilla fence-painting does not make others respect your devil-may-care attitude, and will definitely not attract wide-eyed blondes who won’t be able to keep their hands off you. Sorry to shatter your illusions, but those are the hard facts!