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Slylock Fox, 3/15/17

Wow, some hard truths about animals being laid down here, including the hard truth that owls … are actually kind of dumb? I bet the post-animalpocalypse regime will come to feel bad staffing its entire legal system with owls, then. Just another human superstition they should’ve rejected! Also, it mysteriously seems that the very smart crows never appear in Slylock Fox, at least not in any of the strips in my archive. We can only assume that the Event that granted all the animals sapience made the crows super-intelligent, and they all built spaceships and went to a different, better planet, or maybe transcended their physical bodies and became creatures of pure mind.

Shoe, 3/15/17

Ha ha, yes, it’s funny because Loon’s butt froze, but I have to question what prompted the question in the first place. The Perfesser is just reading the financial section of the newspaper, and thinks, “Huh, you know who seems like a criminal who probably had a warrant taken out against him to ensure that he couldn’t use any of his ill-gotten resources to continue his illegal activities? My friend and co-worker over here!”

Mary Worth, 3/15/17

Dr. Jeff has been taking some time off from his busy schedule of going to the Bum Boat with Mary and trying and failing to get her to marry him to nurse his bad knee at his daughter and son-in-law’s house, so surely he’ll understand when Mary decides to take time off from going to the Bum Boat with Dr. Jeff and rejecting his marriage proposals to go on a fun, sexy cruise with Tobey! And screw the column! Nobody gives a shit about the column! Let nothing stand in the way of this glorious plotline!

Blondie, 3/15/17

Neither Alexander nor Cookie know what “flash in the pan” means. Sad!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/15/17

[long, increasingly awkward silence]

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Slylock Fox, 3/10/17

OK, Slylock Fox, here’s something I’d like to unscramble: how exactly was that sausage made, and from whom? Are bovines convicted of simple assault punished by being killed then ground into delicious all-beef links? Are pig musicians who fail to entertain paying customers due to technical difficulties ground into chorizo by their angry audiences?

I also want to point out that our hungry sausage thief is a rabbit, a representative of a purely vegetarian species, and that the similarly herbivorous moose in the background seems keenly interested as well. Then there’s Slylock’s indulgent smile, a far cry from his usual attitude towards petty theft, and the rabbit’s nudity. Perhaps the Transformation that turns an ordinary animal into a sapient citizen of the New Order involves taking a bite of cooked flesh. Perhaps Slylock has gone out into the still wild forest to do some recruiting.

Mary Worth, 3/10/17

It’s never been exactly clear how old Iris is supposed to be, but with a mid-20s son and a mid-20s ex-boyfriend, I’ve assumed that she’s roughly my age, i.e., in her early to mid 40s. Today’s strip confirms that suspicious with the revelation that she’s bumped the typeface on her laptop up to like a zillion-point font, which is what I did for about four years before I finally admitted I needed glasses. I got bifocals a few months ago and it literally felt like I had been faith-healed! I strongly feel that Iris should follow my lead here. I know some people don’t like to get them because they think it makes them look old, but she’s obviously contemplating getting back together with Wilbur, so clearly that’s not an issue.

By the way, if the image of Wilbur wandering around Brazil asking random people in broken Portugese (or probably shouting in English, actually) “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much should you not be alive?” doesn’t make you smile, probably we shouldn’t be friends.

Six Chix, 3/10/17

Oh no, this poor hunchback lady’s son has fallen in with a “bad crowd” of local child-demons! That’s what this strip is about, right? Children who are also devils, from the bowels of hell? Ha … ha?

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Mark Trail, 3/6/17

Mark Trail has had exactly three writer-artists in its 71-year existence — Ed Dodd, Jack Elrod, and James Allen — and Elrod and Allen both spent extensive periods assisting their predecessors before taking over the strip. Other soap strips have seen a higher turnover in syndicate-hired personnel, and I have it on good authority that, in the absence of organized archives, some of those writers resorted to using my blog’s archives for backstory on the strips they were taking over; but Mark Trail has institutional memory when it comes to the lore, man. That’s why the strip is able to casually bring back recurring characters like fecund Quebecker Johnny Malotte, who’s been around since at least the early ’50s. So even though I’ve been reading Mark Trail every day for the last 15 years and have never heard of Johnny Lone Elk (hmmm, Mark sure knows a lot of non-WASPy guys named “Johnny”), I have full confidence that the Water-World Theme Park Disaster was a real storyline that was published in newspapers, probably in the ’70s sometime, and was extremely hilarious. I am jazzed up for this next adventure, guys.

Hagar the Horrible, 3/6/17

I honestly love how Gus maintains his weirdly bug-eyed smiling expression even through Hagar’s blurted question in the third panel. You’d better believe there’s no ham sandwich, Hagar. There’s nothing Gus loves so much as blowing people’s damn minds.

Dick Tracy, 3/6/17

There are any number of hilarious things about this strip: The Spirit sleeps in his eye mask and white gloves! The Spirit has a bedside princess phone in his hotel! The Spirit thinks that a normal, comfortable way to talk on the phone is to lie face down on the bed and sort of rest the handset against the side of his head! Still, I’m a little disappointed that my initial interpretation of panel one, which as that the Spirit slept wearing a CPAP machine, turned out to be incorrect.

Slylock Fox, 3/6/17

Oh wow, it seems the colorists for today’s strip, in which notorious person of (green) color Count Weirdly implements an incompetent terrorist attack on a ceremony honoring law enforcement, have decided to suddenly portray him as Caucasian! Way to promote #whitgenocide, Slylock Fox.