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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.

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Blondie, 2/17/17

I feel like the moment when Dagwood stopped being just a generic white collar worker at Dithers Industries and started being referred to as an “office manager” happened within living memory — like, maybe even since I started doing this blog. And while it’s true that specificity is generally a good thing in jokes, nothing about Dagwood’s intermittently depicted job duties ever matches up with that description; he never seems to be, say, budgeting for office supplies or figuring out who should sit where or designing filing systems. Instead, he prepares “reports” about “accounts” and deals with “clients,” all of which seems outward-facing and outside his job duties. Perhaps today’s strip explains all that, though, if “office manager” is just code for “person who services our clients, sexually, then prepares detailed reports that we use for blackmail purposes.”

Slylock Fox, 2/17/17

Obviously that’s supposed to be a fan tail at the bottom of our mysteriously four-limbed lobster’s torso here, but for the life of me it looks like pleated material of a skirt. Basically, that’s what I’m going to imagine it is, shielding the dangling lobster junk from our field of vision.

Pluggers, 2/17/17

Pluggers also realized why many texting conversations didn’t go as expected when informed that “FML” does not stand for “friend: make love?”