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Slylock Fox, 12/17/16

Today’s Slylock Fox offers an important look at how the world evolved from the sudden, awful moment of the animapocalypse to the mostly organized society we know from the main narrative of Slylock and his mysteries. In the Six Differences panels, we see the early days of animal sapience, where the abruptly intelligent beasts are engaged in a Hobbesian war of all against all: the cat eagerly reaches for the fish, who squirms in terror, unable to escape, while a dog watches on smiling, devouring the stabbed corpse of a bird who was presumably as self-aware as any of these beings about an hour ago. Years (decades?) later in Las Vegas, the lights are still on, and Slylock is on the case, apparently enforcing securities law, making sure these wealthy, tails-and-top-hats beasts aren’t defrauded by one of the few remaining humans. It’s amazing how quickly the systems that protect first life, then property replicate themselves!

Spider-Man, 12/17/16

One of the things about laughing at Newspaper Spider-Man is that the character was always, across all iterations, supposed to be kind of funny, in a hapless teen way, even though the strip depicts him as a hapless twentysomething, which is … less attractive. So anyway, it’s pretty clear that Peter reaching out for help to other, better superheroes but only getting their voice mail is supposed to be funny. And yet I believe that Ronan, The Accuser’s magical conveyor belt of foodstuffs was intended to be entirely straight-faced! Sometimes parsing the levels of irony embedded in newspaper comic strips so I can tell whether I’m laughing with them or at them is exhausting, guys, but this … this is the life I chose.

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Gil Thorp, 12/12/16

Whoops, looks like I almost completely failed to talk about Gil Thorp’s football season plot this year, didn’t I? In my defense, it was super boring, and here’s the quick summary: Heather Burns became a third-string tight end in addition to a unpaid coach, a potentially interesting development that resulted in no real conflict or drama whatsoever, and also Kevin Pelwecki got to live out his dream by becoming like the fifth-string quarterback or something, while obviously never taking a single snap all season. Then the team didn’t make the playdowns. Personally, I blame the failure to have a bonfire this year, which is why I’m very excited to see that basketball plot is starting with a warehouse rave! Let’s start a new orgiastic tradition to bring good luck and extra fertility for the coming season!

Judge Parker, 12/12/16

I’ve also been neglecting Judge Parker, mostly because the pieces of the plot have been slowly moved into place over the past few weeks and I’ve sort of been waiting for action and drama. But now: action! Drama! Sophie, after mysteriously disappearing from the car wreck, just as mysteriously reappeared! And finally, with this press conference, the Spencer-Drivers really get some use out of the ludicrous faux-classical columns they wedged onto the front of their exurban shitbox to “class it up a little,” as they provide a nice visual frame for the news cameras.

I’m glad I hunted down that old Gil Thorp strip I linked to above, because it reminds me that the dude glowering behind Sam and Abbey is the detective working the case, and not, as I first assumed, Spencer Farm’s hired muscle, there to hustle journalists off the property if they ask too many nosey questions. The green jacket, in my mind, indicated that he had won the Masters Tournament at least once. The Spender-Driver family only hires retainers of distinction.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/12/16

Welp, considering that she’s been written as cartoonishly jealous throughout this dumb plot about Mason and Marianne’s non-romance, Cindy actually bounced back from the publication of shocking photos of her kissing him on the cheek outside her parents’ house pretty quickly! Not so Marianne, it seems. I assume that we’ve once again switched to black and white to emphasize the noir-esque nature of this story, which has absolutely no resemblance to a noir film in any way except that it might involve an innocent woman trapped in a web of lies having a fatal car accident on the twisting roads in the Hollywood Hills.

Slylock Fox, 12/12/16

So hey, if you were wondering what happened to Australia after the animapocalypse: it became a massive slave compound in which sapient sheep are kept captive, generation after generation, and forcibly sheared to earn export dollars for the dominant species, which appear to be wolves. Slylock makes sure that when one of these wolf-slavers steals from another, he faces justice — but when will justice come for the uncounted enslaved sheep? These carnivores need to watch out for the revolution that will put them in the same ash-bin of history with Homo sapiens.

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Spider-Man, 12/11/16

There’s a lot to love in today’s Spider-Man — MJ’s ridiculously impractical outfit, Peter getting his ass kicked, Peter making a superhuman effort to get off a dumb wisecrack before losing consciousness as a result of said ass-kicking — but it’s the next-to-last panel that will be long remembered as the comics panel of the year, maybe the decade. The sight of, among other things, an ice-cream sandwich, a slice of cake, a bottle of ketchup, a pot and a cup of coffee, a raw steak, and a delicious hoagie floating pell-mell in the general direction of Ronan, The Accuser is absolutely amazing, and I don’t even regret the fact that we don’t actually get to see how he processes all those foodstuffs into energy. Like, do they get absorbed through his skin, or does he just unhinge his jaw and they all fly down his gullet, or what? Surely Ronan, The Accuser doesn’t engage in anything so pedestrian as “chewing.”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 12/11/16

Shoutout to Slick Smitty for treating Max with utter and complete contempt in this little adventure. Having been presumably caught red-handed with evidence of his low-grade silver theft, Smitty has refused to even pretend that Max has the ability to impose some kind of legal consequences on him, and, rather than flee one step ahead of the actual law, has brought his latest hookup with him to enjoy the spectacle of Max running all over town on his tiny little legs and then futilely digging a hole in what I assume is a hilariously escalating state of agitation. Slylock does not look happy to have received this call.