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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!

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Slylock Fox, 7/3/17

Hmm, I think there’s a lot of backstory here that Slylock isn’t getting in to. QUESTION: If Holly Hippo just wrote this recipe down last night, why is it that she can’t remember any of it today? ANSWER: It’s because she was copying it from a source she no longer has access to — possibly the closely guarded family cookbook of a competitor in the big pie-baking contest coming up! I’m assuming there’s a big pie-baking contest coming up because otherwise why isn’t there “enough time to find the thief”? Enough time for what? What’s the deadline here? Dinner? Is Holly Hippo having a freakout because she can’t cook her stolen pie recipe for tonight’s dinner? There are other desserts for tonight and other nights for dessert, Holly. Hold it together, for the love of Christ.

UPDATE: Whoooops, I somehow failed to see the first sentence of this caption, lol

Mary Worth, 7/3/17

This strip doesn’t advance our current plot at all (unless the photo Mary bought was of Derek and Esme kissing and she plans to use it for blackmail) but obviously I couldn’t pass over Toby in her ’80s finery. The thing I wonder: did Toby know in advance that there would be an ’80s dance party on the boat (possibly it was part of the endless promotional material she browsed online) and pack those clothes, which she still owned from her youth in the early-Madonna era Lower East Side? Or does the cruise line just own a bunch of ’80s gear and let passengers wear them for theme nights, then let them keep them because, ew, cruise passenger dance sweat, gross.

Spider-Man, 7/3/17

Aunt May! Threatening to harm yourself unless your partner makes a grand emotional commitment is a classic act of emotional manipulation and abuse! YOU IN DANGER GIRL

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Mark Trail, 6/29/17

Oh, I bet you thought that three months ago, when Mark Trail paused to do some jokes about a mysterious incident Mark and Johnny got up to “a long time ago” at the “Water-World Theme Park,” it was all just a silly aside, a wink to those of us who know about how Mark’s various dramas often leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Well, guess what: it’s turned out to be extremely key to this storyline instead, actually! Since Mark rented his car under Lesley’s name (is this something you can … actually do? just rent a car in the name of someone whose ID you do not possess? guess they’re still pretty trusting at the rental facilities in America’s rural heartland), this has led the FBI straight to the Water-World Theme Park, which upgraded its name’s orthography to WaterWorld right around the time they ditched their popular but increasingly controversial “poke a captive orca with a cattle prod” exhibit. Anyway, this will result in Mark being … freed, somehow? Probably because Lesley Joyce has dealt with his car-destroying antics before, giving her an uncanny ability to figure out his next move, as Mark well knows. The Water-World Incident took place years ago, when Lesley was just a simple Customer Experience Enhancement Agent in charge of cleaning up the dolphin poop; now she’s climbed the corporate ladder all the way to Vice President of Octopus and Squid, but an encounter with Mark Trail is something you never forget.

Slylock Fox, 6/29/17

You know, maybe I’ve got it all wrong about how the Animals seized control of the world of Slylock Fox. Maybe there was no violent revolution, no singular Event when the beasts achieved sapience all at once. Maybe humanity mostly died out in a series of great pandemics, started when pseudoscientific beliefs convinced people to abandon immunization and other techniques that had kept the microbes at bay. Here we see the opening stages of the Great Die-Off, when affected household are required, under the emergency authority granted to the Plaguemaster General, to identify the diseases present inside. The dog just sits and watches, waiting for a new ecological niche to open.