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Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/26/23

CASSANDRA [bursting through the studio door]: Quick, Kopy, I need a favor. Put this portrait up on your easel and act like you’re painting me. I’ve already made sure that I’m wearing the same clothes as in the picture; let me get myself in position so I get the strut exactly right.

KOPY: Gee, Cassandra, this painting is completely dry, and I don’t even have any blue paint out. Slylock’s gonna see right through this scheme! You’d better just run if you don’t want to get caught.

CASSANDRA [posing sexily, just they way she knows Slylock likes it]: Who said anything about not getting caught?

Dick Tracy, 11/26/23

OK, yes, ha ha, Sam’s colleagues on the Major Crimes Unit are razzing him by implying he’s going to extract saliva from their suspect X. Libris by smooching her, and Liz is even demonstrating the frenching technique he’ll used to acquire an adequate sample size, but we need to talk about the metaphor Sam is deploying in response in the final panel. I guess we’re supposed to visualize him … face down in the gutter? Sort of swimming along? But he’s wearing a snorkel, so he can get a real good look at what’s going on down there? And these floating brains keep blocking his access to air? It’s all very unsettling, and once they solve this series of gruesome stab murders, probably everyone on the squad should sue everyone else for creating a hostile work environment.

Gasoline Alley, 11/26/23

Hey, did you know that back in the early ’80s, Bolero was considered a top “sex record”, a cliched thing you’d put on the old hi-fi if you brought a special person back to your pad and were ready to get down? Not saying that’s what’s going on here, but I do invite you to imagine going home with someone and instead of hopping into bed they insisted you wait for a bizarre cat food commercial featuring singing mice, to “set the mood.”

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Slylock Fox, 11/6/23

One thing I’ve never really considered about the post-animalpocalypse Slylockverse: what do the other sapient animals think about the great apes? Are they considered just one more stone in the brilliant mosaic of a multispecies world? Or are they too close to the mostly exterminated H. sapiens for comfort? Today we learn that at least some of these apes unnaturally trim their fur to better resemble stars of the clownish human entertainments that the animals still watch and half-understand. This is, I assume, off-putting for everyone involved, as Slylock’s facial expression here seems to indicate. Yet if Slick Smitty were to catch site of these stooge-apes and fly into a violent rage at their cruel mockery of his massacred fellow humans, he would be the one put in jail! Is there no justice?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/6/23

Sure, there have been a lot of changes to Rex Morgan, M.D., over the years, but we should never forget that this is primarily a strip about Rex and June Morgan, who react to perceived bullshit with some of the most hilariously withering facial expressions known to man. Whether you’re about to start a fight at a funeral or filming an informercial on your recent kidnapee’s cell phone right before you turn yourself in to the cops, the Morgans will not attempt to compose their faces into expressions of polite interest or even mild distaste.

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Slylock Fox, 10/17/23

Ahh, an idyllic barnyard scene, featuring various animals relaxing and frolicking with one another, showing no sings of the advanced cognitive abilities necessary to, say, operate a helicopter or have strong opinions about the display and curation of antiquities. What changes might be in store? Could they have something to do with the official Slylock Fox Facebook account’s Word of the Day on Saturday, “Singularity: A hypothetical point in the future when technological growth becomes uncontrollable”? Are we left to imagine that most humans transcended physical form into pure digital energy when this Singularity occurred, leaving behind a few baffled or insane remnants like Count Weirdly and Slick Smitty, with the animals rising to fill the gap in our absence? Or did the technology accidentally enhance the animals instead, bringing them to our level and setting up an inevitable conflict that we lost? Much to think about.

Hi and Lois, 10/17/23

Speaking of change and transformation, it was just last month that we learned that Trixie was beginning to experience physical growth for the first time in her decades of existence. And now Chip has begun doing a chore than has hitherto been his father’s domain! Looks like the progression of linear time is finally catching up with the Flagstons, which is really too bad for them because it means they’ll probably all be dead soon.