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Beetle Bailey, 11/29/15

Usually Saturday is the day Beetle Bailey sets aside for strips about the Halftracks’ awful, loveless marriage, but you have to really give the creative team kudos for using the full scope of a Sunday strip to hammer home how truly hellish this relationship is. My favorite part is the topical shift as we move from the second to the third tier of panels: sure, the General’s marriage is explicitly acknowledged as a prison, but his supposed hobby, the sort of thing one usually engages in for enjoyment, is also a punishment. The only solution is to numb the body and mind with alcohol! Anyway, I know there’s a lot of awful things happening in the world right now, but I honestly think this strip should be in the running for The Grimmest Shit In The Newspaper Today.

Panels from Slylock Fox, 11/29/15

In the top panel, the abruptly Awoken animals are using their newfound sapience to try to come to an understanding with the humans, to create a new, balanced form of existence in which all species can live in harmony. In the bottom panel, the animals are merely establishing an insincere truce under which they will gather their strength for the inevitable violent uprising that will wipe humanity from the planet. I don’t really think the other five differences matter all that much.

Judge Parker, 11/29/15

Years ago, back when Sophie was prepubescent weirdo savant rather than an alpha-cheerleader mean girl, she cheerfully admitted to spying on Neddy while she was doing “that tongue thing” with some now long-forgotten boy. Voyeuristically keeping tabs on Neddy’s sex life is a Spencer-Driver family value, is what I’m trying to say.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/29/15

Long story short, Cayla, the answer to your initial question is “not well.”

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Slylock Fox, 11/16/15

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say the answer to today’s mystery is a little grim. “When the animals rose up and seized human civilization, they gained control of our machines without fully understanding the legal and social safeguards we had built up to protect ourselves from the dangers of what we had created! In the first few years of the Forest Government regime, the roads were littered with corpses.”

Apartment 3-G, 11/16/15

Hey guys, a certain extremely handsome comics blogger was quoted in a New York Times from last week; the author of the article also managed to get a definitive statement from King Features that Apartment 3-G is going away at the end of the week. Now that you know that, aren’t you glad that the strip is spending at minimum a seventh of its remaining time in newspapers resolving the whole thing where Margo’s mom was being swindled by a psychic wedding planner? WE CAN SLEEP EASY NOW.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/16/15

Good news! The board has rubber stamped Heather’s Milton’s decision to not sell the company, and is about to expel Hugh to boot. This is actually good for him, because as an outsider he’ll have an easier time suing the entire board for corporate malpractice, when it becomes public that all the stuff he’s saying about his father being medically unfit and the company being run by a nanny are completely, 100% true.

Mark Trail, 11/16/15

OK, we all had fun with all the punching last week, but I’m going to go ahead and say that Ken calling his fist a “lullaby machine”, because it renders so many people unconscious by inducing brain trauma, is a little disturbing. I’m assuming that while Mark is prattling on about shoes in panel two Ken is kissing each of his knuckles, one by one.

Hi and Lois and Family Circus, 11/16/15

Billy and Ditto are generally depicted as nothing but surly and unpleasant in these strips, so I’m just going to assume that all of today’s dialogue is extremely sarcastic.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/15/15

Call me a speciesist if you will, but it seems to me that the animals who rose up and took over the planet in the Slylockverse haven’t quite matched our levels of achievement, have they? I mean, they apparently seized control of a human research station at the North Pole, an event that was presumably quite bloody and involved several polar bears, and they’ve been operating it in a sort of cargo cult fashion ever since, but now they’re in trouble. “Which way did they go?” the polar bears ask, poking their claw at the scavenged compass. “South? It’s all south.” The thief rides away and the bears, already growing soft in their warm enclosure, have forgotten they once were the fastest things on the pack ice.

Mary Worth, 11/15/15

This is an amazingly prefect Mary Worth Time-Killing Strip! Mary exchanges pleasantries with the cabbie, who is enough of a pro to not react to whatever meagre tip she’s giving him; then we get four solid action-packed panels of Mary thought-ballooning about the mechanics of letting her hosts know she’s arrived, a little retrospective on how she got there (not in any soul-searching or philosophical way, just the actual travel mechanics), and some platitudes about New York and how it’s Always Different! Slap a successfully completed phone call on at the end and a fabricated quote from St. Augustine on at the beginning, and you’ve got a Sunday!

Crock, 11/15/15

The answer to “how dark does Crock have to get before I laugh at it with respectful wonder” has now been established, and it is: botched suicide. I thank you for your time.