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Panels from Slylock Fox, 10/26/14

Today’s Slylock Fox Six Differences puzzle takes place in that awkward period after the animals achieved sapience but before they had truly taken over the Earth. Our grumpy park ranger’s face may bear the scowl of prejudice, but his cause is legit: if this bear can now think and reason like humans, shouldn’t he be subject to the same law? Eventually the animals would develop their own cargo cult legal system in response to these issues, but at this moment, I assume that, despite his newfound intellectual powers, the bear here is still more than happy to meet aggression animal-style, with his claws.

Dennis the Menace, 10/26/14

At last, Dennis the Menace has shattered the unspoken rule that all characters in the daily comics must be gentiles! We learn a valuable lesson here today: that little Jewish children and little Christian children can be friends, so long as neither of them understands any of the theology behind their various holidays and just think of them as “that thing we celebrate in [insert season here],” and also agree to come together at the end of October to worship Satan. (Side note: I’m going to accept as canon the clear implication in today’s throwaway panels that Margaret is a well-known anti-Semite.)

Mary Worth, 10/26/14

There are lots of good reasons to wish that Frank Zappa was still alive, and somewhere on that list is my desire to see what he’d think about having a quote almost certainly incorrectly attributed to him used to try to bully an old woman in Mary Worth into an assisted living facility.

Six Chix, 10/26/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because the scalpel blades are breaking off still embedded in the patient’s flesh! There’s so much blood! So much hilarious, hilarious blood!

Momma, 10/26/14

Tina had sometimes resented the fact that her rift with her mother-in-law meant that she and Thomas didn’t get invited to many family gatherings with his brother and sister. But then, she reflected, if she had been at the house that day, she would’ve been mauled to death by the cold, thirsty bear-dog-things, just like the rest of Thomas’s family.

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Slylock Fox, 9/22/14

We’ve seen this courtroom drama before, and back then I was interested in the sad picture it painted of the animal justice system: the injured Slylock meekly giving his testimony, almost cringing as the bull and his sharp-toothed lawyer grin confidently, secure in the knowledge that this case is going their way despite the facts. Today I’m more intrigued by those facts, or at least the presentation of them here, and what they say about the post-animapocalytic world. Are we meant to understand that the Great Change altered so many things about the world’s bovines — not only making them sapient, but also transforming them from quadrupeds to bipeds and granting them front-facing stereo vision to boot — and yet still left them color blind? Moreover, how exactly did the entirely human urban legend about bulls being enraged by red come to be believed by animal-dom at large? Were images of bullfights perhaps used during the Bestial Revolution to rile up anti-human sentiment? At any rate, this provides more evidence that Slylock Fox takes place in the first generation of so of the post-human reality, as the animals are slowly learning about each other … and about themselves.

Crock, 9/22/14

Congratulations, Crock: for a strip with exceptionally crude art, you’ve sure managed to pack a lot of deeply unsettling emotion in the face of the Legionnaire in the second panel here. Does Butt Stew contain meat from a butt, or stuff that came out of a butt, or something even more disturbing? You don’t want to know, but he wants to spend the whole rest of the afternoon grinning smugly about just how much you don’t want to know.

Apartment 3-G, 9/22/14

NO DON’T TAKE YOUR TIME GO VERY QUICKLY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I CAN’T BELIEVE WE’RE GOING TO GET ANOTHER WEEK OF THIS STORYLINE

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Apartment 3-G, 9/1/14 (panel)

They’re going to either burst into a Rocky Ledge duet or dash for the bedroom, and I don’t know which would be worse.

Slylock Fox, 9/1/14

I’m always fascinated by Weirdly’s gadgets, minor taxonomy-related errors aside. But I was transfixed by Slylock’s scuba outfit, encasing his luxuriant red tail in yards of pillowy blue neoprene. At first it looked like a clever canid-specific buoyancy compensator, maintaining both depth and balance — probably fart-powered to conserve breathing air and protect the delicate reef ecology. Then I saw Max’s predicament, and realized that Sly’s tailsheath is essential defense against the carnivorous goldfish, which consumes its victim tail-first, inch by inch, until after long months of agony the nose disappears into its toothy maw like the final cherry of an after-dinner flambé. Red in tooth and claw, folks — dive safe, and keep those tails covered!

Mary Worth, 9/1/14

Mary is driven insane about the way l’affaire Kaphut was resolved without her interference so no credit is coming her way and she had to go crawling to that smug punk son of her jellyfish boyfriend just to find out what the hell happened. Like she’s no better than some damn nurse! In her rage she lets her defenses slip and reverts to the hair, posture, expression, and sing-songy speech cadences of an Evil Queen in a Disney movie (probably Ursula from The Little Mermaid, but maybe Cruella from 101 Dalmations, your choice):

♫ “You seeeeeeeeem to have very ACurate gutinnnnnnnnstincts (cackle cackle cackle)!” ♫
♫ “You KNOW what was reeeeeecently reVEALED about himmmmmmm? hmmmmmmm? (cackle shriek cackle, whiff of sulfur, bright flash)”

Van Horn Texas — home to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Image spaceport and the 10,000-year clock buried in the surrounding hills. Come for the diesel-fried chicken and donkey-ropin’; leave for Tucson in the morning. Send burrito money, folks — he’s a long, long way from home and a burrito could be a good friend right now.

— Uncle Lumpy