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Mary Worth, 8/21/14

Boy, I’ve really been dropping the ball on this Mary Worth storyline for the past few weeks, haven’t I? The short version is that Olive’s medical procedure went well and that pesky cyst was successfully removed from her torso! Today, we learn that she’s been carrying it around in a little purse ever since.

Dennis the Menace, 8/21/14

“Dad’s inability or unwillingness to really be present for me during these fleeting, precious moments is kinda ruining my childhood for me. Hope you don’t stay up all night despairing over what a terrible job you guys are doing as parents!” Menacing factor: strong.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/21/14

Les is super excited about the fact that the movie adaptation of his book (for which he’s already been paid handsomely) has now completely unravelled. The failure of the project will almost certainly damage the careers and finances of any number of people and companies who believed in it. Les is excited about this because he’s an asshole.

Judge Parker, 8/21/14

Hmm, in addition having her work as legal secretary at what he thought was a thriving practice, Sam also tasked Gloria with managing his daughter’s finances! NOPE NO IDEA WHY SHE’D WANT TO QUIT THIS JOB, NONE AT ALL

Wizard of Id, 8/21/14

You know, considering how often the Wizard of Id uses actual torture as a punchline, I’m kind of surprised that it would be the strip that really manages to boil Orwell’s ideas about how dictatorships control thought through control of language into a single, effective panel.

Spider-Man, 8/21/14

Spider-Man is going to use his superpowers to more effectively photograph one of his main antagonists successfully fighting crime, so he can sell those photographs at poverty-level freelance print journalist prices! I know there’s no TV watching involved, but we may have hit Peak Newspaper Spider-Man, guys.

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Wizard of Id, 8/16/14

This is supposed to be a serious commentary about how man is the most dangerous and deadly animal of all, which is of course accurate. Nevertheless, the first few moments I looked at it, I thought the Wiz was talking about wizards as a class, or maybe just about himself personally. The Wiz is a near-omnipotent mage who works for the dictatorial government of Id, which routinely tortures its citizens on a whim. Of course he kills thousands of people a year.

Family Circus, 8/16/14

You might think that Dolly is being a dolt about how day, night, and the various bodies in our solar system relate to each other, but she’s actually 100% right: it’s two in the afternoon and the “dark” is the construction paper Mommy and Daddy have used to block all the windows in the Keane Kompound, punishing the children for some minor act of disobedience with simulated eternal night. Sorry, PJ, but you won’t get to see the sun again until your older siblings show some halfway convincing repentance.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/14/14

It’s kind of amazing that Otto is perfectly capable of understanding symbolic language — for instance, he knows that fire hydrants are a longstanding visual shorthand for dog urination in our culture, even though no dog urinates exclusively on fire hydrants — and yet he somehow can’t figure out how to go to the bathroom in a toilet.

Dick Tracy, 8/14/14

These movie assignations are actually a cover for Dick and Annie to discuss their escape from Weird Maybe Time-Travel Island, but still, the idea that an adult police officer would help break a tween girl’s crush on him by literally taking her on dates is pretty gross! Haha, but everyone in ThePastBurg wants to get into Officer Tracy’s pants, so it’s totally OK.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/14/14

Hey, remember a couple days ago when I said Les’s fantasy sequence would be mildly more interesting than the whole Lisa’s Story movie plotline? Well, that was before I knew it would involve sexy ladies trying to get Les to have sex with them! Now it’s grosser, and not just mildly grosser.

Mark Trail, 8/14/14

Mark trail is such a dedicated naturalist that he’s going to make sure you know what kind of python this is, before, under duress and with great respect and sadness, he’s forced to slice off its head.

Wizard of Id, 8/14/14

In a cross-promotion of the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week that I’m sadly certain is entirely unpaid, the Wiz in Wizard of Id has turned himself into a shark! A shark that yearns for shark-sex with lady sharks. The intersection of monogamy and animagery is in fact deeply complex.

Pluggers, 8/14/14

The most common use a plugger has for computers is figuring out how to poop more easily.