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Judge Parker, 9/14/16

Ever since Sophie and her friends went tumbling down that rain-slicked hillside, Neddy has been on tenterhooks waiting to find out if her dumb little sister managed to ruin her big day, by dying. Turns out she’s alive! Turns out it’s not incredibly inappropriate at all that Rocky lined up those three champaign flutes and held that bottle of bubbly at the ready, waiting for this call. Turns out we’ll never get to see him quietly returning the glasses to the cabinet and putting the bottle back into the fridge, unopened, while Neddy weeps over the terrible loss of publicity, not to mention all the money spent on jumbo cookies for the press, just gone to waste. I’m a little disappointed by this, honestly.

Marvin, 9/14/16

Considering how most babies and dogs actually have their temperature taken, I think we’re finally discovering the limits of what the normally scatologically-obsessed Marvin is allowed to get away with.

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Hi and Lois, 9/13/16

One mark of many a sitcom and comic strip with middle-class American characters is the dad working a generic, nonspecific white-collar job at a generic, nonspecific large company of some sort. So shoutout to today’s Hi and Lois for answering multiple decades-old questions in a single strip: Foofram Industries manufactures nuts, bolts, and other fasteners, and Hi is works in its PR department. This should provide lots of opportunities for gags where Hi, dead-eyed and emotionally exhausted, builds up the strength to churn out 500 peppy words about a revolutionary new alloy that Foofram Industries is going to start using in its screws to increase their stress tolerance by a full 8% or whatever. What I’m trying to say is that based on how boring his usual duties must be, Hi should be thrilled about the opportunity to write about something exciting like this lawsuit, which, for the record, Foofram is getting hit with because one of their nuts didn’t fit properly onto one of their bolts, causing the bleachers at a minor league baseball game to collapse, killing twelve people.

Mark Trail, 9/13/16

Having been denied the use of the company credit card to rent a boat, Mark has decided to rent a helicopter (apparently the risk of choppersplosion is already priced into the insurance?) to get to Abbey Powell’s Mysterious Invasive Species Island Which Is Also Volcanic Even Though It’s Near Kauai And Thus Not Really In The Right Spot For That. I’m particularly fond of Mark’s slightly put upon expression in panel three. “Women! Always thinking they’ve discovered signs of invasive species, amiright? And taking so long to get ready for a date? Eh?”

Crankshaft, 9/13/16

So the tale of the kid who fell asleep on Crankshaft’s bus never … actually got resolved? Last we saw Crankshaft was grouchily driving him home while his mother desperately drove by the bus in the other direction, presumably in a panic that her child had disappeared. Anyway, today it looks like the kid never did get reunited with his family and has had to live on the bus ever since, quietly training himself in the violent arts at night and awaiting his day of vengeance. That day … has arrived.

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Spider-Man, 9/12/16

Ugh, you guys, I know this isn’t a fun thing to hear me whine about first thing in the week, but Spidey’s use of “tariff” bothers me so much here. A tariff is a tax on imports or exports, and I’m pretty sure J. Jonah Jameson doesn’t pay every month to import his sweet penthouse in from whatever low-labor-cost country penthouses are made in now, devastating Ohio’s traditional penthouse-manufacturing industry. I guess he pays either rent or a mortgage and Spidey didn’t know Jonah’s real-estate situation so decided to come up with … another word that means paying for things?

I’m not bothered at all by JJJ’s choice to sleep with a shotgun leaning up against the side of his bed, as this seems like a particularly hilarious and ineffective method of self-defense. I certainly hope that he wakes up in surprise and just starts firing every which way at an extremely tiny target that he can’t possibly hit, sending shotgun shell after shotgun shell into what appear to be the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse.

Slylock Fox, 9/12/16

I’m not saying it’s OK to just go around stomping on other creature’s carefully tended flower beds — far from it! But I do think this is a good opportunity for all the herbivorous inhabitants of post-animalpocalypse Earth to acknowledge that they have it pretty good compared to their ancestors. Imagine a world where the biggest complaint a rabbit would have about a wolf is that the wolf crushed her flowers (instead of, say, eating her) and then her reaction is to call in a fox who proceeds to use ratiocination to solve the crime (instead of, say, eating her).