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Gil Thorp, 9/9/16

Welp, looks like despite my best efforts to fool myself, summer is actually over in Milford, and football (both the American and foreign versions) season is getting underway! Panel one gives True Standish, the beloved (?) driving force behind many of the last couple years’ plots, an affectionate sendoff as he leaves the strip forever, or at least until he blows his knee out in a scrimmage a year from now and starts hanging awkwardly around Milford again. In panel two, Coach Kaz is the only person on the field wearing sunglasses, proclaiming his intention to let the whinges of his student-athletes blow harmlessly past him like “The Ride of the Valkyries” in the classic Maxell tape commercial. And in the final panel, a Lady Mudlark soccer player is experiencing one of the most valuable lessons that high school athletics has to offer: a keen insight into one’s own essential mediocrity.

Six Chix, 9/9/16

Shoutout to Six Chix for really committing to a strip gag where two vultures hang around talking about how much they love eating rotting animal carcasses! What really impresses me is that the artist gave that dead dog or whatever it is a face. Just two little closed eyes, but still, it crosses the line from “dead thing in the abstract” to “a creature that once lived and loved but then got hit by a car or maybe died of exposure and now its rotting corpse is a delicacy for these carrion-eaters to devour,” which, just to reiterate, is a joke that we’re expected to laugh at.

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Crankshaft, 9/8/16

Crankshaft trufans (by which I mean Crankshaft haters, which are sadly the only kinds of Crankshaft trufans out there) have long asked themselves: when will Ed Crankshaft, who is remarkably, dangerously bad at his job as a school bus driver, finally be fired? He’s managed to so far stay employed despite the extensive and actionable damage caused by his incompetent driving. But can his career survive actual child endangerment? Stay tuned!

Pluggers, 9/8/16

It probably says something terrible about me that the most affection I’ve ever felt for a plugger came from this cartoon: a plugger-lady sitting silently, unsmiling, staring at her tiny TV, waiting for something terrible to happen to the host of the gameshow she watches every day. Maybe it won’t happen today. Maybe it won’t ever happen. But if it does, she wants to be there to see it.

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Family Circus, 9/7/16

We all joke, of course, about the “melonheaded” children of the Family Circus, but we all just assumed their apparent macrocephaly was a quirk of Bil Keane’s art style, now handed down to his son Jeff. How wrong we were. How horribly, horribly wrong. Today we learn that the Keane Kids’ heads are grossly distended due to whatever monstrous science is required to keep them alive indefinitely, as they are transplanted from one child’s body to another — and really, the less time spent dwelling on how exactly those bodies are acquired, the better. “How old was my head in this picture?” Jeffy asks, his immortal life being nothing more to him than an undifferentiated blur of surgeries and tiny bodies that eventually fail and wither.

Gasoline Alley, 9/7/16

Speaking of awful nightmare visions, two members of Gasoline Alley’s extended cast are, for reasons I’m not even going to bother going into here, engaged in a little light accidental-woods-birth action. I’m sure this will turn out fine and not be nightmarish at all, but I am super unsettled by the array of woodland creatures, eagerly watching to see the baby’s head crown with big, adorable, staring, unblinking eyes.

Mary Worth, 9/7/16

“So, wait, you’re telling me there’s a pill … that I can take … when I have an unbearable urge to take another kind of pill? This new pill sounds great! I’m just gonna swallow a whole bottle’s worth all at once!”