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The Lockhorns, 9/6/16

“Like, take the guy who designed this building. How high do you think that ceiling is? Six feet? Six and a half? I’d like to use the democratic process to let that architect know what I think of him! Too bad we can’t. Too bad he works for the Management of this building, which is an enormous edifice built on the post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be ‘outside.’ Or that’s what they say, anyway. I’ve never seen a window. Have you? Has anyone? How many generations has humanity been inside this fortress? Has anyone seen the Manager, who has enslaved us to inscrutable busywork under the eternal glare of flickering fluorescent lights? Did you catch the big game last night? Working hard or hardly working?”

Gil Thorp, 9/6/16

Oh hey, now that phenom QB True Standish is off to anchor the Wake Forest Demon Deacons’ 114th-ranked offense, I guess there’s a new quarterback battle shaping up in Milford! Soon enough we’ll learn if Kevin Pelwecki is a standard-issue “overly cocky high school athlete” of the sort we get once a year, or actively delusional!

Hagar the Horrible, 9/6/16

Legitimate shoutout to Hagar the Horrible for depicting how the only way to truly survive war with your mind intact is to pretend your enemies aren’t human! The carnage behind Hagar and Eddie is particularly great — but nothing compared to what happened to Eddie’s soul.

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Gil Thorp, 9/5/16

The calendar most of the world uses today is a direct descendent of the one developed by the ancient Romans, but there have been a lot of modifications along the way. For instance, in the days of the Roman Republic, the calendar year was only 355 days long; the Romans knew this was too short, but weren’t exactly sure how long the year was. Twenty-two extra days were supposed to be added into February when necessary, but there was a catch: the Pontifex Maximus, who held Rome’s highest priesthood, decided if the calendar had become misaligned enough from the seasons to make the extra days necessary, and the Pontifex Maximus was always a member of Rome’s political elite. Since a politician’s term of office was the same as the calendar year, a Pontifex Maximus might be prone to add the extra days if he or his allies were in power, or not add them if that would shorten the terms of his enemies. This caused the calendar to become wildly divergent from the natural rhythm of the seasons. Eventually Julius Caesar, who was Pontifex Maximus himself, managed to become absolute dictator of the state, and, based on Greek and Egyptian science, established the 365-day-plus-one-leap-day-every-four-years calendar that we mostly follow today; the situation had gotten so bad that, in order to realign everything, the year of the reboot was preceded by a year that was 445 days long!

This is a long way of saying that, sure, maybe you think that today’s Labor Day, traditionally marking the end of the summer, and that thus we should be moving into Milford’s school year and football season. But nope, that baseball-season plot that we all were pretty sure dragged out over the summer? That was just a really long spring, according to our politco-religious elite (i.e., the creators and distributors of Gil Thorp). Now summer’s here! A summer of beach-centric hijinks! Previous summers gave us Kaz-punching wackiness and Marty Moon getting grifted and senile pro wrestling hijinx, so I’m very much looking forward to whatever we get in the summer of 2016, which, just to make clear, is not over at all, but actually just getting started.

Spider-Man, 9/5/16

Good to see that Ant-Man Scott is still determined to reject the tired superhero tradition of “secret identities”, and plans to blow Spider-Man’s cover, right here on the subway! Anyway, today we learn that Scott is either such a thorough reader of TMZ that he can recognize the nobody husbands of C-level stage and film actresses, or he’s one of the eighteen followers of the sad, abandoned Instagram JJ Jameson made Peter set up during a manic episode that ensued when he learned what Instagram was.

Family Circus, 9/5/16

“Think about it, Mommy, it makes sense. For one thing, Daddy has friends.”

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Mary Worth, 9/4/16

One of the low-key best aspects of the Tommy the Tweaker Mary Worth stories is the emotionally complex and slightly co-dependent relationship between Beedle mère et fils. Sure, Tommy has let Iris down, again and again, but deep down in his heart he doesn’t want to. Obviously it’s very embarrassing for Tommy to be busted in front of his mom, partly because now she knows he’s a drug addict. But I bet that what hurts him most is that in her eyes he’s now an incompetent pharmacy-shopper. Like, why couldn’t she have seen all the times he successfully pulled this off, you know? Maybe she would’ve been proud of him, even!

Panel from The Lockhorns, 9/4/16

It’s always fascinated me that the Lockhorns takes advantage of the increased space the Sunday comics provides by printing six unrelated one-panel Lockhorns gags. That’s a lot of content! And as someone who has to produce a lot of content on the regular, I know that sometimes the well just goes dry on your usual shtick, man. That’s why I totally respect today’s Lockhorns, which provided five gags about the usual marital hellscape and one that’s just “what’s the deal with deep-dish pizza, amirght everyone?”

Panels from Crock, 9/4/16

I’m from Buffalo, NY, where Buffalo wings were invented (more than a decade after the notorious Jessica Simpson “I don’t eat Buffalo” incident, some people still need this explained to them), and, fun fact: in Buffalo we don’t call them “Buffalo wings”! We call them “chicken wings,” or just “wings.” So I guess I’m not surprised that people who are actually in the French Foreign Legion don’t call it “Legionnaires’ disease.”