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Mary Worth, 8/2/16

So far this storyline has been mostly about how amazing Vicodin is at relieving both physical and emotional pain. And if taking a little Vicodin is good, then taking a lot of Vicodin is great! So what’s not to like about this drug? Well, it turns out that there are serious side effects, like the inability to count pills or even notice that the bottle you’ve been gazing at lovingly for weeks is almost empty! The solution: buy as much Vicodin as you can, so you never run out! Get your hands on it by any means necessary!

Gil Thorp, 8/2/16

Aw, Gil is going to make True Standish be nice to the guy whose main hobby is being an intense asshole about how his dad killed True’s ex-girlfriend/best friend. This raises some questions, like, doesn’t the baseball team have an actual captain Gil could do this half-asssed-intervening-by-proxy to? And shouldn’t True be getting ready to go off to college, seeing as it’s the first week of August and all?

Dick Tracy, 8/2/16

“In case you didn’t know it, she’s turned up again…”

[long, dramatic pause]

“…on social media!!!!!”

[everyone screams and screams endlessly because this is the most shocking thing they can imagine]

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Slylock Fox, 8/1/16

There’s a huge missed opportunity here in that the strip doesn’t provide us with the name of this completely adorable pig band! Some suggestions:

• Pig Floyd
• The Piggles
• Pig Direction
• Radioham
• One Pigrection
• Taylor Ham Swift
• Carlos Pigtana ft. Pig Thomas

Anyway, Sly and Max’s facial expressions here are 100% great. They thought they were down with that hip new music that the kids like, but it turns out that they very much are not.

Dick Tracy, 8/1/16

Speaking of the stuff the kids like, our crime-fighting squares in Dick Tracy are taking a casual video call with Dethany, an adorable goth, and seem to be having an OK time with it! Rikki Mortis is named “Rikki Mortis” and is in a relationship with “Abner Kadaver,” a guy who sleeps in a coffin and looks like a skeleton and has done a bunch of murders, so I don’t know where Dethany gets off on her gother-than-thou attitude here.

Spider-Man, 8/1/16

“Like bugs on a bagel” sounds like a phrase that someone would come up with if they had to make up a New York City catchphrase on very short notice and had never actually visited New York City. “Uh, what do they have in New York, uh, uh … bagels! They love bagels over there. And everything’s infested with vermin, right?”

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Judge Parker, 7/31/16

Finally, everyone Sam and Abbey live with is gone for the night, having sex responsibly somewhere, so now they can have sex, responsibly! Remember, the Spencer-Drivers live a palatial horse-breeding compound and everyone’s bedroom is at least a half a mile away from everyone else’s, so obviously thre is a lot of special pleading going on here on the importance of having everyone out of their hair. I think they’re worried about the last time they tried to have sex, when this horror-nightmare happened, and they want to make sure it never happens again.

Crankshaft, 7/31/16

I like the vigorous wink Crankshaft is giving Pam in the final panel here. He knows he’s making a little joke! He knows this jersey is an inanimate object, and can’t actually collect Social Security! Since this is the first time I’ve ever seen him do this, I have to assume that with every other mangled wordplay-chunk he comes up with — the punchlines of about 75% of Crankshaft strips, in other words — he has no idea how dumb he sounds.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/31/16

The first row of throwaway panels at the top of the strip, which don’t appear in every newspaper depending on how they lay out their Sunday comics, completely change the content here. Without them, we just have a harmless, sappy series of nicknames. With them, we have Loweezy stalling a Barlow, the hated enemy of her clan in a feud that’s stained the hills with blood for generations, until her husband can show up with his shotgun.