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Dennis the Menace, 11/30/16

I’m a little concerned about why Henry looks so very miserable in this panel. I’m wavering between “He secretly can’t get enough of Dennis’s humiliations of various adults and is profoundly sad that without his glasses he can’t make out the expression on this optometrist’s face” and “Dennis is cracking wise to cut the tension after the optometrist just sucker-punched Henry for no reason.”

Hi and Lois, 11/30/16

Somewhere deep in the HQ of Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, a cigar-chomping executive is growling angrily at various cowering hacks. “Boys,” he says, “we used to own the comic-strip baby thing. Everyone loves Trixie, and she gets a solid 20% of the jokes in Hi and Lois. But have you seen this?” He waves multiple printouts of Marvin strips aggressively. “This little bastard is the only baby in his family. And he just makes poop jokes nonstop. I thought people loved Trixie’s sweet relationship with sunbeam.” He sighs heavily. “But I guess it’s a new world now.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/30/16

Wait, Sarah is taking the bus now? Like a common poor? I know it’s awkward being dependent on violent gangsters to transport your child to and from her elite private school, but it seems like some extremely hasty decisions have been made here.

Mary Worth, 11/30/16

The best part about today’s Mary Worth is that Zak thinks this date is going great.

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Dick Tracy, 11/29/16

You have to give the new-ish Dick Tracy creative team credit for bringing the strip into something that’s semi-recognizable as the modern era. I mean, the strip’s trademark bit of gee-whiz futuristic tech is now on sale and really something of a niche market, which I’m not sure if that makes their job easier or harder! Anyway, today’s strip shows that Neo-Chicago’s Major Crimes Unit is really getting with the times; they’re less likely to get information by building long-term trusting relationships with street-level informants or via brutal beatdowns of suspected criminals, and instead are just trolling Instagram for pictures of people who seem reluctant to be photographed. Thank God Dick, at least, reacts in his usual inscrutable and incorrect fashion. “This is great. I want you to have the boys in the photo darkroom print up a blown-up version of this — obviously there’s no other way to get a better look. But that’ll take hours, so let’s the two of us head down to the zoo and start shooting first and asking questions later. Hopefully that blown-up photo will count as ‘probable cause,’ retroactively.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/29/16

I was going to go into a riff about Sarah making fun of her one-year-old brother for not having any friends, but then I realized that Sarah doesn’t appear to have any friends either, especially now that the Morgans have abruptly cut off contact with her mobster patroness. Like, who would Sarah have at her fantasy birthday party with the clown and the bounce house and so forth? Would she invite the kid who made fun of her paintings, just so she could keep him on the other side of a velvet rope and make him watch her frolic, by herself?

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GUYS! Uh, did you know that last week was a big schedule-disrupting travel holiday? That’s why I didn’t post a comment of the week post this past Friday, sorry, I’m sure your comments were all very good, but I’m declaring a COTW-Picking Amnesty and giving handsome Harry Backstayge an extra week.

Speaking of things I’m behing on, I’m still finalizing the line-up for this month’s installment of The Internet Read Aloud, but I can guarantee this: it’ll be good, and in Los Angeles on Friday at 8 pm. You should come!

And I also must give thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar or backed me on Patreon! And let’s give thanks to our advertisers:

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• Two Party Opera: A daily comic that features the Presidents of the United States as they live on the stage of history with the day-to-day news of political mudslinging.
• And if you haven’t bought my novel yet, you should! You can get it in hardback, paperback, or ebook forms. It’s called The Enthusiast, and it’s about trains, comics, stealth marketing, capitalism, and joy.

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