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Judge Parker, 10/27/16

Welp, we always knew the other shoe would drop eventually when the upstanding Parker family, which owns the local judgeship by feudal right, tied itself to a clan of notorious mercenaries and killers! Oh, sure, at first they tried to keep their in-laws in the dark about their illegal activities, but, know this: when your son marries a CIA (?) assassin, you will at some point be called upon to help fake her father’s death.

Mary Worth, 10/27/16

Speaking of trauma in the soaps, Mary, who’s life hasn’t changed in any meaningful way in fifty years, sure seems nervous hearing Wilbur’s tales of When Bad Things Happened Overseas! Considering all the dramatic carnage happening in other soaps, I wonder if Mary Worth is angling to join in on the fun? Santa Royale isn’t far from the San Andreas Fault, is what I’m saying, or from the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. It’d be a shame if the next Charterstone pool party were interrupted by a massive earthquake-tsunami, followed by a wave of radioactive debris falling from the sky — a real shame, I tell ya.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/16

As a paid-in-full member of America’s Elite™, June is always careful to respect trademark law, as intellectual property production is the backbone of our economy. Nobody’s going to be making unlicensed references to the lucrative franchises of The Walt Disney Company here! The characters from The Wizard of Oz, meanwhile, are firmly in the public domain and thus fair game.

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Six Chix, 10/26/16

Happy early Halloween from Six Chix, everybody! I note that these pumpkin-people’s heads and arms are the same bright orange color, which I take to indicate that they are similar in substance and consistency. What prospect do you find spoooookier?

• That their whole bodies are tough and durable, like pumpkin’s shell, which means that every time they move their outer layer grinds painfully and loudly against itself
• That their whole bodies are soft and pliant, like ordinary flesh, even their huge, bulbous heads

Your answer may hinge on how you believe the pumpkin-beings’ faces manifest. Do they merely appear when one of them finally determines the emotion they want to express? Or must they be carved, with a knife?

Funky Winkerbean, 10/26/16

Ha ha, angry rage maniac Bull Bushka’s brain is so battered that his angry rage mania is now an integral part of his personality, says his wife, who has to share a house with him and his irrational violent outbursts all the time now that he’s retired! This isn’t setting up teeth-grindingly awful and tragic storyline for the future, at all!

Pluggers, 10/26/16

You’re a plugger if you don’t just hate reading but try to shame your spouse for liking it.

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Spider-Man, 10/25/16

Let’s be real, guys: the “relative strength of a spider” aspect of Spider-Man’s origin story has always been kinda dopey, right? I mean, there’s a whole bunch of inverse-square-law problems with this, which equally apply to Ant-Man, who was launched by Marvel Comics in 1962, just like Spider-Man. I guess it was a banner year for bug-men in the comics? Bug-men with bug-strength? Anyhoo, it’s nice to imagine that these costumed morons themselves have only the vaguest understanding of what their abilities really entail and how they work, so it’s very exciting to me to see Spider-Man declare that he can defeat a spider with his spider-strength, only for him to be immediately pinned by its monstrous spider-jaws (the relative jaws of a spider) and then killed by the actual spider’s deadly spider-venom (the relative venom of a spider, which you think would come in handy for a superhero, but no, just keep working that “strength” angle, guys).

Six Chix, 10/25/16

One of the more unsettling visual tropes that has been fully absorbed into the collective comics unconsciousness is “trees and fire hydrants are the equivalent of bathrooms to talking comic-strip dogs!” I feel like people love to play with the implications of this joke but lose touch with its origins which lie in the fact that dogs like to pee on said objects. This, I think, is the case here: probably the tire swing is just supposed to represent “what would a really tricked out tree look like,” but now I can’t stop thinking about how dogs maybe like to pee on tires? Or, like, through the hole in the middle of tires? Because they like the challenge, or something?

Dennis the Menace, 10/25/16

A year after the Great Agricultural Collapse, Alice and Henry are still gamely pushing forward, sculpting their daily ration of Nutrient Slurry into a cake-shaped pile in an attempt to remember what it used to be like in the Time of Plenty. Dennis is having none of it. Dennis’s refusal to keep a stiff upper lip in the endless dystopia is a genuine menace to humanity’s ability to cope.