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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.

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The Phantom, 7/30/16

In the non-monastery-based Phantom Kids Go Off To School plot, the Phantom’s daughter Heloise is at her fancy boarding school in New York with her new roommate, who is, unbeknownst to anyone, the daughter of her father’s mysterious arch-nemesis, Eric Sahara, the Nomad! The girls are anxiously feeling each other about their fathers and the nebulous sources of vast wealth that allow them to attend an expensive private school. Don’t feel awkward or out of place, girls: you’re mingling with the children of New York City’s elite! Plenty of your classmates’ parents have killed people. Mostly they’ve killed them by firing them so they don’t have health insurance anymore, but still.

Mary Worth, 7/30/16

Vicodin®: It Can Help You Clean Up An Explosive Diarrhea Situation™! Ask your doctor if Vicodin is right for you, your family, and your sandwich eatery that maybe has a little more E. coli in the meat than is strictly ideal.