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Slylock Fox, 10/5/15

Sapient animals: they’re just like us, except in the sense that they had to piece together the fundamentals of an entire civilization in a very brief period of time, mostly using the wreckage of the culture they destroyed during their quick and presumably violent uprising. They’ve done pretty well for themselves, having managed clothes and boats and such; but, unlike humanity, they haven’t developed the elaborate legal theory that would allow ownership of this treasure chest to be awarded on a basis a little firmer than whose footprints were on top of whose. Anyway, the first sentence of today’s solution tells us that the animals are already imitating our worst mindsets.

Hi and Lois, 10/5/15

Hi and Lois is part of a longstanding American tradition of gentle humor about the lives of our relatively affluent middle class. Anyway, in today’s strip we learn that those lives are rife with anxiety, all the time.

Six Chix, 10/5/15

Speaking of animal uprisings, I’m not really sure what’s going on here, but to me the most unsettling thing is that these dogs are in a bed. Do you think these perverts were doing it “human style”? Disgusting.

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Judge Parker, 10/4/15

Oh, hey, I guess we’re turning back to some actual Parker family dynamics in the strip ostensibly named for them! April has just fallen seventeen notches in my esteem for using the perfectly gross phrase “give her a grandchild,” though I’m sort of impressed at how sure she is that she’ll be able to overcome the uncertainties of the human reproductive process within a set timeframe by sheer force of steely will. Of course, we should note the way April artfully deflects Abbey’s assumption that she was going to the Balkans on World Bank business. April is of course a CIA operative and knife-weilding killer, so presumably in a few weeks reports will emerge from Montenegro of an isolated mountain village, the entire population of which was found murdered in their sleep, with the only inhabitant missing being a single newborn baby. Katherine will have her grandchild within the year, all right. Katherine will have it in record time.

Six Chix, 10/4/15

This poor woman is addicted to tops! She must fight this addiction by purging all tops from her life. There will be no tops, only bottoms. Every object will have a lower half but no upper half, an undersurface but no covering. How is this possible? What nightmare of madness-inducing, unnatural geometry is she unleashing on the universe? We will all be collateral damage in her terrible battle against her addiction.

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Spider-Man, 10/3/15

As is my wont with Newspaper Spider-Man characters plucked from the depths of Marvel’s intellectual property vault, I have gone out of my way to learn basically nothing about Prince Namor because I want to learn to love him in whatever hilariously dipshitty way that Newspaper Spider-Man chooses to portray him. I’m not even sure what his biological deal is — he lives underwater, but clearly breathes air and stuff and his people inhabit pressurized undersea environments? But they’re not just humans who moved beneath the waves centuries ago, what with the ears and the eyebrows? And also perhaps their hearts are oversized, to adapt to the oxygen-starved nature of their artificial atmosphere, which leaves then particularly vulnerable … to love? Anyway, the thought that Prince Namor would, if not for his heartbreak, be chowing down on an entire tray of “seaweed royale” is definitely one of the funnier things the comics has taught me this week.

Apartment 3-G, 10/3/15

“The most important thing is that you hover in the room and think good thoughts at her and be there when she wakes up, especially considering she didn’t recognize you before and thinks you’re dead. Don’t get in the doctors’ way! That will be extremely easy, in whatever spacious hospital room she’s in! Stay there all the time, even though you’re not legally related to her! If anyone complains, tell them I said it was OK! I’ll be somewhere else, somewhere far, far away.”