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Hi and Lois, 11/14/14

This starts out looking like it’s going to be about a good kid resisting peer pressure, moves quickly through recognizing the false promises of advertising, then settles on some profoundly depressing existential ennui. “What’s the point of trying new things? Nothing ever really changes. We’ll just be sitting here on this couch, fundamentally, no matter what superficial things we try to add to our lives. Those fleeting, flickering images on the screen, the sense of excitement and novelty they convey — those aren’t real, or at least can’t ever be real for us. We’ll just be sitting here on this couch, forever.”

Momma, 11/14/14

It turns out that if you really want to keep Momma away from your door, you need to call in the most powerful practitioners of ancient magick that you can find.

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Shoe, 11/13/14

It’s a well-known technique among schoolchildren everywhere: if you don’t know the answer, just dazzle ’em with some prokaryote erotica.

Mary Worth, 11/13/14

OK, so, the whole point of this storyline is that Mary has deemed Hanna no longer competent to drive and is now browbeating her into making significant lifestyle changes as a result. And yet look at panel one. This is one of the worst parking jobs I’ve ever seen. Mary has thrown her car diagonally across this admittedly enormous parking space willy-nilly, and in panel two is just unbuckling her seatbelt like she thinks it’s good enough. It’s super not good enough, Mary. BAN MARY FROM DRIVING ANYWHERE FOREVER.

Family Circus, 11/13/14

I like how profoundly angry Jeffy looks at being forced to breathe in some of (presumably) Mommy’s perfume and appreciate it as it’s meant to be appreciated. No, he seems to be saying, I will not and never will experience puberty! I will be a filth-covered little melonheaded urchin for eternity within the Protective Circle. Adulthood means change. Adulthood means death.

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Crankshaft, 11/12/14

Everyone knows that Crankshaft rests on twin pillars that I like to call the “two Ms”: malapropisms and misanthropy. The strip’s really been leaning on the former for the past week or so, with “punchlines” that have involved the words and phrases “painted themselves out on a limb,” “battle-ax states,” and “electrical college.” But this I decree to be not up to snuff. “Nasal” derives via French from the Latin “nasus,” and “nose” from the Old English “nosu,” and both of those come from the same ultimate Indo-European root. They’re basically the same word, in other words, with just the vowel shifted a bit, which means this is unacceptably lazy wordplay. The whole point is to mash unrelated terms together! And you’re pointing to your nose! As if we’re incapable of figuring out what “nosal passages” might refer to! Come on, get it together, Crankshaft.

Herb and Jamaal, 11/12/14

“One of those new cashing devices on your phone,” on the other hand, is perfect. It is an amazing example of someone trying to refer to a technological advance who’s heard about mobile payment systems but doesn’t understand anything about how they work and has zero intention of doing any research about them. Never change, Herb and Jamaal. You keep doing you.

Judge Parker, 11/12/14

Oh, boy, that chainsaw-weilding maniac I ordered has arrived, and in just three weeks, which in Judge Parker is a unit of time so fleeting it can only be recorded with the most delicate scientific instruments! I had neglected to order Sam Driver’s washboard abs, but I approve of the gender-inversion of the usual horror movie trope where sexy ladies take off their clothes and then are gruesomely hacked to bits. (This trope will be further inverted when, instead of being gruesomely hacked to bits, Sam will be handed a substantial sum of cash for no real reason.)