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Sally Forth, 10/3/14

True Story: Sally Forth is the comic strip that first got me thinking seriously about comics time, the phenomenon by which characters in a long-running comic stay basically the same age, but the cultural signifiers surrounding them also stay current which implies that not only their present but their past is slowly moving forward through the space-time continuum. Because it’s hard to notice that strip-time present is changing to match real-life present, you tend to notice this most during flashback sequences, as I did when an early ’00s Sally Forth storyline about Ted and Sally meeting in college featured Ted wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt. I’d been reading the strip since I was a child, and so obviously Ted and Sally were my parents’ age, and this blew up everything I thought I knew.

Anyway, something about this particular storyline, about Sally and Alice meeting for the first time twenty years ago, has been nagging at me all week, and I finally put my finger on it: Alice is in fact sporting 1994’s hottest haircut, the Rachel, which works great for the milieu but makes the fact that her current-day character model still has the same Mid-’80s Business Lady Hair that she’s always had seem even stranger.

Spider-Man, 10/3/14

SUPERHERO: “I’m trapped! I’ve got to use my superpowers to escape!”

[SUPERHERO tries for, like, thirty seconds]

SUPERHERO: “Well, that didn’t work. Time to resign myself to death!”

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!!!!!!!!!!!

Beetle Bailey, 10/3/14

It’s funny because you can tell the chili is too hot because it’s on fire and also Beetle is literally cringing in pain and his face-flesh is covered with horrible burns

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Mary Worth, 10/2/14

Thank goodness little Gordon’s cognitive functions have been completely captured by horrifying mouse cartoons since Monday, so he doesn’t have to listen to his mother and his grandmother bicker over who gets to spend less time with him! Currently he’s staring at Non-Copyright Infringing Superhero Mouse and playing with his action figure and pretending he’s participating in its uncanny valley adventures, so he doesn’t hear his reluctant caregivers dancing around the issue of s-e-x. How are either of these single ladies going be able to go on dates if they have to supervise this mute little ginger, who needs to have his bugged-out eyeballs moistened every few hours as he watches the Rodent Cartoon Channel?

Those shadows in panel one show just how brave Hanna needs to be to defy her daughter: if Amy were to stand up straight, her knees would clearly be level with Hanna’s waist. It’s not easy to say no to a terrifying giantess!

Dennis the Menace, 10/2/14

Speaking of unsettling size differentials, has Margaret always been so much larger than the boys? Anyway, in today’s panel, Joey, this strip’s holy fool, reveals his complete ignorance of the arbitrary ethnic labels that divide human beings from one another. Dennis and Margaret, already so fully inculcated in the lie of nationalism that it seems a part of nature to them, regard him with pitying stares. It’s a panel that’s truly menacing in its implications.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/1/14

I like the looks of surprise in panel two not just on Miss Buxley, but on the faces of the two passers-by at the bottom of the panel. There’s no particular reason they should be showing sudden horror at the gaping, angry Sarge-maw, but their epiphany mirroring Miss Buxley’s fits in with the dream logic of the whole strip, and by “dream logic” I mean “Jesus Christ this is a Freudian bonanza of sublimated psychosexual squick.”

Spider-Man, 10/1/14

Last week, Spider-Man battled Doc Ock the only way he could: by not battling him at all, but letting another villain he accidentally set free from jail do the battling for him. Today, he’s getting actively annoyed at this thrilling super-powered combat getting all up in his personal space while he’s trying to just relax a little.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/1/14

“The floors are cover’d in bird shit, jes’ like our house, though!”