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Mary Worth, 9/10/14

While I was busy voyaging across America, Uncle Lumpy kept you appraised of important developments in the story of Mary Worth and Olive The Special Sensitive Child: specifically, that Mary told Olive she should believe hard in her most powerful delusions, and then provided some weird pseudo-biological justification for this insane advice. Now Olive is laughing it up about the supposed “second brain” in her “tummy,” but I feel it’s important to make clear that Olive doesn’t have some bundle of nerves sending her crude flashes of insight from her torso; she receives literal divine messages from actual angels. Is Mary committing blasphemy against the Almighty by tricking His prophet into believing in a mundane explanation for His messengers? Or is the strip endorsing the bicameral theory of mind, with Olive slipping slowly out of the mental state of our distant ancestors and reconceptualizing her “visions” as part of her own consciousness and not from a separate being? Either way, it’s terribly sad.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/10/14

I mean, I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise, given the extremely low levels of educational attainment in Hootin’ Holler, but this school scene is extremely sad. Note that only two of the students have writing implements — not that that matters, as there’s nothing available to write on, and they’re presumably just serving as a talismanic reminder of the bygone era, several generations back, when they lived in a literate society. The Holler’s parents should be angry at the guv’mint, what with its complete abandonment of its mission to educate everyone, even those in the nation’s poorest communities.

Dennis the Menace, 9/10/14

Wait, does Joey have a … little sister? I can’t remember seeing anything about his home life, ever. I choose to believe that instead Dennis and Joey have, in a vaguely menacing fashion, just shown up on a neighbor’s doorstep and demanded to hang out with their toddler. “C’mon lady, let us in, we have a truly hilarious bit of wordplay planned but we need your kid as a springboard for it.”

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Spider-Man, 9/9/14

It does seem a little sad that, in order to find a foe worthy of Newspaper Spider-Man’s capabilities, the strip creators have had to pick a character out of the deep Spider-Man rogues gallery who’s literally a moron. I do like the Ox-eye’s view in panel two, in which Spidey attempts to physically draw the information out of his bewebbèd foe. In panel three, our hero expresses shock that someone in the criminal underground wouldn’t want to freely give out his name.

Archie, 9/9/14

I’m truly enjoying the emotional roller-coaster our hapless fast food employee is on here, from glum sadness to eye-twitching rage. Remember, advertising isn’t just business-to-consumer communications (B2C, as we say in the biz); it’s also business-to-business, or B2B! Join the fast-paced world of fast-food franchising, where you can serve delicious burgers to customers who are as attractive as these handsome actors! The sour looks all around in the final panel are a sad commentary on the web of mutual deceit on which modern consumer culture is built.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/9/14

Isn’t this charming! The mysterious millionaire who creepily wears widow’s weeds at all times and her thuggish henchman have brought these children to a windowless warehouse corridor in a dangerous neighborhood! GOOD PARENTING DECISIONS BY THE MORGANS, AS PER USUAL.

Blondie, 9/9/14

Anthropologists tend to see distinctions between societies that enforce rules of social conduct based on guilt and those that enforce them based on shame. They should probably study wherever it is Dagwood came from, since he is clearly capable of neither.

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Blondie, 9/8/14

Wait, wait, Dagwood, I want to hear more about your line of food-themed children’s books! Like Beauty and the Beef: does a simple peasant girl fall for a handsome prince who’s under a witch’s curse and has been turned into a succulent, mouth-watering plate of roast beef, and the girl must lift the spell before her love for the prince is overwhelmed by her hunger? Or Three Little Pigs In A Blanket: is this how the story should’ve ended, with the Wolf victorious and the pigs devoured, though not before their (still living?) bodies are wrapped in flaky, delicious biscuit dough? And “Wee Willie Twinkie” — clearly an anthropomorphic Twinkie, but a child, younger than Twinkie The Kid, trapped eternally in a prepubescent state like a boy vampire by Hostess Brands LLC’s devilish formula of shelf-stabilizing food preservatives. “Please eat me!” Wee Willie begs the reader. “I cannot decay over time! I’m an abomination against all that is natural and good! I long for death!” Anyway, these sound like they wouldn’t be traumatizing at all and I think Dagwood should spend a lot of time and money trying to get them published.

Dennis the Menace, 9/8/14

I originally saw the quotes around Dennis’s sentence here and assumed he was repeating something he had just heard on TV, while looking over his shoulder at his mother and presumably showing a creepy lack of affect: vaguely menacing, I thought. But I went back and looked at older panels and nope, it turns out the dialogue for Dennis the Menace is always set out in quotes, meaning that this is something he’s saying to his mom about … the fact the he’s watching people on TV making out, maybe? “Look, Mom, maybe this is several years earlier than you expected me to start looking for ‘Adult Situations’ in the television listings, but let’s establish a policy now of never talking about it, OK?” Menacing level: extreme.

Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 9/8/14

One thing that’s fun about the Funkyverse is when women in stereotypically attractive professions (newscasters, personal trainers) are drawn with heavy-lidded, half-dead eyes. Somebody knows what they like! They like it when you’re so beaten down by life that you can’t feel anything anymore. Anyway, Crankshaft controls the last viable bee colony in his county — and perhaps in the world? — giving him unprecedented power over agricultural production, and, by extension, our very existence. And also Funky doesn’t want to do his exercises! Wacky!