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Judge Parker, 6/20/14

Good news, everyone! Everyone’s shared love for Judge Parker Senior’s unreadable book has helped broker a truce between warring factions, and now the wedding reception can continue. Now we can focus on the important questions, like: did Randy get married in a mint green suit? For real?

Mary Worth, 6/20/14

Wow, this is a disappointing revelation on a number of levels. First, it seems kind of lame that the heavenly prophecy Olive received was just “don’t go near the pool, kid.” But even worse is how casual she seems about it. “Mommy, mommy, a glowing, heavenly messenger of the divine with huge, terrifying wings came down from heaven and whispered in my ear and told me never to go swimming!” “That’s nice, dear. Say, do you want to take swimming lessons?” “Enh, maybe, let me think about it.”

Mark Trail, 6/20/14

Welp, looks like Woods and Wildlife’s expose on rhino poaching has been derailed because their African contact has been kidnapped or killed or something. But don’t worry, Mark’s glommed his way onto some white couple’s safari, so he’ll be coming back with a bunch of wildlife pictures that look exactly like the wildlife pictures available from wire services or Wikipedia. He’ll still be expensing the whole trip, of course.

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Shoe, 6/19/14

Someday in the far future, when the only relic of 21st century human culture is a multi-volume hardcopy of TV Tropes, laboriously hand-copied and bound in a post-apocalyptic monastery, I will be chiefly remembered for coining the word nephewism to describe a scenario where fictional characters live with their aunts and/or uncles for never-quite-explained reasons. The relationship between Skyler and his Uncle Cosmo seems like a particularly grim version of this. Cosmo grudgingly supplies Skyler with a roof under which to sleep, thanks to blood ties and a ghostly memory of affection for a presumably deceased sibling, but that seems to be about it. Certainly we never see the two of them eating anything resembling a family meal; usually the Perfesser sits too close to the TV eating off his tray and and Skyler is left to fend for himself. There isn’t even another chair in the living room for the kid to sit on. I guess he’ll be eating his TV dinner in his bedroom, assuming he has microwave privileges.

Mary Worth, 6/19/14

There have been some hints so far in this storyline that Olive’s parents have been less than thrilled with her wild imagination, presumably to set them up as the villains, so you’d think that they’d be rather horrified by this pronouncement, and yet they seem to be giving each other pleased knowing glances in panel two. A possible clue: note the WOW CHIPS in the background of the first panel. WOW was a brand used by Frito-Lay in the mid ’90s to identify products that contained Olestra; Olestra, if you’re too young to remember, was an artificial fat substitue that had some less than pleasant effects on the human digestion system, leading to a tortuous negotiation between the food industry and the FDA over a vaguely commercially viable synonym for “anal leakage” that could be used in an on-package warning label (the compromise arrived at was “loose stools”). Anyway, Olestra never really took off, for obvious reasons, so I’m guessing the WOW brand is now being used for chips with similarly dodgy ingredients — mild hallucinogens, say — and so Olive’s parents are glad they’ve finally fed her enough of the stuff to get some marketable visions out of her.

Gil Thorp, 6/19/14

The past six weeks of Gil Thorp have focused relentlessly, and crushingly boringly, on the love affair between Amy and Lucky, and both kids’ inchoate ideas about good and bad luck and how they’re stealing it from each other, and it’s been so super boring that I barely made it through that sentence. Anyway, I just want to point that Gil somehow getting his players SUPER REVVED UP about clawing their way into a tie for second in the conference neatly summarizes the Mudlarks’ usual sports competence.

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Mary Worth, 6/18/14

Oh, hey, here’s a real thing that’s happening in Mary Worth: neglected little Olive is, we are told in the words of the omniscient narration box, literally receiving a revelation from a shining angel of the Lord. I mean, sure, we could’ve dismissed the pagan vision of flower fairies as just being a product of an overactive imagination, but this seems pretty straightforward: Olive is the instrument of God on Earth, come to deliver us His message. The main drama of this storyline will thus be Mary’s seething resentment over not being the Chosen One. One assumes that she will eventually take on the role of St. Paul to Olive’s Jesus, doing the work to found an organization and massaging the original message to her liking once the Prophet has been conveniently taken out of the picture.

Beetle Bailey, 6/18/14

On first reading this thoroughly baffling strip, I guessed that “Queen of Hurleyburg” was some kind of archaic idiomatic phrase describing a stuck-up person, like “Queen of Sheba,” that would be familiar to the 70-and-up crowd that makes up Beetle Bailey’s core readership. But “Queen of Hurleyburg” resulted in zero Google hits; instead, it seems (according to this four-year-old Usenet discussion thread) that Hurleyburg is the town that is immediately outside the gates of Camp Swampy, and, though I would have thought it was under the jurisdiction of the United States, it has apparently set itself up as an independent monarchy. General Halftrack is now on foreign soil, and without a status of forces agreement in place between the U.S. and Hurleyburg, he may find himself quickly tried and summarily executed for lèse-majesté.

Apartment 3-G, 6/18/14

Because I read the comics so you don’t have to, I went back and checked: we haven’t seen Tommie since June 6, haven’t seen Margo since May 10, and haven’t seen Lu Ann since April 29. Will any of the inhabitants of the titular Apartment 3-G ever appear again? Will they eventually fade into the strip’s history, making occasional appearances like Barney Google in the strip that still bears his name, while the main drama focuses entirely on Carol, and her love for absent Jack, and her sidekick Freddy who is a … possum? Let’s say possum.

B.C., 6/18/14

Unlike Mary Worth, B.C. does not see employee-employer relationships as mutually beneficial.