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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/17/14

Sarah may have easily defeated an elementary school bully, but now she’s facing a much more difficult challenge: a rich old lady who always gets what she wants, mostly because she’s rich. She’s like Sarah, except a legal adult! In a way, she supposes she does work at the museum, except in the sense that she pays for everything, so the museum works for her, and so does everyone in it, including Sarah. Sarah is right to break out in a cold sweat in the final panel! This is her most difficult adversary yet.

Six Chix, 6/17/14

Six Chix generally offers a vaguely crunchy-liberal take on modern American life, which makes today’s strip a refreshing change of pace. The chickens, of course, are a metaphor for us: while we’ve been led to believe that we should be eating local and organic food and getting in more physical activity like our ancestors did, the truth is those ancestors started driving everywhere and eating processed foods and TV dinners as soon as they could for a reason: because processed food tastes better and physical activity is a pain in the ass. Like caged chickens that remain motionless for their entire lives and are fed an endless supply of corn byproducts, most humans find the idea of not watching TV and eating non-Dorito foodstuffs irritating and pointless.

Wizard of Id, 6/17/14

Wizard of Id is a strip that routinely uses actual torture as a grim punchline, so it’s nice to see it keeping up with the times, I guess.

Apartment 3-G, 6/17/14

Never thought I’d say this, but … where’s Tommie? What’s Tommie up to? I’d sure like to see what’s going on with Tommie, rather than this small-town-gossip thought balloon madness.

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Crock, 6/16/14

Somehow, it ain’t like the old days, right everybody? It used to be that when someone said “boombox,” you had a pretty good idea what they meant: a luggable radio with a built-in tape deck, built as large as it could get while still being portable, so the huge speakers could put out really loud bass. But boomboxes have been out of favor for 20 years, so who even knows what that word means anymore, or what any word means, for that matter. Kids today and their slang and their polysemy make language a baffling morass. Is a boombox a metallic glove now? Sure, why not!

Lockhorns, 6/16/14

This joke, obviously, is some kind or riff on Loretta’s eggs (or maybe biscuits? what pairs with brownish goo that you need to eat with a knife and fork?) being so poorly prepared that they have the consistency of vulcanized rubber; nevertheless, my immediate assumption was that Leroy was referring to Vulcans from Star Trek, which makes sense because obviously the emotional hellscape of his failed marriage is something he desperately wants to escape by whatever means necessary. Perhaps he’s trying to put himself through the Kolinahr, the Vulcan monastic discipline under which the last vestiges of emotion are purged away. “How long does it take to complete the Vulcanization process?” he wonders aloud. “When will I become a creature of pure logic? When will these awful, awful feelings stop?”

Mark Trail, 6/16/14

MARK IS IN AFRICA, everybody, and by “Africa” we mean some nonspecific country in Africa where there is fine dining but also ladies who carry things on their heads. Mark is supposed to be meeting Jacob Hickman to save the rhinos, but Jacob Hickman has been kidnapped so Mark is just going to sulk at his hotel restaurant instead. “Now I’m stuck here! I’m bored! There’s nobody to punch!”

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Family Circus, 6/15/14

Most of us know our parents pretty well, so I guess I’ll believe Billy when he claims that his dad’s “favorite kind of stuff” consists of just horrible pun after horrible pun. That said, though, I’m pretty disappointed by the quality of this pun-map. It’s like Billy started out intending to do one entirely made up of celebrity name puns (and kudos for spanning decades of American celebrity culture, from Orson Welles to Andrew Garfield) but then ran out of ideas and just started throwing in bullshit like “Rock of Ages” and “Sit-Up-Straight” and (ugh) “Great S-Cape.” What I’m trying to say, Billy, is that it’s a bad Father’s Day present if you can’t even keep up the central conceit of your homemade gift for like 15 minutes, and you should be ashamed of it.

Blondie, 6/15/14

But I’ll give Billy this: at least he didn’t jam a ruler into is sleeping father’s gaping maw, in order to figure out how to build a meat-bomb that will occupy every available cubic inch of his gullet.