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Slylock Fox, 6/9/14

Do it, Max, Sly said to Max, silently, with his eyes. Do what you have to do. The irony was palpable: he was, after all, a fox, and there was a time when everyone knew that foxes had to be free, and the awful truth that they would chew through their own flesh and bone to escape a trap became a cliche. Slylock, who like all his anthropomorphic brethren had no memory of the Before Times, couldn’t appreciate the little joke, but presumably Count Weirdly could, presumably that was why he had set up this macabre little scene in the first place, why he had shackled Sly up in a room with a mouse-sized open window, left that saw out where Max could find it. In fact, the more you thought about it, the more obvous the many layers of irony Weirdly had baked into this sick little scenario became: the sudden Emergence of Earth’s animal life into sapience had nearly wiped out the human race, and forced poor holdouts like Weirdly into inaccessible fortresses, but Slylock now had too much cognitive power to free himself from a trap the way his kin could before, too much ability to understand the consequences of his own actions, to foresee the agony and the blood, to bring himself to do it. But he knew that if he remained in Weirdly’s captivity, worse would happen, much worse. So he had no choice but ask his best friend to do the unthinkable, to place the the sharp steel against his flesh and begin to … oh, wait, what? The eye hook is made of some different material? Haha, yeah, sure, that’d work too. That Count Weirdly, always forgetting some crucial detail! Ha!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/9/14

The whole underlying point of this endless Rex Morgan, M.D., Sarah plot is that Sarah is a frighteningly precocious adult-child and everyone around her is in a state of mortal terror at all times. They’re so terrified, in fact, that they never actually call her on any of her shenanigans, which is why the pushback she’s suddenly getting is completely fascinating to me. Either she’s going to shatter at the first sign of direct confrontation in her life, or this young man’s going to be a smear of gore with a few bits of blond crewcut in a manner of minutes.

Spider-Man, 6/9/14

YES, Dock Ock! It’s not enough that Spidey be shown up, he must also be MERCILESSLY HUMILIATED! More taunts, I say!

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Judge Parker, 6/8/14

OH MY GOD

THE MURDEROUS, VILLAINOUS ARMS MERCHANT NAMED “FLACO” WHO’S BEEN MENACING OUR HEROES FOR MONTHS IS GOING TO SPARE THEM BECAUSE HE LOVED JUDGE PARKER SENIOR’S TERRIBLE, UNREADABLE BOOK

THIS IS THE GREATEST POSSIBLE RESOLUTION TO THIS STORYLINE, MUCH MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN I COULD’VE POSSIBLY IMAGINED

Seriously, remember back on the cruise where we first encountered these sinister wedding-ruiners, and Alan read a negative review of his book from an awful elitist Ivy League double-professor, and then later he ran into her on the cruise and he publicly humiliated her, because she had an opinion? That character will have been treated by our narrative with significantly less compassion than Flaco, who sells deadly weapons to the highest bidder in conflict zones worldwide and before that worked for the Securitate, the most notoriously brutal Eastern European secret police of the Cold War era, all because Flaco loves Alan’s shitty spy novel. I love everything about this. Maybe Flaco will stop demanding the diamonds back, as long as they’re invested in turning The Chambers Affair into a terrible, unwatchable movie? Dare to dream!

Momma, 6/8/14

Sure, Momma is terrible to her kids, but there’s nobody she’s harder on than herself, and it’s often in her dreams and reveries that she really lets her self-loathing run rampant. Here she is imagining being spurned by her husband, in the afterlife! Or maybe just her corpse is being spurned by his corpse? Either way, pretty depressing!

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Beetle Bailey, 6/7/14

Oh, look, it’s more fun on The Halftracks Hate Each Other Saturday! The joke here, I think, is that while the General might view his zany “KISS THE CHEF” apron as a marker of his laff-a-minute attitude towards life (and it did genuinely take me a minute to parse the idea that “KISS THE CHEF” is supposed to be “funny,” rather than just some kind of weird long-standing cliche), it only serves to remind his wife of his notorious roving eye and lack of affection for her. If that’s the joke, it would have worked better if the Halftracks had been hosting a cookout party of some sort and there were lots of party guests present, pretty ladies among them; we’ve never seen any such thing happen, presumably because the General’s entire social life consists of playing golf with his sycophantic mid-level officers, and his wife seems to have no friends to speak of. In the context of what we actually see here — which is to say, the General is grilling two hamburgers, because he and his wife are the only ones eating and are the only ones there — a more reasonable guess at the punchline would be that Mrs. Halftrack is repulsed by the idea of physical contact with her husband and rebelling against suggestions that she initiate it, though honestly that seems a little dark for this strip.

Dick Tracy, 6/7/14

So this slo-mo intermittent Dick Tracy-Little Orphan Annie crossover is still happening, I guess! Today, Daddy Warbucks is brazenly offering to straight-up bribe whatever city Dick patrols (Neo-Chicago?) so that the police department will assign its best officer to his particular case. He’s … supposed to be a good guy, I think?

Apartment 3-G, 6/7/14

At last, the setup promised by this strip has been realized! Anyway, if a deer and a horse can be friends, if by “be friends” you mean “be in proximity to each other for a few minutes while the deer is literally being held in place,” then sure, there is hope for us all, if by “there’s hope for us all” you mean “this alleged deer-horse relationship tells us nothing about the human condition or our potential for happiness or intimacy with our fellow beings.”

Dennis the Menace, 6/7/14

I mean, he’s making you dig your own grave, Dennis, so, probably! It’s not like you’ve got a lot more years to look forward to, if you catch my drift.