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Mary Worth, 8/28/23

Big news: in the presence of their beloved dogs, Saul and Eve have agreed to marry one another! Since their last attempts at matrimony involved a hated arranged marriage that ended with Saul’s dead wife buried in an undersized grave and Eve’s dog taking a bullet to protect her from her abusive husband, respectively, this trip to the altar can only go better for both of them. Saul’s the luckiest man in Santa Royale, or at least luckier than Tommy, Wilbur, or Dr. Jeff.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/23

The form of adoption that became common in the 19th and 20th century west, in which infants would be taken in by strangers and any connection to their birth family severed, is, historically speaking, an aberration; the vagaries of mortality meant that adoption has always occurred, of course, but much more commonly it involved orphaned or abandoned children being taken in by kinfolk or neighbors in the community (and in most pre-industrial settlements, those amounted to the same thing). One assumes that’s the process by which Snuffy and Loweezy’s have come to be the guardians of their nephew Jughaid, but his exact relationship to them is unclear — I’m not even sure if it’s ever established whether one of his parents was Snuffy’s sibling or Loweezy. At any rate, one wonders if Jughaid remembers his birth family, or if his adoptive parents ever think of their departed relations and hope they’re doing right by them in the way they’re raising the boy. Panel two here suggests that Loweezy, at least, is worried that they very much are not.

Slylock Fox, 8/28/23

Hmm, Slylock sets free the suspect identified by a forensics expert and instead just arrests the guy he had already decided was guilty? This one’s a little on the nose, in my opinion.

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Hi and Lois, 8/27/23

All the Walker-Browne golf strips are sad, of course, because they’re about golf when they could be about literally anything else. But this one is particularly sad, I think we can all agree. Look at the huge smile on Thirsty’s face in that last panel! There’s nothing he loves more than spending the day out on the links with his best friend, then relaxing with him together and discussing the game. Hi, meanwhile, is starting to outright panic that Thirsty simply will not go away so he can spend some time with his wife, who (unlike Thirsty) he actually likes.

Dick Tracy, 8/27/23

Look, I know that I complain a lot that Dick Tracy’s glory days of theatrical ultraviolence are sadly far behind it, so I must admit the current Minit Mystery, which apparently involves professional baseball players bludgeoning each other to death in the locker room due to poor on-field performance, is pretty ultraviolent, actually.

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Gasoline Alley, 8/26/23

Hey, remember the bear in Gasoline Alley who can talk? Well, he found a human baby abandoned in the woods and brought him to the ranger station for safekeeping. Today we learn that he’s “heard” of angels but doesn’t know much about them, which implies to me that while bears in the GasAlliverse are sapient and can talk, they don’t have eternal souls that live on after death. Some real unsettling implications there if you think about it!

Dennis the Menace, 8/26/23

Margaret is showing Dennis was a true menace is: she’s not only irritating Mr. Wilson, but breaking the fourth wall and confronting the comics’ aging readership with the fact that the late 1990s were 25 years ago.

Marvin, 8/26/23

Imagine if your house was burning down, everything you own going up in flames, but one of the firefighters who’ve come to help has to sheepishly tell you that they can’t hook their hoses up until a bunch of dogs finish pissing. That’s life in the Marvinverse, Where Piss Comes First™.