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Heathcliff, 10/3/13

Of the 24 blackbirds that had been captured, stunned, and laid atop a disc of pizza dough just before it was shoved into an unbearable hot oven, 23 somehow survived the hellish inferno and emerged with enough strength to fly off when Heathcliff opened the box. They were horribly burned and forever traumatized, to be sure, but at least they had avoided the grisly fate awaiting blackbird number 24. Perhaps it had mercifully succumbed during the baking process; but perhaps it was still conscious, covered in cheese and sauce, too weak to move, but still terribly aware of Heathcliff looking down at it, not even with hunger, just with cool, heavy-lidded detachment. He would be eating that last blackbird, oh yes. In his own time. In his own time.

Spider-Man, 10/3/13

You can’t even imagine how happy I am to see Spider-Man smugly announce he’s going to use one of his bona fide superpowers, and then fail really ostentatiously, while producing a hilarious “NHHHNN” noise. It’s like they wrote this strip just for me! “I loosened it for you” is what you say as a joke when you try and fail to open a pickle jar and then someone else opens it easily, by the way. Anyway, I hope that our poor sad-eyed webbed-up guard was able to derive at least a little bit of satisfaction from this whole scene.

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Spider-Man, 10/2/13

You can tell that Spidey’s become fully part of Tarantula’s desperate guerrilla army because he’s willing to participate in ethically dubious shenanigans like this. Sure, war is hell, and fake surrenders can help you achieve tactical victories, but at what cost? Once El Condor’s soldiers stop respecting the white flag of truce for their own safety, the bloody insurgency will reach truly gruesome levels of carnage.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/2/13

Lukey looks rightfully horrified as he realizes that the time is quickly approaching for his Reaping, the day when the inhabitants of this desperately poor community decide that he’s not worth keeping alive anymore and ritually tear him to shreds so they can put his remains to whatever use they can. That tongue depressor the doctor’s using? It’s made out of human bone!

Dennis the Menace, 10/2/13

So Dennis heard a new word in school today, but instead of paying the extremely minimal amount of attention necessary to the linguistic context to try to figure out what it meant, he instead came up with an interpretation that would lay the groundwork for an awkward and vaguely sexually charged question for his mother and called it a day. Pretty menacing, all in all!

Marvin, 10/2/13

Never let it be said that Marvin isn’t innovative! It’s not just a strip about urine and feces, you see. Sometimes it’s about vomit! Copious amounts of vomit! Foul-smelling hot dog vomit, washing over people and furniture like an endless flood, like a natural disaster. Ha ha, the vomiting baby’s name was “Hurly,” you see, because of vomit!

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Mark Trail, 10/1/13

Happy U.S. government shutdown day, everybody! In keeping with his tendency to say vaguely nice things to everybody and let his underlings take all the controversial stands, Senator Mason has decided that Washington, D.C., is an extremely unpleasant place right now and that he’d much rather head off on a little vacation. As a federal employee, Dusty Rhodes is now officially furloughed, but that’s OK; instead of being forced to tell the senator about all the stuff he’s not supposed to do on federal land, he can join Mark and the gang in shooting as many animals as they want, digging for oil at random, and burning down huge swaths of forest, for kicks. Who’s gonna stop them? The government? Hahahaha!

Heathcliff, 10/1/13

I don’t want to alarm you but it appears that the Garbage Ape has started to attract notice even beyond the readership of this blog. I’m all for Heathcliff’s brand of off-putting surrealism finding a wider audience, but I think creating a Robin to the Garbage Ape’s Batman in an attempt to cash in on the character’s growing renown is too precious by half.

Momma, 10/1/13

You can tell I’ve been reading Momma for far too long because what mainly irritated me about today’s strip on first read was the weird, awkward way Francis just looks at Momma in silence for two panels and not, say, the unspeakable Oedipal horror.