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Mary Worth, 6/28/12

Wow, so the letters that people write into Wilbur’s Ask Wendy advice column are … kind of abstract? I mean, usually people send notes to advice columnists with very specific questions, like “How can I convince my son to get a job and move out of the house?” or “What’s a polite way to tell my mother-in-law that how I cook isn’t any of her business?” or (scroll down to the second letter, which is the greatest letter to Dear Abby ever written) “My husband wants too much sex, should I let one of my horny friends sleep with him to take the pressure off me?” But if the letter we’re getting a glimpse of here is representative, Wilbur’s fans just write long, rambling diatribes about their overpowering ennui, full of sweeping, nonspecific complaints about our fallen age, and lacking any particular question or request for advice per se. Are these mopey types attracted to Ask Wendy because Wilbur himself is full of quiet but very deep despair, which radiates out on a frequency only other depressives can detect? Or do we have things the wrong way round — has Wilbur in fact been driven to the slough of despond by the incessant soul-crushing letters Wendy receives? You can see that Mary herself, normally indefatigable and chipper, is already buckling under the weight of sadness in panel one.

Wizard of Id, 6/28/12

In much cheerier news, the Black Death has arrived in Id, striking terror into the hearts of its inhabitants. If historical averages hold, the plague will kill a third to two-thirds of the characters in the strip, but we can always hope for more.

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Blondie, 6/27/12

It’s always the glasses-wearing nerdlinger in the office who’s the first to clue you in on how to use cutting-edge high-tech stuff like “Google search” for work.

Ziggy, 6/27/12

Ziggy’s parrot has taken the liberty of whiting out all the typos in the newspaper, with bird poop.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/27/12

A hitherto unexplored source of Funkyverse misery: local law enforcement is willing and able to dish out brutal beatings to anyone who even hints at DUI or illegal alcohol production.

Hi and Lois, 6/27/12

I originally read Trixie’s “I hope Dawg can wait that long” as a poignant reminder that our pets’ lifespans are shorter than ours, and that Dawg might not still be around by the time Trixie is old enough to take him for a walk. But then I realized it was just a joke about how Dawg is about to pee all over the rug.

Gil Thorp, 6/27/12

Man, with all the exciting teen pregnancy action, Gil Thorp neglected to tell us that the boy’s baseball team was on the verge of winning a championship! Don’t worry, though, they didn’t.

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Judge Parker, 6/26/12

Awww yeah it’s a massive rural marijuana grow operation, everybody! Obviously Judge Parker saw that Mark Trail did a story depicting vast fields of marijuana plants and got noticed by the popular press for it and so now they want in! Judge Parker of course did its own pot-growing storyline back in 2007 and ’08, when Sam and Abbey’s elderly next-door neighbors built a mysterious landing strip and then brought Abbey some brownies which made her act all funny and she and Sam almost had sex but then didn’t and then Abbey tried spying on them to find out more and eventually they ended up getting busted totally off-panel, for growing pot. But this new batch of pot growers aren’t the sort of genteel dabblers who can afford to live in the same zip code as the Spencer-Driver clan; they’re no doubt tougher rural types, connected to both larger drug cartels and inner-city distribution networks, heavily armed and not amenable to soft, rich, big-city types literally stumbling onto their turf. Or maybe their hostility will dissipate once Avery negotiates a multimillion dollar deal for them to appear in their own reality TV series on the Discovery Channel, Real Farmers of Mendocino County.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/26/12

“For instance, you can still love someone even if they snoop on other people’s conversations, always assume that anything negative you say is about them, and get all pissy about it!”

Beetle Bailey, 6/26/12

Desperate to save his only friend from the horrors of war, Sarge tries assigning Otto to desk duty, despite his illiteracy. But the General knows that the Army needs bodies for the front line — and doesn’t care what species those bodies are from.