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Judge Parker, 10/9/12

My goodness, I have been incredibly remiss in keeping you up to date on Judge Parker! Mostly because it’s been kind if enh. Quick summary of the last six weeks: after briefly skunking our boys out of their cabin, our nefarious marijuana farmers stole Avery’s camera, because it has pictures of marijuana, but also pictures of a fish that Avery thinks are more precious than life itself. We also learned that Bea is financially solvent only because she’s being paid off by Bubba and his growers; Sam expressed thin-lipped disapproval. And now Avery has gone off to demand his camera back from Bubba, which is bad for him, because he’s probably going to be beaten to death with a chain, but great for us, because it has led to the third panel of this comic, which is probably the greatest thing you will see today and maybe even this year. The overalls! The beard! The chain! The beads of sweat and/or boils, can’t really tell what those things on his face are supposed to be! Papa to Adam … bring in the slicker! BRING IN THE SLICKER!

Mark Trail, 10/9/12

Usually battling overalled rustics is more Mark Trail’s cup of tea, and maybe we’ll get to that later, but right now Mark has come home just long enough to pull out Rusty’s heart and stomp on it. Haha, Rusty, we know that your loneliness and feelings of abandonment — symbolized my Mark’s repeatedly broken promise to take you on a fishing trip — have left you with zero self-esteem and led you to reckless behavior, like trying to get photographs of dangerous sheep-killers. So how will you react when Mark once again bails on your trip — this time to go on a fishing trip with someone else? “It’s sort of a business and pleasure trip … but mostly pleasure. The pleasure comes from not seeing Rusty!”

If the main character in any other strip said he wanted to “get some good pictures of bonefish,” you know I’d be all over it, giggling like a 12-year-old. But this is Mark Trail talking, so let’s show some respect! (By “respect” I mean respect for whatever terrible neurological or psychological disorder leaves Mark unable to experience or even understand erotic feelings of any kind.)

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Spider-Man, 10/8/12

I know there are like thirty-seven wildly differing versions of the Spider-Man mythos occurring across various forms of media at any particular moment, but in the newspaper strip (surely the iteration that’s earning the least for Marvel Entertainment, LLC, and its corporate parent, The Walt Disney Corporation), this is the deal with Spidey and MJ’s living situation: they have an apartment in New York, probably Manhattan, which is implied to be small and crappy even though of course as drawn it’s significantly larger than any New York City apartment not owned by a hedge fund manager. I’ve assumed that this is all they can afford because MJ’s mid-range movie/Broadway star money and whatever spare change Peter earns as a freelance newspaper photographer pretty much cancel each other out.

But! Apparently I’ve been wrong and MJ’s painfully unfunny play made her tons of money and they’re leaving the overcrowded hellhole of New York behind them for some ghastly neo-neo-Georgian mansion just off the LIE, where Peter can wander around the corridors in his tatty bathrobe, complaining not just about how much less he makes than his wife but also about how long it takes for him to commute into the city to get yelled at by J. Jonah Jameson. Really, getting eaten by a tiger would probably be a blessing for both of them at this point.

Hi and Lois, 10/8/12

“We can get totally blotto in front of the kids and they’ll be none the wiser! I mean, I’m high all the time and you don’t ever notice, so it should be easy to fool them. Wait, did I say that last part out loud?”

Funky Winkerbean, 10/8/12

Oh, were you worried that, what with his impending remarriage, Les was no longer haunted by the spectre of his dead wife? Don’t worry, he is super duper extra haunted by the spectre of his dead wife.

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/7/12

At last, a definitive answer to the question I’ve been musing on for years: Are Hagar and his entourage Christians or pagans? Hagar, at least, appears to still worship the gods of the old Norse pantheon, as is perhaps befitting for the bloodthirsty leader of a violent war band. Given the lack of intra-Norse civil strife and the friendly relations between Hagar and Brother Olaf, we’ll just have to assume that the action of the strip takes place during one of the more peaceful lulls in Norway’s transition to Christianity, which generally involved one side gaining dominance and attempting to violently suppress the other. Indeed, today’s strip shows how hearts and minds can be changed without use of force, as Hagar begins to question his allegiance to deities that were explicitly believed by their worshippers to not be all-powerful or all-knowing.

Herb and Jamaal, 10/7/12

So I read this strip and thought “Haha, at last, I get to see the moment when Herb and Jamaal goes completely nuts,” but then … it turns out this quote is in fact floating all over the Internet as attributed to Desmond Tutu? There’s never any explanation of the context in which he said it, though, which sets my “let’s attach a quote we like to a random famous person” alarm bells going off. Still, the good Archbishop is a cyclist, so who knows! Anyone who can confirm or deny this quote gets a shiny Internet quarter.

Edited to clarify: The “give a man a fish…” phrase is as old as the hills and clearly not originated by Tutu. I’m specifically wondering if he was the one who turned it into a joke about bicycling.