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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/30/23

I guess Mud Mountain Murphy’s apology tour has now become Mud Mountain Murphy’s relentless attempt to extract forgiveness from Truck, which isn’t exactly in the spirit of humility and self-abnegation that Professor Mirakle preached, I don’t think. Mud has apparently decided to check in at the Glenwood Hotel, which is where Truck sheltered in place after contracting some kind of not-COVID respiratory virus in the spring of 2020. It’s a real shithole, which is why it was the perfectly depressing setting for a roots country tune that went unpredictably viral, which ironically means that, despite being in better financial straits, Truck feels honor-bound to just live there permanently now. Anyway, I can’t remember if the owner was originally one Glenwood’s surprisingly large contingent of roots country maniacs before all this happened; I’d like to imagine that he was more a classic rock guy, or maybe into Motown, but was compelled to get way into the roots country scene after his establishment got RootsTok famous, which would explain both his pompadour/sideburns lewk and his clear knowledge of the Mud-Truck feud’s current status.

Six Chix, 8/30/23

I love that this dog is derisively telling his owner to “tell it to the postman, dude.” The Postal Service is of course the mortal enemy of the canine race, and a dog can imagine no better way to degrade you than to suggest that you voluntarily interact with one of its employees.

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Hi and Lois, 8/29/23

Look, I’m just a simple city boy who’s always had his trash collected by a municipal service department, and I don’t understand the wily ways of suburbia with its advanced public-private partnerships and such. That’s why the relationship between Hi and his garbagemen has always puzzled me, as it’s often implied that he’s paying them directly in some way? I always assumed they were contracted by his HOA or something, but now that I find out that it’s actually some kind of anarcho-capitalist situation where different suppliers compete for dominance both by offering superior service for better prices and by using violence to intimidate or eliminate their competitors, I have to admit that I’m a lot more interested.

Blondie, 8/29/23

If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know that inside me are two wolves: one that gripes “Ugh, this long-running legacy comic has been beating the same joke into the ground for decades” and the other that gripes “Wait, this is out of character! Why isn’t this long-running legacy comic strip character using one of the beloved jokes he’s been doing for decades?” Anyway, today the second wolf has triumphed, and I have to say I’m disappointed that the punchline here is “Ha ha, wouldn’t it be funny if men liked reality TV?” rather than the reveal being that Dagwood was watching America’s Next Top Sandwich or The Real Sandwiches Of Beverly Hills or Love Is Blind And Also They Eat Sandwiches or something.

Dennis the Menace, 8/29/23

Alice shaming her son for not having any friends to play with? A rare menace reversal here.

Dick Tracy, 8/29/23

“A real piece of shit. We all wanted him dead and whoever did this to him should get a medal. Frankly I’m pretty furious the coroner called you down here. Nobody in this locker room is going to testify at trial.”

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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.