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Dennis the Menace, 9/22/11

Mrs. Wilson knows she needs to calm her radical anti-establishment husband down if this encounter is to end without violence. “Now, dear, you and I both know that 911 is a joke, but there’s no need to call him a pig to his face. You’ll just get tasered in the neck again, and I don’t think your heart can take it.”

Judge Parker, 9/22/11

Wow, that’s quite a large amount of cash that Sam and Abbey can just pull out of their bank account on a whim. Do you suppose that all subsequent Judge Parker storylines are going to be more and more transparently about the Spencer-Driver clan’s wealth? Will every strip in April of 2012 just consist of the two of them sitting around counting out hundred-dollar bills, pausing only to occasionally blow their noses into them?

Marvin, 9/22/11

Despite my burning and irrational hatred for Marvin, I have to admit I feel a twinge of sympathy for him in the second panel. Look at his growing sense of panic as he learns that, as his life draws to a close decades from now, even the joys of eating will elude him! Quick, someone tell him something reassuring about old age, like that he’ll finally be able to start wearing diapers again.

Spider-Man, 9/22/11

Yesterday’s post implied that Spider-Man would inspire by sick children by going to the hospital and getting arrested. In fact, he’ll inspire them by going to the hospital and telling them that being a superhero is for suckers and quitting in disgust. We regret the error.

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Shoe, 9/21/11

Here’s the thing about jokes of the form “you put the X in Y,” where X represents one or more syllables in Y: the humor only works if the X makes up a part of Y even though the two words are not related semantically. For instance, if your significant other had travelled into orbit as part of the U.S. space program, it would be funny if, after admiring their attractive backside, you said, “Baby, you put the ‘ass’ in ‘astronaut.'” However, if you were dating an Olympic champion, you shouldn’t say, “Baby, you put the ‘win’ in ‘winner,'” as that would sound very, very stupid. “Crank,” in the sense of an eccentric, obsessive person, is actually derived from “cranky,” so the level of wordplay here is pretty disappointing to say the least.

(OK, I admit that I launched into that etymological and linguistic lecture entirely because I’m particularly proud of the “you put the ‘ass’ in ‘astronaut'” joke I thought up.)

Anyway, I do enjoy the cranky old Biz character in Shoe despite the fact that he’s being linguistically ill-used here. I particularly like the fact that he’s angrily berating Roz for always serving him tasteless tasteless food, and yet he nevertheless comes to Roz’s to eat all the time. Isn’t there some other bird-restaurant where the bird-people of Shoe eat? I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of snooty place where they serve fancy bird-French food. Maybe Biz can’t afford it, on his bird-Social Security.

Spider-Man, 9/21/11

So, just to keep you up to date, Peter Parker is insisting that, because a bunch of sick kids are expecting Spider-Man to visit them at the hospital, he must go to the hospital, even though the police are after him and also know that he’s planning to visit the hospital. Because if there’s one thing those sick kids want to see, it’s their hero getting arrested.

Apartment 3-G, 9/21/11

Ruby has heard you complaining about how her hair is dumb, and has responded by dying it Manic Panic red! That … that’s what you wanted, right?

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/20/11

Have you ever had the experience of seeing a word in print and thinking, “Wait, I thought I knew what that meant, but now I’m not so sure! Did she really steal a piece of metal from the machine shop, spend every night in her cell slowly and methodically carving down one end of it into an incredibly sharp point, and then stab her English paper in the kidney and leave it to bleed to death in the prison yard?” It turns out that “shank” as a verb can also refer to a bad shot in golf, so I guess she means that she screwed up on her attempt to write the paper, because if there’s one thing teenage girls go in for when they’re talking to themselves in their room, it’s golf metaphors!

In other news, remember how after the Funky Winkerbean time jump we were supposed to spend more time getting to know the next generation of high-school aged characters? Instead, we’ve mostly gotten Les being smug and maudlin and self-righteous and lusted after by various deluded women. But at last, we now have a genuine teenage plot! It will involve Crazy Harry’s daughter plagiarizing her English paper off the Internet, which will give Les an excellent opportunity to be self-righteous.

Judge Parker, 9/20/11

You know your opening gambit in a negotiation is the right move when it makes your adversary vomit in terror.