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Apartment 3-G, 7/26/11

OMG SCOTT GAINES! Despite the fact that I sneer at the oppressive nostalgia that lies over the newspaper comics industry like a suffocating blanket, I admit that I love it when the soap strips bring back beloved minor characters from the past. Scott Gaines was briefly engaged to Lu Ann; they met when he was pretending to be a janitor, but then she found out that he was cartoonishly rich. They broke up for some boring reason I forget now; later, Margo, during her brief stint as a wedding planner, took on Nina Blake, whose savagery she found pleasing, as a client; it turned out Nina was marrying Scott, who got cold feet but then agreed to marry her because Margo berated and humiliated him. So I guess now our gal Magee is hitting up the two of them for money? We should be in for serious fun times!

Family Circus, 7/26/11

Ha ha, Billy, you really shouldn’t let Boston Harbor touch your skin! What you’re feeling isn’t so much cold as numbness; the various pollutants are destroying your nerve cells as they rapidly eat through your flesh.

Judge Parker, 7/26/11

This whole plot in Judge Parker — involving as it has Jackie Thornton the man-eating marketing director getting hit by a bus and replaced by her college-age intern who then took Judge Parker Emeritus to see a play but then brought him up a secret passage to the roof where they found a beautiful defense contractor about to kill herself but then Judge Parker talked her out of it except he was accidentally knocked off the roof by the cops but it’s OK he’s totally fine oh and also some mysterious neighbor filmed the whole thing and live-streamed it to millions across the Internet, making him a national hero and his book an instant best-seller — has seemed so ludicrous and contrived, even by the standards of this strip, that many of you have believed quite earnestly that there must be a more rational explanation. Several have suggested that perhaps the whole thing was a set-up, arranged in advance by Constance and Jackie, with Constance playing the suicidal lady and the Internet live-streaming arranged in advance, all to drum up publicity for the Judge’s latest unreadable book.

But as the strip wraps things up, it’s beginning to look like there’s exactly as much here as meets the eye. Today, Judge Parker gives Constance an important lesson in being a character in the comic strip that bears his name: if someone dies and thus makes your already extremely comfortable life even better, you don’t worry about them; you just lay back smugly and enjoy it. Hopefully he’ll soon call in a woman to give her another important lesson that Judge Parker characters need, if they’re female: How to sit down in insanely tight dresses.

Marvin, 7/26/11

So, as was in retrospect fairly obvious, the whole “Marvin gets a brother” subplot in Marvin turned out to be just a dream sequence. Now we’re back to the strip’s sad reality, starring Bernie as a shameless pill addict.

Mary Worth, 7/26/11

Having successfully fended off another painfully awkward marriage proposal from Dr. Jeff, Mary heads off to lunch in triumph. “Yes, table for one, please. Table for one … forever.

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Lockhorns, 7/25/11

I am absolutely in love with the enormous frown on the kid’s face in this panel. It’s like, he’s just gone down to the newsstand to buy the latest Superman comic (because like all of today’s youth he loves twee retro affectations). He didn’t expect to be harassed by some squat middle-aged stranger. Certainly he didn’t expect to be offered an observation so dense with emotional anguish and post-love ennui; he’s far too young to really understand it, but he feels the pain of it flowing out of Leroy and crashing over him in waves. He’s going home a changed person, and he’s going to be looking in his funnybooks for the real stories, the stories about what makes people human (hint: it’s suffering).

Slylock Fox, 7/25/11

Once again, Slylock proves that he simply can’t stop with the sleuthing after tiny clues, even when it isn’t necessary. I’ll bet he makes the poor techs down at the CSI lab work for days with him on figuring out the make of the tires that left those treads in the concrete before finally admitting that he also has access to the perp’s license plate, which they could connect to his registration and home address by spending about thirty seconds in front of the computer. I’m less interested in his sad and increasingly desperate little game than I am in the nattily attired duck standing on the corner. While everyone else in the neighborhood appears traumatized by the reign of automotive terror that just blew through the subdivision, he just stares forward with big, soulless eyes, like he’s a jarring minor character from a David Lynch film.

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Panels from Dennis the Menace, 7/24/11

Alice Mitchell has suffered so much horror at Dennis’s hands that she’s responding the only way that makes sense — by numbing herself to all sensory input. Look, her vision is already fading! She can’t even make out her husband’s eyes anymore.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 7/24/11

“I’m freeing my son from the clutches of these quacks, with their so-called ‘x-ray machines!’ Come on, we’ll take you home and get some leeches on that arm right away.”