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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/20/24

Look, I’ve been to plenty of comedy open mics in my time, and the thing you have to keep in mind about them is that they are generally extremely depressing and poorly attended, and the people who do come are invariably all comics looking for a few minutes of stage time who are staring at their phones or mentally running through their sets when other people are performing and who inevitably leave once they get off stage — slinking back home, if they’re lucky, or trying to find another mic, if they’re truly in too deep. Anyway, my point is that you don’t normally see a bunch of people sitting there watching attentively as in panel one. The Glenwood entertainment scene must be truly dire if this many people are coming to see an open mic that allows literal children to perform, and those children are trying to make a genre they’re calling “neo-vaudeville” happen. Are there no roots country concerts these poor souls could be attending instead? Has it really come to this?

Hi and Lois, 8/20/24

It’s pretty funny how exasperated Hi looks in the second panel. Wow, Hi, sorry your kids are taking an interest in your professional life! Although I do think the ribs thing isn’t realistic; it seems more likely that Dot’s initial Google takeaway would be more “Wait, Kansas City is in Missouri? What the heck!”

Hagar the Horrible, 8/20/24

Ha ha! It’s funny because Hagar and his family will freeze to death in the bitterly cold Scandinavian winter!

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Slylock Fox, 8/19/24

Slylock is not alarmed because he knows about the square cube law, which dictates that this unnaturally enlarged mosquito’s body will not be able to support his own weight and he will soon die as his respiratory and circulatory systems collapse. We can only pray that Weirdly’s mechanical tinkering with the bug’s brain wiped away his conscious mind so that he doesn’t have to experience the excruciating process.

Mary Worth, 8/19/24

Remember Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? Well, get ready for the upcoming Ed-Estelle wedding plotline, Veterinarians Think About Sad Dogs Who Want More Pills All Day, While Unpaid Veterinarian Assistants Spiral Into Bridezilla Mania And Possibly Set The Stage For Actual Fightfights At Their Weddings. I’m tentatively into it!

Gasoline Alley, 8/19/24

Sure, you might say that blogging about comics is “pretty easy all things considered” and “not a real job,” but have you considered the untold psychic damage I take every day, for your amusement, as any number of insane comics details burrow permanently into my brain? For instance, years from now, when my mind has turned to soup and I have forgotten the name and face of everyone I ever loved, I guarantee that if you visit me in whatever facility I’m warehoused in and whisper “Chief Meowrice” into my ear, the correct neuron sequence will fire and my mind’s eye will be presented with the image of this horrible French cat advertising pitchman. If I’m lucky, the experience will kill me.

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The Phantom, 8/18/24

A fun running bit in The Phantom is that we sometimes see original Phantom creator Lee Falk going about his day in pre-war Manhattan, musing about whatever direction the Phantom storyline is going to go in next. This can cause minor issues when it comes to suspension of disbelief, since the Phantom clearly takes place in the 21st century; I buy that Falk could’ve dreamed up plutocrats with their own private rocket companies, though independent post-colonial African states seems a bit more of a stretch. However, I have a harder time believing that our comics scribe neither keeps copies of his own strips nor subscribes to the newspapers that print them and needs help remembering plot points from a few days ago. I guess we really lost something when we replaced friendly one-man newspaper stand businesses with the Internet, although the Internet would also be happy to show Lee Falk last week’s strip, if he asked.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/18/24

This is in fact a repeat of a mystery that ran back in June of 2022. However, it’s been redrawn and recolored and — crucially, to establish the much worse vibes — has had dialogue added to show that Slylock has decied to dispense with even the flimsy pretense of rule of law that Forest Kingdom cops operate under and is about to dish out a brutal extrajudicial beating on his shrew nemesis.