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Judge Parker, 8/9/10

Well, it turns out that Sophie’s cheerleading-driven powers of all-knowingness only give her universal access to cold, hard facts about whose ex-boyfriends are back in town, and whom those ex-boyfriends have divorced. The underlying motivations behind those circumstances are as opaque to Sophie as ever, and it’s kind of heartening to see that the youngest Spencer-Driver foundling is still an unsettling android-child, despite her makeover into a tween fashion plate. “NEDDY-UNIT: THE SOPHIE-UNIT DEMANDS INFORMATION ABOUT LOVE AND THE EXPERIENCE THEREOF! WILL LOVE OVERLOAD THE SOPHIE-UNIT’S CIRCUITRY IF SHE ATTEMPTS TO INCORPORATE IT INTO HER TOP-LEVEL ALGORITHM? THE SOPHIE-UNIT WILL INITIATE THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘IRRITATION’ (SUCCESS OF IRRITATION-INSTIGATION SUBROUTINE ESTIMATED AT > 95%) IN THE NEDDY-UNIT UNTIL THE DESIRED INFORMATION IS GIVEN!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/10

Ha ha, the chicken has fallen in love with Snuffy, whose main source of food is the chickens that he steals and eats! This has the potential for being one of the funny pages’ great tragic love stories. Let’s hope the artists don’t shy away from the heartbreaking beheading scene!

Dick Tracy, 8/9/10

Wow, usually we don’t get to see the badly decomposed corpses until the end of the Dick Tracy storyline. What exactly is that lump floating atop the body in panel one — is there an alligator lazily feeding on the poor sap, with Officer Hugepelvis gingerly sneaking up on it with plans to taser it? This could be the greatest Dick Tracy plot ever, if by “greatest” you mean “with the highest body count,” which is really the only metric I can think of that fans of this strip would respect.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/8/10

The best sadness in today’s Funky Winkerbean (because that is how one should evaluate any day’s Funky Winkerbean, by determining which of its many sadnesses is the best) is not Funky’s failure to recognize how his own unquenchable anger has infected every aspect of his life; that’s a theme that’s been harped on a bit too much of late to be fresh. No, my favorite is Crazy Harry’s rage at Funky for selecting a private service for parcel delivery, choosing reliable tracking capabilities over long-standing friendship. One assumes that Harry’s hangdog expression in the next to last panel is due to this betrayal, and not over the psychological implications of the new t-shirt design.

Panel from Marvin, 8/8/10

Unfortunately, this panel does not depict Marvin’s parents watching with bored detachment as their son is carried away by hungry rodents, with Jeff responding to his wife’s earlier question, “What kind of hungry rodents are those, carrying Marvin away to eat?” But I’ve put isolated it here like this, so you can pretend that it does.

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Blondie, 8/7/10

Ha ha, Dagood is a philistine who only appreciates books for their physical qualities, not for the wonders of storytelling contained therein! Of course, the third-panel payoff should have been evident from the beginning of the strip, as nobody selects a whole bookshelf’s worth of books with identically colored covers for their literary qualities. (Longtime readers of this blog will remember the day Dagwood made this mass sham book purchase.)

Judge Parker, 8/7/10

Oh my goodness, now we know why Sophie was so keen to become a cheerleader; she’s gone from being a mere know-it-all to being literally omniscient.