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Judge Parker, 10/25/09

I know I’ve been kind of missing in action over the past several Judge Parker storylines, as they just haven’t had that classic mixture of ludicrous and emotionally detached that first drew me to this strip. But I have high hopes for the noir-ish plot brewing now. “D’Vito” is a transparent Bernie Madoff stand-in who was gunned down hours after making bail, and “Henry” is one of his victims, an apparent patsy set up for the murder — oh, and also dying of colon cancer.

Anyway, coming events promise to offer lots of opportunities my favorite Judge Parker recurring theme: that the privileged main characters can just barrel ahead and do whatever the hell they want because rules don’t apply to them. Sam, smelling a rat in this case, visited Henry in jail and essentially told him (Henry) to that he (Sam) would be serving as his (Henry’s) defense attorney, a proposition to which Henry never actually agreed pre se. Nevertheless, I’m sure that the police will allow Sam’s law partner to poke around all the potential evidence in Henry’s house. Also, in those first two panels: lying to get evidence from someone who may be a potential witness or co-conspirator? Sure, why not? All that, and soothing a troubled millionaire whose feeling are apparently tender after he assaulted a photographer are all in a day’s work for Sam Driver: Smug Dick at Law! Oh, and as panel three assures us, there will also be breasts.

Slylock Fox, 10/25/09

Is this the cruelest Slylock Fox Sunday mystery ever? One must picture Max Mouse, finally allowed to go work on a case on his own for once, carefully counting off the paces in some rural backwater, digging enormous holes with a shovel three times as long as he his tall, desperately looking for Slick Smitty’s ill-gotten gain — all while the perp himself is just standing there with his girlfriend, laughing. You have to imagine the level of anxiety he must have reached before he finally pulled out his itty-bitty cell phone to call his boss, who will of course never allow him out of the house alone again now that he’s shown his incompetence at basic ratiocination. It’s a sad, sad day for tiny prey mammals.

Dennis the Menace, 10/25/09

I have to kind of admit that I kind of like this Dennis the Menace for the glimpse it offers us into Henry and Alice’s bucolic pre-Dennis lives. I imagine them in college, both of them tall, gangly young people recruited for their skills on the volleyball court. I like the thought of a pair of mirror-image crushes from afar — Henry attending games played by the women’s team, Alice going to the men’s games, each pair of eyes settling on a player that strikes their fancy, with a long physique that looked good in those short volleyball shorts. Then, at a party thrown by members of one or the other team, the two finally work up the nerve to talk to one another, and, over a few cheap keg beers, begin to see the dim but hopeful outlines of a future together. It will be a future dominated by their awful, hated son, of course, but it would be impossible for them to know that, so let’s leave them for the moment in their youthful happiness.

On that note, I also appreciate the fact that the strip has left to our imagination exactly how Dennis has managed to turn a game of volleyball played in an apparently dry yard into some kind of mud-soaked nightmare.

Beetle Bailey, 10/25/09

In light of the many Beetle Bailey strips that depict man-on-tree sex, I find at least one form of camouflage depicted here particularly troubling.

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Gil Thorp, 10/24/09

So it turns out that all imprisoned-brother-haunted ticking time bomb Duncan Daley needed to do to find emotional support was to let his idiot friends in on his little secret! Hopefully I’m not offending any current or future high school jocks by questioning how willing and eager Shep and Robb (or perhaps two other interchangeable friends with stupid names) are to help, as this isn’t a social class known for its nurturing attitudes. Even Ted Peare’s teammates pretended that he was infected with a deadly disease when they found out he was homeless!

Anyway, with the Mudlark locker room softened by this outbreak of drama-killing, touchy-feeling emotional support, we have only one place left to turn for hard-hitting narrative action: prison! Let’s hope that we just gloss over the rest of Milford’s undoubtedly doomed football season and just focus on the shankings.

Barney Googe and Snuffy Smith, 10/24/09

Good lord, now we know why the malformed child known only as “Tater” has remained an infant throughout this strip’s multi-decade run: Loweezy has been forced by rural poverty to birth a whole series of little Taters and hand them over to the greedy Silas, who as the owner of the General Store is the only resident of Hootin’ Holler who participates at all in the national non-barter-based economy, and to whom the Smif clan is presumably heavily indebted. We can only hope that this sinister shopkeep is selling the babies to parents so desperate to adopt that they won’t question too closely the size of the gene pool that spawned them, as the other possibilities are even more terrifying.

(Side note: Showing the limits of the modern information age, the name of Snuffy Smith’s store owner character is one of the no doubt many bits of data that cannot be easily found with a quick Google search. I had to find it the old-fashioned way: looking through the archives until I found a strip where one of the other characters addressed him by name. My God, it was like living in 1997!)

(UPDATE: Uh, yeah, as several posters have pointed out, Silas’s name is in fact right there in the strip. Of more interest however is the person who mentioned that his name is also in the Snuffy Smith Wikipedia article. I had of course consulted Wikipedia on this important subject, but had looked up the feature under its official name, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which does not include this vital data. Why on earth are there two articles on this subject? Oh, there’s an angry merge template going up on those articles tomorrow, believe you me.)

Family Circus, 10/24/09

I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: that Jeffy can’t determine the relative ages of the people he sees on the TV, or that he can’t differentiate between displays of maternal and romantic affection. For his sake, I’m hoping that his horrified parents will realize what he’s watching and ratchet the V-chip protection levels on this TV set up so high that the only thing it will get is the Weather Channel.

Ziggy, 10/25/09

Ziggy is using a slight variation on the ancient “they asked for a number to call in case of emergency, so I wrote ‘911’” joke to draw attention away from the fact that nobody on Earth would lose a moment’s sleep if he were hospitalized or dead.

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Mary Worth, 10/23/09

My goodness, is Mary actually admitting that (a) she once didn’t know everything and (b) she once had the capacity for love? This is like hearing Satan mention that he once attended junior high school. Anyway, this anecdote seems to be going to some kind of “and then he died” place that can’t possibly make Adrian feel any better. “So during one of these periods when I was punishing him with my silence for his transgressions, he was killed in a shootout when his police unit was raiding an opium den. I felt terrible about it, for a week or so, but then it passed! What I’m trying to say, dear, is that if you make your heart an icy stone, nothing can hurt you.”

My Cage, 10/23/09

My goodness, I have to admit that when Jeff’s son mentioned yesterday that he’d be playing a character from a comic strip in his school play, Masky McDeath never once occurred to me as a possible candidate. Well played, Ed Power, writer of My Cage! Let us know what it’s like waking up tomorrow with Lisa’s tumor-ridden head in your bed.

Pluggers, 10/23/09

Having already absorbed hipsters and hippies into their collective, pluggers have settled on their next target: preppies. It’s pretty clear now that nobody is safe, and those of us who refuse to settle for life as folksy, semi-literate furries need to start preparing for the final, apocalyptic war for survival.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/23/09

Can’t you just hear the little metaphorical lightbulb switching on over Earrings O’Punk’s shaved, off-screen noggin in the final panel in this strip? I certainly hope the denouement of this plot finds him at the crooked old folks home, feigning dementia to score free meals. He deserves a happy ending, as he’s by far the most sympathetic character in this storyline.

Marmaduke, 10/23/09

Marmaduke’s owner was hoping that he would “take care” of the town’s homelessness problem by going down to the shelter and devouring all the hapless hobos. Instead, he’s assembled a pack of stray dogs who will urinate on every single piece of furniture that his owners possess.