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Cathy, 8/24/09

For most of mid-August, Cathy revolved around Irving’s Facebook-inspired loathing of his current haircut, followed by his intense anxiety about switching hairdressers, so his studied nonchalance upon actually getting a new ’do is deeply irritating, matched in that regard only by everything else that’s happened in Cathy ever. Fortunately, in the final panel, it appears that our put-upon stylist is planning to behead her annoying customer with her clippers.

Dick Tracy, 8/24/09

I’m pretty curious about the conversation that led up to today’s first panel of Dick Tracy, in which the creepy Mr. Pops attempts to explain to Dick the rudiments of his job description. “So, Mr. Pops, I noticed that when you and your similarly dressed cohorts were performing, the audience members’ mouths were pulled up at the corners, and they were expelling air from their lungs in a series of short, staccato bursts that sounded like ‘ha, ha’. More troubling still, in those moments they appeared to not be consumed by thoughts of torture and death. What sort of diabolical scheme is this?”

Slylock Fox, 8/24/09

This may be the first Slylock Fox mystery strip I’ve seen in which two humans interact with each other, and I’ve got to say that I find it very disturbing that Slylock is there to protect the property rights of a man who sells animals for a living. Despite all of his nosey police work, Slylock appears to be nothing more than an vulpine Uncle Tom, happy to buttress the institutions that enslave his fellow beasts! For shame, sir!

Also, seeing as Slick Smitty must be freakishly strong to be able to hold up a bag of water more than three feet in diameter, I certainly hope that Slylock’s human overlords trust him enough to arm him, or else this could get ugly.

Mary Worth, 8/24/09

“…but then Ian said something pompous that irritated some drunken hooligans, so, long story short, he got stabbed to death. Hey, is Charley Smith still single?”

Sigh. Sorry, Scotland, I don’t mean to make cruel jokes about your reputation as Britain’s knifecrime capital. It’s just that, while a Charterstone pool party is usually a happy occasion to me, the one getting underway here can only be a source of sadness, as it marks the definitive and anticlimactic end of the Charley-Delilah-Lawrence storyline, which was once so promising. Sure, we’ll always have that deliriously wonderful week in Charley’s love pad, but I can’t help but think that the strip could have reached even greater heights of entertaining insanity. Would Ian’s cruel, violent death at the hands of junk-sick thugs alleviate my ennui? Well, maybe a little.

Hi and Lois, 8/24/09

Speaking of Scotland, today’s Hi and Lois offers a particularly pathetic look into Hi’s inner life. Sure, it’s only natural that a guy would want to ditch out on his wife and family to go play golf among the stab-happy Scots — I mean, how can wives and families ever match up with golf, right? However, it appears that Hi’s reverie consists not of him actually taking a golf vacation, but rather of him telling his layabout neighbor that he wishes he could take a golf vacation. It’s a sad day when your fantasy life consists of turning down opportunities that really aren’t even that exciting in the first place.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/23/09

While there’s a long and noble history of enlisted men holding their superior officers in scarcely disguised contempt, I’m a bit concerned about the next to last panel here, in which the men of Camp Swampy visualize the country they’ve sworn to protect as a smoldering ruin, barely held together by primitive bandages. Has the rampant incompetence so frequently on display in Beetle Bailey infected the rest of the military, leading to a successful invasion? Or do Beetle and his platoonmates simply hate America?

The ruined United States in the thought balloon is also horribly misdrawn, with northern New England lopped off, half of Mexico annexed, and the Great Lakes reduced to a greenish blob, but since Americans are notoriously ignorant of geography, this is simply par for the course.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/23/09

The content of today’s Funky Winkerbean, in which Les demands that Summer listen to a terrible joke that serves as a very thin layer over his pain over her mother’s death, still raw more than a decade later, is pretty depressing. Still, things may be looking up, as this little father-daughter moment appears to be illuminated by the bright glow of some all-consuming fire. Perhaps a nuclear attack on Westview will finally release the damned inhabitants from their misery.

Marvin, 8/23/09

Since this is Marvin we’re talking about, for “college” we should read “prison,” obviously.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 8/23/09

HEY, EVERYONE, MARGO IS TALKING ABOUT HER LADY BITS RIGHT THERE IN THE SUNDAY PAPER OH MY GOODNESS

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Archie, 8/22/09

Friends, Romans, comics-lovers, I come to praise the AJGLU-3000 today, not to bury it in scorn! I admit to feeling a frisson of compassion for Mr. Lodge, as his anxious loathing of Archie has reached such a level of intensity as to somehow create some sort of psychic link between the amiable everyteen and Riverdale’s richest man. Just as Harry Potter’s scar surges with pain when his evil nemesis Lord Voldemort is plotting something, so too does Mr. Lodge break out into an anxious sweat whenever the Andrews boy approaches his palatial compound, the route the lad is taking towards shameless moochery off the Lodge fortune burning brightly in his mind. He’s so distracted that he can’t even focus on the financial news, which includes a feature on how the current financial crisis has ruined fellow cartoon plutocrat Rich Uncle Pennybags.

For my money, though, the most intriguing aspect of this cartoon is the way that the Lodge manservant (this is Archie, home of the most painfully obvious nomenclature in English-language literature outside of Pilgrim’s Progress, so I’m pretty sure his name is Jeeves) is lurking half-heartedly in the third panel. I’m not sure if he’s supposed to be hiding himself at the edge of the doorway so as to leap out and bludgeon his employer’s teenage tormentor to death at an opportune moment, or if he’s just realized that he needs to lean over a bit to be visible in the frame, so it doesn’t look like Mr. Lodge is rambling insanely to nobody in particular.

Curtis, 8/22/09

If you were going to start running Curtis in your newspaper and felt like you needed to offer a quick primer on the feature to your readers, you could hardly do better than today’s installment. About two-thirds of the strip’s themes — Curtis doesn’t want his dad to smoke, Curtis likes a girl who can’t stand him, Curtis is emotionally manipulative, Curtis wants money — are packed into just four panels. Add “Barry is even more manipulative” and “Every Kwanzaa the strip goes on a delightfully entertaining two-week long mescaline binge” and you’re all set.

Mark Trail, 8/22/09

So, after investigating environmental misdeeds, witnessing an attempted murder, and then tracking down an assassin, vigilante-style, Mark has turned matters over to … the Department of Homeland Security? Sure, why not. I was going to smugly go on about how ludicrous this was, but DHS is such a huge, baffling catch-all bureaucracy that it may in fact have some kind of division responsible for organized crime intimidation related to illegal disposal of toxic waste for all I know.

I’m sort of impressed by the way the Sheriff Whosit’s word balloon emerges from more or less the same spot in both panels, even though the second is the usual Mark Trail extreme critter close-up. It’s as if the first panel were shot through some sort of x-ray telephoto lens, and then the second was taken after the camera zoomed all the way out but remained otherwise stationary.