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Gil Thorp, 11/16/22

It’s been a while since I’ve kept you up to date on the various plot threads in Gil Thorp, a strip that appears to be on a breakneck pace to cover all the Teen Issues before comics and/or teens are declared illegal, but the important thing to know here is that (a) Milford High held a hyper-realistic mass shooter drill, presumably with help from an overly enthusiastic theater department, that left Keri sobbing uncontrollably in front of their peers, and (b) a hitherto unseen Milford student named Allyson is one of three hitherto unseen Milford students who have died of a drug overdose this semester, so naturally these threads come together with a fistfight at a funeral. I’ve noticed what struck me as a fairly deliberate choice to show Keri sporting chunky rings across four fingers this whole semester and I’m quite pleased to have seen this little detail pay off so violently! Anyway, I deem this as the greatest Newspaper Comic Strip Funeral Fight (Continuity Strip Division) since the Great Rex Morgan Coffinside Strangulation of 2012.

Crock, 11/16/22

Man, sometimes you have to admire it when a newspaper comic strip manages to slip a grammatically correct but semantically absurd “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” type sentence in there. “The government gave my cousin Kyle a great buy on his farm” sure is a sequence of words, all right! Did you manage to parse out what they meant? Did you successfully interpret them to potentially mean that Kyle still owned the farm, but the government was able to do things like bury toxic waste there? I myself did not.

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Blondie, 11/15/22

I love this comic, which is quite clearly the product of a person who has never encountered protests or union organizing (here collapsed into a generic “picket”) outside seeing them briefly on cable news framed in a vaguely negative way, and has no idea why they happen or how they work. Yes, definitely people are recruited into the abstract idea of a picket, and only when they turn down the opportunity to participate as if they were a teen in an afterschool special who just said no to drugs are they wooed with information on what the picket is actually about. That explains the “A ‘Nappy’ Makes Me ‘Happy”’ lady, who apparently thought she was going to a protest for equal rights for diaper fetishists.

Hi and Lois, 11/15/12

It was a particularly rough day at the office — so rough that Mr. Foofram had to use the time-reversing technology from Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet to extract a few extra hours of work from Hi, meaning he’s coming home older than he should be. Lois has told him that he needs to complain to the Department of Labor about this, as Foofram isn’t paying him overtime, but he won’t stand up for himself!

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Mary Worth, 11/14/22

I have to say that I’m proud of our girl Iris here: the fact that she was almost dragged to her death by the weight of her hunky boyfriend’s rippling muscles is intrinsically far more interesting than the fact that she later accepted his marriage proposal, and she’s right to lead with it. I’ll even allow her to imply that the big story was her own potential doom, which seemed a lot less likely thank Zak’s, if only because it’ll rattle Mary’s cage a little. “That’s right, Mary, I’m out there getting that high you can only get by staring your own mortality in the face. What’s the closest you’ve ever come to meeting your maker lately? Letting Dr. Jeff steer the boat when he’s had two Michelob Ultras?”

Dennis the Menace, 11/14/22

This is definitely one of the grimmest panels Dennis the Menace has ever done. Every night Mr. Wilson has one nightmare, the same one that also occupies his every waking moment. Keep pulling on whatever you’ve wrapped around his neck, Dennis, and put him out his misery.

Dustin, 11/14/12

A fun fact about Dustin, the newspaper comic strip about the conflicts between feckless young people and their older family members who genuinely despite them, is that it’s one of the newer comics in the syndicated world and yet was also launched in 2010, which I regret to inform you was a full 12 years ago at this point. Now, in 2010, would a storyline about a young person trying out this new “blogging” business make sense? Sure, barely. Does it now, in the year of our lord 2022? Let me assure you that it very much does not. As America’s #1 newspaper comics blogger, I am uniquely positioned to deliver this sad news.

Pluggers, 11/14/12

ME [in a room full of high-powered Hollywood executives/perverts]: Gentlemen, it’s been more than 20 years since we made history with American Pie, the story of a teenage boy who fucks a pie. America’s gotten a lot weirder since then. So what if, for our next move… [I advance the PowerPoint slide deck to reveal “PLUGGERS: THE MOVIE: A BEAR FUCKS AN ICE CREAM CONE”] [the Hollywood perverts shower me with $100 bills]