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Non Sequitur, 4/25/05

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: I think Wiley, of Wiley fame, is going insane. I think we can all agree that his Sunday strips have slowly evolved from tepid, ham-handed satires (e.g., “Esme in the Land Before Time” or what have you) into completely whacked-out text-heavy Jules Verne pastiches involving floating Victorian cities, mustachioed balloon-sized men right out of a Thomas Nast cartoon, and pterodactyls being shot out of the sky by evil harpoon-wielding Germans. This has been alternating with weekly strips that have for months now focused relentlessly on Danae, the most evil little girl who has ever lived, who is apparently supposed to represent the horror that is modern American life, only without the charm. Today, however, we’re taking things in a new direction, as we’re apparently going to be treated to a series about a dead hobo’s adorable puppy finding his own way in the world. I’m sure it will be uplifting and won’t make you once want to shoot yourself in the head. Hopefully.

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From Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/24/05

Only the throwaway front-matter gag is worth commenting on in Sunday’s BB & SS, and it’s only worth commenting on to the extent that it enrages me. But boy, does it enrage me. Here’s a tip: when you make jokes that emphasize the weird, Depression-era limbo in which these hill folks seem to live most of the time, sometimes the strip is amusing. When you take transient catchphrases from the late ’90s and try to play them off as “cool,” it just feeds my rage … rage … RAGE!

Anyway, since I have nothing to say about these panels except that I hate them, I thought I’d turn to more pleasant matters and point out that I am slowly but surely falling in love with the “next” teasers that come at the end of Sunday editions of Spider-Man. They’re ludicrously overblown, no doubt on purpose. There’s this:

And this:

And, my personal favorite, this:

Yes, who does have the rhino? I’m sure there are versions of these that you can come up with for other comic strips, which exercise I leave to you, my eager commenting minions of humorous evil.

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Mark Trail, 4/23/05

Be careful, insurance investigator guy whose name I can’t be bothered to look up! You may think you’re having a productive, professional chat with a respected member of the local law enforcement team, but you’re actually standing mere feet away from a bloodthirsty zombie who’s lulling you into a false sense of complacency so he can crack open your skull and eat your brains!

Admittedly, it can hard to tell the difference between a small-town sheriff and the walking undead. Here’s a few “warning signs” that may indicate a corpse reanimated through foul magic:

• Chalk-white skin
• Eyes with orange pupils
• Protruding cheekbones giving the face the appearance of a skull
• Deep shadows cast over one side of the face, seemingly at odds with the actual lighting in the room
• A thousand-mile stare that seems to wistfully harken back to a pre-death-and-unspeakably-evil-reanimation existence

If you think you might be talking to a zombie, run for higher ground! It’s a well-known fact that a zombie’s main mode of locomotion is an awkward shuffle, so they have some difficulty with inclines. In case of mass zombie takeover of your town, be sure to tune in to NOAA radio. If the usual weather report has been replaced by a guttural voice moaning “BRAINS … BRAINS!” over and over, you’re pretty much screwed.

Incidentally, it almost seems like Sherriff Zombie’s directions — “you can find him at Lost Forest” — are some kind of snide joke, but it’s commonly known that zombies have no sense of humor.