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The Phantom, 10/16/24

The Avarice AI’s suicide attempt was actually a murder-suicide attempt, but it failed in both respects ignominiously, so now the poor robot has to sit there and listen to further lecturing from the Ghost Who Lectures, this time about how its declaration yesterday that it was “the unified sovereign of this planetary body” was wrong, since it thinks it’s on the moon, since the moon isn’t a planet. Far be it for me to chastise a guy for pausing his violent battle against a novel machine intelligence in order to smugly establish that he’s technically correct, the best kind of correct, but if you do that, you have to actually be technically correct, and I regret to report that the big purple guy is, in this case, not. In astronomy, a “planetary body” is an alternate term for a planetary mass object, which is defined as any body large enough to achieve achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (to hold together as a sphere or something close to it, in other words), but not large enough to sustain fusion like a star would. Plenty of objects in our solar system meet this definition, including a whole suite of natural satellites, of which our moon is one. So the score is now Avarice 1, The Phantom … well, several higher than 1, and we know he’s going to win eventually, but we gotta give this robot this one, it deserves it.

Gasoline Alley, 10/16/24

Ida Noe the evil magic doll has already tried to kill these children once, by taking them back in time to the horrors of the Civil War, but has now realized that it would be much more efficient to simply transport them beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will quickly asphyxiate.

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Gasoline Alley, 10/15/24

Wow, I guess I see why Sophie has a different teacher than the other two girls! I’ve been trying pretty hard to avoid learning any specific details about these nightmare children, but now we know specifically which two are the “smart ones” (hint: not Sophie).

Dennis the Menace, 10/15/24

Just showing us Dennis and Mrs. Wilson reacting to a picture we can’t see? What a tease! WE DEMAND THE HOT MR. WILSON PIC, SHOW IT TO US AT ONCE

Shoe, 10/15/24

“I wonder if a tiger ate him?”

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Mary Worth, 10/14/24

“You’re right, Mary! I made a decision meant to avoid pain of the type I had suffered before, but now, under your careful guidance, I’ve learned that was a mistake. I’m ready to marry yet another emotionally unavailable workaholic! I’m ready to be a widow twice over! Thank you, Mary, for breaking my spirit!”

Intelligent Life, 10/14/24

Sure, this comic strip conflates the zoot suit, popularized by African- and Mexican-Americans in the 1940s, with a suit cut in a totally different style that was worn by the Joker as portrayed by Cesar Romero, a man of Spanish and Cuban descent, which isn’t great. On the other hand, it got me to do a little Googling and discover that for a mere $950 you could be the owner of a genuine “Jokers Wild Purple” zoot suit, so who’s to say if it’s good or bad?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/14/24

I kind of love Silas’s emotion affect in the second panel here: he’s both pleased and a little puzzled. Have Snuffy and his fellow primitive denizens of Hootin’ Holler finally developed the ability to understand and even sympathize with the emotions of others? Silas had never thought he’d see the day, but his store is the lone outpost of globally-scaled free-market capitalism in this otherwise backwards region, and he’s ready to profit off this local development with the sale of some of the sympathy cards he ordered a while back, just in case.