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Sexually unpleasant Wednesday

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Mary Worth, 5/18/22

Oh, wow, not only has l’affaire HelenCal ended with Ian and Toby’s past and potential future (respectively) student entanglements safely banished, but it seems the Camerons have learned a valuable lesson: namely, that performing their sexual attraction for the benefit of others is just the thing they need to rekindle that attraction and indeed spark it to new and intensely erotic heights! Look for Charterstone’s #1 intellectual academic couple to engage in increasingly public and risky erotic rendezvous in the coming months.

Sally Forth, 5/18/22

Sally Forth, meanwhile, is approaching much more transgressive territory than mere exhibitionism: no, Ted and Sally are making their first ever neighbor friend and are immediately veering into cuckoldry. Look at how Sally sweats with delicious anxiety as their neighbor moves boldly into her personal space! Ted seems to have vanished entirely after the first panel, but I assume he’s bearing the same intrigued expression you can half see on him there.

Dennis the Menace, 5/18/22

This is a profoundly sad strip. Dennis is begging — begging — his father to stop shit-talking his friends because he knows he’ll blurt all those insults out in front of them, he wants to stop but he can’t stop, not matter how hard he tries. Henry, meanwhile, looks not upset or sympathetic but bored. “Look, kid,” he’s thinking, “You’ve gotta menace these guys. I know it’s no fun, but it’s what the people want. It’s the name of the strip. It pays the bills around here.”

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Tuesday is for jerks

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/17/22

Wow, I guess we really are going to get “Snuffy is cruel to his family/Snuff is poor” bits for the rest of the week, huh? Personally, I’m very stuck on poor Loweezy’s face in panel two. I realize that you don’t always feel right as rain after a doctor’s visit, especially from a doctor willing to survive on Medicaid payments and barter, but I’m getting strong and disturbing “Snuffy is bribing Doc Pritchart with an extra stolen chicken in return for poisoning Snuffy’s wife” vibe from it. Think, Snuffy, think! Who’s going to make you cake now?

Blondie, 5/17/22

This is a strip that was clearly created in a white-hot fury by someone who’s just learned that schools don’t use chalkboards anymore and who was so motivated to slam on the dumb kids today that they didn’t even bother finding out what replaced them. Was it texting? Texting, probably? Anyway, in actuality they were replaced by dry-erase whiteboards, something that Dagwood would be pretty familiar with if he worked in an actual office rather than a weird vast open space with shiny floors and the occasional corner.

Dustin, 5/17/22

Much of the job of being a comics curmudgeon involves reading about unpleasant characters over and over and thinking to yourself, “But what specific kind of asshole is this?” In the case of Dustin’s dad, he’s specifically the kind of asshole who doesn’t answer this question with a perfectly reasonably “Yes, please,” or a perfectly reasonable “No, thank you,” but instead with a “Yes, but only so I can experience your culture’s inferiority first hand.”

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‘There’s a HOLE in your story’ Sly smirked as Shady was hauled off to the torture chamber

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Slylock Fox, 5/16/22

My intense study of the post-animalpocalypse world of Slylock Fox has been ongoing for sixteen years now, but every day we are still learning new things about how this society works. For instance, as we humans understand law and justice, Slylock is surely an agent of the government: he works directly for high regime officials, and has the authority to both investigate and prosecute crimes. Yet here we see him in the process of investigating insurance fraud, something that in our own economic system would be considered a civil matter. This hints that their government and law enforcement have a broader reach than ours do: maybe the regime believes they have an obligation to protect corporate bodies against harm just as they protect animal citizens against violence, or perhaps the insurance industry is itself wholly state-run rather than in the hands of private entities. These are rich avenues for study and more than justify the renewal of my academic research grant, so hopefully that check will be coming my way soon.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/16/22

Sometimes, when you’re the producer of a media product that’s been running literally since the Wilson Administration and whose whole main shtick is a fairly problematic series of running jokes at the expense of some of America’s most economically desperate citizens, you need to spend a week or so getting new readers up to speed on your characters and letting them know why they should care about them. For instance, did you know that Snuffy Smith refuses to help around the house, and is also deeply in debt? Tune in this week for eight more endearing (?) facts about this dwarfish, potato-nosed rascal!

Pluggers, 5/16/22

Pluggers cannot bat away the constant, intrusive thoughts about death, because they’re aging and physically declining and will themselves be dead soon. That’s it! That’s the whole joke!