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Judge Parker, 1/6/25

Detective Yelich has been Sam’s inside man on the police force since the Great Judge Meth Caper of ’23, which, you may recall, included an episode in which Yelich got drunk and kidnapped a material witness to a murder case. So, yeah, detective, Sam isn’t gonna buy you shit! He can already threaten to ruin your life if you don’t help Alan with his little maybe-my-daughter’s-a-murderer problem! The only reason he had you meet him at the diner is so there would be witnesses if you decided that killing him might be easier and more fun than living under his thumb forever!

Marvin, 1/6/25

If you ever decide that “FINE, my comic strip WON’T be about poop for once, so what’s a good joke that doesn’t involve poop,” you could do worse than pulling out whatever trivia book you have as reading material in your bathroom and building a punchline out of something you find when you open it at random. In the interests of intellectual honesty, though, one of your strip’s characters must read said trivia item out of said book. Anyway, my favorite part of this strip is that Marvin’s trivia-loving friend has a big smile on his face as Marvin delivers the punchline. “That’s right, Marvin!” he’s thinking. “That rabbit is long dead. And it serves him right!”

Family Circus, 1/7/25

28 years ago, Ma Keane got a new haircut, and while strip reruns still include anachronisms like old-fashioned metal trash cans, the family matriarch’s old ‘do is always replaced with the new one as if it were one of Stalin’s purged generals. That’s true even if she’s wearing a kerchief that no longer serves much of a purpose wrapped around her newer, shorter hairstyle. Anyway, Big Daddy Keane sure is grumpy, presumably because he found a box that he briefly thought was full of delicious Jack Daniels but then he opened it and found a stack of dumb old issues of the Saturday Evening Post instead.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/5/25

Lord knows I’ve spent enough time contemplating the economy and politics of Hootin’ Holler, so I might as well take this opportunity to unpack its cosmology a bit. You are all, I trust, familiar with Granny Creeps, a chthonic sorceress or perhaps demigoddess who creates potions and spells from native roots and lichens and lives in a local cave — indeed, in a strip from a few days ago, we learned that she recently blocked up the cave mouth with rocks so she can “hibernate.” Today, we are reminded that there’s another town resident who tinkers with powers beyond our ordinary plane of existence: Zeldy, who works brighter, more ethereal magic, a being of wind and spirit who looks into the future rather than drawing power from the past. Now, Zeldy hasn’t been seen in this strip since 2013, but I have a terrible suspicion about why this pastel-hued, pale-skinned medium is being brought back to a strip that already has an ominous green figure: it’s called Wicked Fever and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith has, regrettably, caught it.

Hi and Lois, 1/5/25

God, I love the fact that Lois and Irma have gotten into this Hawaiian bit just so they can spend 90 seconds making sure their husbands are getting drunk before they peace out. Sure, they might get weird looks at the mall, but they can be secure in the knowledge that their blotto husbands neither know nor care when they’re coming back.

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Blondie, 1/4/25

Yes, I still read the newspaper comics strip Blondie every day, and I actually learn things from it! For instance, Herb saying “mega-horsepower” made me wonder if horsepower is in fact part of the overall International System of Units and can take prefixes like “mega”. Turns out it isn’t; horsepower measures the same thing as watts, although there is a slight difference between metric horsepower (735.5 watts) and imperial horsepower (745.7 watts). It also turns out that a typical snowblower is rated around 5 horsepower, so if we take Herb literally, his new toy has a power output about 3 million times greater than that. Dagwood would not be comically encrusted with snow by it; instead, he and his entire suburban neighborhood would’ve been vaporized instantly the moment Herb turned it on. Sorry if this offends but I must tell the cold, hard truth about the physics involved here.

Gil Thorp, 1/4/25

I have to admit that pleading “But I’m the voice of Milford sports!” is very funny, in terms of ways to defend yourself for getting in trouble for being gin-drunk on the job. Anyway, like all the damned souls toiling in new media, the primary metric on which Marty is judged professionally is going viral, and you’d think going on the air intoxicated would be a good way to do that, but based on his facial expression in the final panel I’m guessing he did it in a very depressing way, not a fun way.

Family Circus, 1/4/24

Billy admits it! He and the other Keane Kids aren’t “real people,” but are instead soulless abominations who should not be walking this earth. “Jeffy,” says Jeffy’s shirt, desperately trying to distract you from the fact that he is a Thing that does not deserve a name.