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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/8/21

ME, MERE DAYS AGO: ugh, this whole thing with Sarah is so boring, can we please move on to someone else, even Buck would be better than this

ME TODAY: oh my GOD Sarah is about to DROP SOME ANIME KNOWLEDGE ON REX, this is the greatest moment in my life

Judge Parker, 8/8/21

Oh, hey, remember when Abbey decided she wanted to open a bed and breakfast at Spencer Farms, only to discover fairly quickly that running a bed and breakfast kind of sucks? Well, not long after that, there was a worldwide pandemic that really hurt the global tourism industry and, long story short, it looks like Abbey has decided to burn the thing down for the insurance money. Sophie is really selling her anguish! Probably going over the top, but it’s a nice little performance for a witness, just in case any arson investigators come snooping around asking questions.

Dennis the Menace, 8/8/21

I like Margaret’s bemused face in the final panel. It’s like she’s finally figuring out that these boys she spends way too much time with may be kind of dumb. Better late than never, girl!

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Blondie, 8/7/21

Elmo’s friend — and look, probably, somewhere deep within Blondie HQ, there’s a whole character chart with a name and a backstory for this kid, but he’ll always be just plain “Elmo’s friend” to me, like if you try to tell me what his actual canon name is, I will simply refuse to listen — is visibly upset in the second panel, and honestly, who can blame him. Elmo’s relationship with Dagwood is weird and off-putting! “Who is this strange adult man?” he seems to be thinking. “Why did we interrupt his nap? Why is he standing here while we’re about to get into the pool? Should I tell my parents about this?”

Pluggers, 8/7/21

At first I, drawing on my own incipient experience of pluggerdom, assumed this was a joke about creaky backs and hips, and then considered that it was probably a much less charitable fat joke. But I would love it to be just a kind of general plugger musing on mortality. “Not sure I want to sit down,” the bear-man thinks, eyeing the chair warily. “Never know when the old ticker’s gonna give out. Do I want it to be in that chair? Not sure it’s dignified enough.”

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Psst. Hey buddy. Wanna buy a COTW?

“The whole point of nephewism is that it doesn’t come with the baggage of parenthood. When Skyler is unnecessary and inconvenient to the gag of the moment, he discreetly disappears back into nephewspace until such time as he is summoned forth again to do a gag that requires a child.” –Peanut Gallery

You want more? You want some hilarious runners up? We got ’em right here.

“Fancy yourself a menace, Dennis? Well, now you know: Mrs. Wilson ruined Mr. Wilson’s happiness long before you ever entered the picture. You’re the assistant menace, and don’t forget it.” –Peanut Gallery

“I feel sorry for people who get Dennis the Menace with the throwaway panels removed, because they’ll never get to see what it would look like if Mr. Wilson dressed as an elf and then did a lot of cocaine.” –Schroduck

“I’m getting ‘giving the hitman the go-ahead’ vibes from Les’s ‘yes.’ I guess he needs another wife to die for his next book.” –ArtOfWargames, on Twitter

“I do appreciate the surreal disconnect between the imagery and text. It reads like a serious and staid police procedural yet appears to depict a leprechaun watching a video of a stripper with giraffe horns.” –Lee Sherman

“Frankly, I’m disappointed with Cayla, too. ‘A dead Lisa party? Wowee wow wow! Sign me up! Will there be a cake in the shape of her corpse? Please say yes!’” –Joe Blevins

“Pluggers sneered at the use of ‘like’ as a filler word for decades, but now that Gen X is aging into their demographic it’s acceptable.” –TheDiva

“As an extra bit of language weirdness, Rufus says accordian t’ as a countrified version of according to, yet actually somehow misspells ‘accordion’ (mentally?) while he’s saying it. Of all the places for someone to screw up both old-timey speech and an instrument sometimes used in bluegrass music, Gasoline Alley shouldn’t be it.” –BigTed

“Can I speak to you the word of the lord Zuke? He that grows in multitudes? His vines do creep into men’s souls, so that they open their mouth for the pulpy flesh of the lord. Please, friend. Open your mouth. Take his blessing. Let his vines entwine your soul. Eat of this zucchini bread, for it too is his body. Drink of this zucchini smoothie, for it is as his blood.” –Voshkod

“This is good for Spider-Man, since he’s finally going to get a girlfriend who buys him accessories, houses, cars, etc. This is bad for Barbie, because like every other Spider-Man girlfriend she’s going to be thrown off the George Washington Bridge.” –Ettorre

“No! No! Mom! Stop! Spider-Man is supposed to be upside down, it’s an iconic scene! Did you even watch my YouTube series?!” –Dan

“I like the annoyed look on Rex’s face in that last panel. Clearly he thought that his comment about Sarah being anonymous implied that it would no longer be openly discussed, perhaps for her well-being but also because Rex is tired of talking about his child.” –pugfuggly

“I didn’t expect Shoe to go meta with a comic about comics less funny than news reporting that actually is less funny than news reporting.” –nescio

“They seemed to be very different people. Granted, I only saw Ashlee exactly one single time and didn’t speak to her at all, which isn’t really much of a data pool to draw from, but she burst into the hospital screaming and crying, and that’s something Drew only does infrequently.” –jroggs

“Today’s Shoe especially emphasizes, visually, the always-present but never-spoken fact that Shoe is the only one there unclothed (except for shoes). I guess that’s why they call him Shoe, but in these two panels that doesn’t really come off as the quaint nickname of a hard-hitting newspaper editor. It comes off as psychotic. Forget the bird-man thing for a minute. Sure, they’re birds, but they dress in clothes and work at jobs and watch TV and get haircuts and use glasses to drink and so forth. So they’re basically people, de facto. So imagine that you got a new job as an intern at your small town’s only newspaper, the Treetops Tattler or whatever it’s called. ‘This is the Perfesser,’ your coworkers say to you. You find a heavy-lidded man slumped over a pile of papers, staring at you with dead eyes. A bit much, sure, but he’s a recognizable journalistic type. You wave. Now your co-worker gestures to someone else. ‘This is our editor, Shoe.’ A man scowls at you, smoking a cigar and utterly naked except for Nike sneakers. A beat. You wait for the laughter, because this is a prank, right? They’re pranking the new guy, No one laughs. Someone clears their throat. You guess you’re supposed to say something. ‘N-nice to meet… you?’ you half-whisper. Shoe grunts and turns, giving you a full look at his bare butt as he strides away. Everyone looks at your with heavy-lidded eyes. Why weren’t you nice to the editor? Later he’ll talk to you again, naked, not remembering he’s already met you. He will never wear clothes the entire time you work there, until you decide to leave that nightmare newspaper and go work at the mortuary. At least the vulture wears a suit.” –Chance

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