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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/10/20

Oh, hey, remember Red? Red was a guy who tried, in an extremely pathetic and non-threatening way, to mug Jordan and Michelle, but then it turned out he was an old high school classmate of Jordan’s, and was also a veteran suffering from both PTSD and hallucinations brought on by kidney disease, so he was reunited with his family and got a kidney transplant, which was, as I probably don’t have to tell you as it took place in Rex Morgan, M.D., boring. Jordan promised to take Red on as a cook in his new restaurant, and honestly the most interesting thing about the whole story is that Red’s drama somehow took the focus off the fact that Jordan had engaged in a little light stolen valor, so my tenuous hope was that Red and Jordan would start trading some (literal) war stories and this would all come out, but instead there’s just going to be a lot of healthy diet talk, zzzzzzzz.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/10/20

I had assumed Harry had taken up teaching music again because he loved it so much that he couldn’t bear the thought of stepping away forever, despite his hearing loss, but no, it actually appears he’s as miserable about this situation as his poor student is. So is he doing it for … money? Does he need money? Honestly, it’s a real relief to learn that he doesn’t get paid for all the time he spends hanging around Westview High irritating the actual band teacher.

Slylock Fox, 11/10/20

Fellas! Are you looking for a chore to do that will beautify the neighborhood and have the ladies swooning? Think about painting a fence!

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Shoe, 11/9/20

One of the whole reasons this blog exists is to make you actually think about the longstanding institution of the newspaper comics and really appreciate how weird they are. Like, take Shoe, which is about bird-people who live in a treetop town, which sounds like a recipe for either gentle whimsy or manic antics, except for the fact that these bird-people are just miserable all the time. Often they’re depressed to the point of near-catatonia but sometimes they can rouse themselves to go out into the world and be merely unreasonably irritable. How long do you think Shoe’s been sitting there, listening in on other people’s conversations, waiting for any possible opportunity to jump in and gratuitously insult Roz, at whose restaurant he eats every day? It can sometimes be hard to parse the sequence of actions in a comic strip, but I’m interpreting the appearance of a stogie in panel two as meaning that he delivered his jibe, then pulled out and lit up a cigar right there in the restaurant, as if to emphasize all the different kinds of asshole he can be.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/9/20

Hey, remember when Harry Dinkle learned he suffered from hearing loss and had to quit as Westview’s band director? Well, he’s apparently nevertheless still teaching music to children, who are ungrateful little brats who would rather dick around on their phone than learn how to play an instrument they hate from a guy who can’t hear very well.

Dennis the Menace, 11/9/20

I truly, sincerely hope that Mr. Wilson is saying this because Dennis is in the middle of his front lawn, shouting about demons in Latin at the top of his lungs.

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/8/20

Welp, I guess Hagar the Horrible is thoroughly cementing Lucky Eddie’s mermaid-focused sexuality into strip canon. In today’s installment, we learn both that Eddie has attempted without success to conform himself to society’s idea of who he should fall in love with (mammals), and also that, no matter how much Hagar’s family and warband have thrown in with the newly arrived Christian religion, they still have to deal with the occasional pagan diety, especially when they fuck said deity’s daughter.

Mark Trail, 11/8/20

Hey look, it’s Jules Rivera’s first Sunday nature strip! It looks great, fits in with the storied tradition of these Sunday strips, and absolutely includes a piss joke.

The Phantom, 11/8/20

The current Sunday Phantom plot features our hero helping out a Bangallan cop who appears to be the one person outside his inner circle who realizes that the “Man-Who-Cannot-Die” bit is obvious flim-flam, and good for him! Today we learn that the Ghost-Who-Walks not only stores the priceless historic heritage of many cultures in his non-temperature-controlled cave, but also hoards the world’s biodiversity on an island optimistically called “Isle of Eden” but where nevertheless I’m reasonably sure a certain amount of endangered-species-on-endangered-species carnivorism goes on.

Beetle Bailey, 11/8/20

I of course have always assumed that due to the weird chronological discontinuities brought about by comic book time, we’re meant to understand that Beetle walked into a recruiting office in 1951, just like he did in the strips that ran in 1951, and has stayed in the military ever since. But today’s strip seems to have updated the timeline a bit, with Beetle and Sarge (?)’s teenagerhood now having taken place in [squints] the ’80s? Sure, let’s say the ’80s. This still presumably makes Beetle the oldest living serving private in the entire U.S. Army, but at least it’s not that improbable that he’s still alive.