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Gil Thorp, 11/18/19

Well, weeks after making the mistake of trying to blow the whistle to Milford’s “mainstream” (i.e., Thorp-friendly) press, Chet is doing what he should’ve done in the first place, which is talk to Marty Moon, preferably in a context where Marty can get as drunk as possible with a non-Marty person paying for the drinks. So the setup is right, but the execution is botched. Marty says he’s listening but you can see in panel three that he’s already tuning out Chet’s blather about “two-a-days” and “Sam Finn” or whatever. C’mon, Chet! Lead with the scissors-throwing! Everyone loves a good scissors-throwing!

Family Circus, 11/18/19

“Daddy” may be back at the help of the Family Circus, but the layers of narrative artifice on display during “Billy (age 7)’s run” are still present. Dolly prays to the Christian God, but He does not exist within the Circus’s circle; the Father and Creator is downstairs, watching football. (Of course, in real life, this God is dead, and in-panel reality is sustained by Jeffy, depicted here as His prophet.)

Mary Worth, 11/18/19

Crouching in your office chair, airing your hairy legs out and pressing an ice pack gingerly against one side of your head doesn’t exactly scream “patented hangover cure” to me, but I guess Wilbur’s the expert! I don’t want to say every plotline in Mary Worth should involve Wilbur getting dumped or otherwise romantically devastated, but, like, every fourth one or so? That’d be great.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 11/17/19

I definitely could see a bunch of ways that a dog could break a tooth while robbing a bank (though to be frank almost all of them involve him biting someone), but I think there might be more to it here. Dirty Dog is, for those of you who don’t want to flip your screen upside down, in disguise as an anteater, a toothless species that would have no reason to go to the dentist. You’d think that “in disguise” would mean that he just has a fursuit on, but that bandage far down his “snout” indicates a genuine injury where there shouldn’t be one. Presumably he’s spent most of the day undergoing the horrific surgery necessary to transform his appearance from one species to another. It’s honestly a wonder that the toothache is his only problem.

Curtis, 11/17/19

Ha ha, oops, Curtis accidentally texted Michelle referring to her “yellow teeth,” making her angry! He had intended to refer to her “stellar teeth,” and how the food he was going to buy her would give her a chance to “show [them] off,” just a totally normal and non-creepy thing that any girl would be excited to read in a text from a boy. “Girl, I want everyone to know how well you can chew, don’t hide your light — specifically, the light glinting off your teeth — under a bushel!” That’s some extremely effective flirting that will get you far with the ladies.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/16/19

Parson Tuttle is of course a grifter and mostly biblically illiterate, but even he knows that a Christian clergyman is supposed to espouse a pacifistic attitude. Sadly, Tuttle is out of his theological depth once you get past these rote, borrowed pieties, and is unable to help his congregants figure out how to live a Christ-like life in an unforgiving society dominated by vicious blood feuds over long-forgotten offenses against family honor.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 11/16/19

Aww, Ralph and Grimm had a friend named Rocko, but he died, of heart disease! That’s … that’s the joke?