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Mary Worth, 9/5/18

But if he were Dale Carnegie — if Carnegie faked his 1955 death, if he managed to still walk among us today at the age of 130 thanks to the dark spells written in blood in his forbidden necromantic tome How To Stop Worrying And Start Living Eternally, if he travels the land in disguise as a wounded and angry man to try to discover the chosen one who can win any friend, influence any person, and if that chosen one turned out to be Mary — well, I’m not saying that’s at all likely. But it’d be a pretty cool scenario, you know?

Dennis the Menace, 9/5/18

Ah yes, it appears that Dennis is finally figuring it out: the reason he’s always been allowed to run wild, been indulged as he harasses Mr. Wilson and blurts out rude nonsense in front of other adults and antagonizes his teachers, is because his mother thinks it’s funny. It doesn’t matter how many people he alienates, that he’s sabotaging his education and his future, as long as she gets some droll anecdotes about what a little shit he is that she can share with her similarly jaded friends. The facial expressions here — Dennis’s of mounting, horrified realization, Alice’s of cruel amusement — make it clear that the menacing dynamic has shifted, or perhaps more correctly that we’ve been wrong about their power relations all along.

Gil Thorp, 9/5/18

“Woo-hoo, bro! Total lack of intellectual curiosity fist bump!”

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Dick Tracy, 9/4/18

Dick Tracy’s approach to depicting crime has always been cartoonish, but usually that means “criminals have hideously deformed crania that could only exist in drawings” and not “drug gangs have laughable names and stake out territory by gently shoving rivals across the street.”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/4/18

Seems pretty mean to joke about your brain-injured pal‘s mental deficits, but I guess if you’re recovering from a massive stroke, as this guy clearly is, you’re “allowed” to say it.

Shoe, 9/4/18

I really appreciate that, in today’s installment of “the bird-men of Shoe hate their lives and themselves,” the Perfesser sighs audibly but only thinks about his deep-rooted desire for a total annihilation of self, because if you speak a wish out loud it won’t come true.

Mary Worth, 9/4/18

HELL YES MARY IS GOING TO FIND MEAN OLD MR. WYNTER SOME FRIENDS AND MAYBE A PACK OF FERALS FOR HIS DOG TO JOIN, NOBODY HAS ANY CHOICE IN THE MATTER, MARY HAS SPOKEN

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Slylock Fox, 9/3/18

It’s hard to deny that the new animal regime of which Slylock is the enforcer has a human problem. Humans make up a vanishingly tiny portion of post-animalpocalypse Earth’s sapient population, but it seems like Slylock is constantly being called on to deal with their petty crimes and disputes. Of course, the fact that humans are a despised, impoverished minority who just lost what must have been a bloody and devastating war to the regime has nothing to do with this, so the animals in their benevolence have decided to confine the humans to a beautiful rural area along with the few animals who never made the Change, where they can steal each other’s omelettes in relative peace.

Gil Thorp, 9/3/18

It’s time for the Gil Thorp fall storyline, and the Gil Thorp fall storyline is about insufferable cineastes. Remember a few years back when the local tattoo parlor used bootleg DVDs as a loss leader, except the DVDs turned out not to be bootleg after all? Well, by making cinematic entertainment seem “edgy” and “cool,” that long-departed tattooist planted the virus of cinematic appreciation in the minds of the local youth, and now the kids all have home theaters and 2001 posters and obsessions with mid-’90s indie films and whatnot. I desperately hope we see each and everyone one of these children get repeatedly stuffed into lockers by the football team, who just want to bring pride to the community by tackling people and don’t want to get drawn into tedious arguments about auteur theory.

Dick Tracy, 9/3/18

Hey buddy! I know when you got into the drug-dealing game someone probably said “this stuff sells itself!” but that’s a bit of an exaggeration. You have to at least tell the kids that you’re selling drugs before they’ll buy it. You can’t just lean against a pole thought-ballooning about it!