Comics on trial

Legal problems are a staple of the funny pages. We don't have car pool lanes in the Chicago area, but the concept is not unfamiliar. Most locals, therefore, would not have needed an explanation for this F Minus strip from July 9:


This Bliss panel from July 4 presents a patriotic legal problem:


But lately I've noticed a lot of comics are actually looking for humor in the courts themselves.

Candorville, for example, has been dropping in and out of a custody trial for several weeks now. The protagonist, Lemont Brown, is represented by a six-year old kid pretending to be a lawyer. The real lawyer, the kid's uncle, may have been kidnapped and imprisoned by the 400-year old vampire who gave birth to Lemont's son. This installment, from June 29, features the vampire's lawyer. Yes, he does look suspiciously like John Edwards:


One of my favorite strips, Brewster Rockit, recently featured an alien's negligence suit against the Earth. The alien, it seems, crashed his saucer into Jupiter. Earth was responsible, according to the alien's lawyer, because of NASA's spacecraft Dawn, now (for real) in orbit around the asteroid Vesta. The Earth ship didn't get in the alien's way; he was simply texting about it when he crashed. This strip, from July 13, illustrates one of the high points of the trial:


A new strip, Dustin, usually focuses on the slacker 20-something for which the strip is named. But Dustin's father is a lawyer -- and last week the strip took us inside his practice. Here's the July 15 entry:


Meanwhile, on July 19, the comic pages' real lawyer, former San Francisco lawyer Stephan Pastis, provided a rather cockeyed lesson on the limits of free speech:



------------------------------------------------------------
Comics obtained from Yahoo! Comics and the Chicago Tribune Comics Kingdom.