Slylock Fox

How does Slylock know the painting is a forgery? Because salmon don't swim downstream.

Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids is a newspaper comic strip by Bob Weber Jr., which consists of the Slylock puzzler and a number of other activities. The puzzler consists of the professional detective Slylock Fox and his assistant, Max Mouse, solving a number of mysteries, usually stopping a number of recurring villains.

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Tropes used in Slylock Fox include:

• Affectionate Parody: There's one strip (not official) which has a Satanist accused of stealing a book from the Islamic Book Store. Said book is called "The Satanic Verses". (It also features the only animals wearing shoes in the strip.)
• Alliterative Name: Most of the non-Slylock characters
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: All of the recurring villains.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animals: Slylock and most of the rest of the characters.
• The Cameo: One strip has Rat as the culprit, in response to Pearls Before Swine taking a stab at Slylock.
• Card-Carrying Villain
• Conviction by Contradiction: All the time. Which sometimes leads to Fridge Logic. In the picture, Slylock deduces that the painting is a forgery because salmon don't swim downstream. Never mind the fact that some salmon do swim downstream, or the fact that the artist my have not known about salmon.
  • If salmon don't swim downstream, how do they get to the ocean?
• Conviction by Counterfactual Clue: See above.
• Crossover: My Cage did a storyline wherein Cassandra Cat was hired and stole money from the company, with Slylock himself appearing later. Word of God states that Max from My Cage was meant to appear in Slylock, but an editor refused it.
• Death Trap: Count Weirdly occasionally subjects Slylock and Max to these.
• Fan Service: The Cassandra Cat shirt that Bob made for The Comics Curmudgeon.
• Funny Animals
• Funny Background Event: A running joke is Max getting into trouble in the background. If he's not part of the investigation, he's probably being pinched by a lobster or bonked by a falling apple.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: The setup for one January 2007 strip was that Max Mouse had spent the night with a girl-mouse named Melody, before being interrupted by Slylock asking them to spy on a Fence living next door.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: One strip has Slylock and Max time traveling with Count Weirdly. It's mainly a tool to dispense facts about dinosaurs, but Slylock and Weirdly seem bizarrely friendly to each other.
• Heterosexual Life Partners: Slylock and Max. Depending on the strip, they even live together.
• Implied Love Interest: Slylock and Max occasionally entertain Tiffany Fox and Melody Mouse. There's no evidence that they're in love, except for when Max spent the night with Melody, mentioned above.
• Mad Scientist: Count Weirdly.
• Meaningful Name: Slylock and every recurring villain, though they might be nicknames.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: More often than not, the answer to a Slylock puzzler is an obscure real-world fact or a tiny clue in the drawing.
• No Mouth: Slylock and Max are usually mouthless, unless speaking or emoting.
• Rule 34: Josh Fruhlinger, aka The Comics Curmudgeon, linked to a Rule 34 of Cassandra Cat in his blog (the pic also had Slylock and two of the other characters). Bob Weber Jr. found out after it was posted, and was a surprisingly good sport about it — he thought it was funny, but politely asked it to be taken down so that kids couldn't find it.
• Shameless Self Promoting: One strip had Max Mouse about to visit "one of his favorite Web sites". The site was www.ohbrothercomics.com, the Web site of Oh, Brother, Bob's other comic.
• Species Surname
• Shout-Out: In an unintentional case, the fan-submitted drawing for one strip was a drawing of Sonichu — the same one that's on the work's page.
• Token Human: Count Weirdly
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Debatable, as many of the alleged "crimes" are solved through the oddest of means. Even then they don't always make much sense, or even point out a crime in the first place.