Do "Hi and Lois" Live on the Gulf Coast?

I thought that at least the Sunday comics would give me a reprieve from the Oilpocalypse coverage. But, no, apparently not.

It's probably just a printing error - or so I thought at first. In the last panel of today's "Hi and Lois", the family is at the beach:

That looks like some particularly nasty black, oil-fouled water. But if this was a subtle effort at drawing further attention to BP's environmental catastrophe and its effects on the economy of the Gulf Coast during this holiday weekend, then why are they letting their kids swim in the petrol-muck? What the hell, Hi?

But then - look at the sky behind the clouds! They're as black as the apparent oil slick in the ocean. If the GIF at the ComicsKingdom web site above didn't have a black sky as well, I would have thought the local Times-Picayune printing plant had screwed up.

Maybe this is the start of a cross-over series of strips and next week Lois's brother Beetle Bailey will see his platoon deployed to the Gulf for clean-up assistance duty. (I spend WAY too much time thinking about newspaper comic strips for a man my age.)