The two strips below were a Monday and a Friday release, with three completely unrelated comics in the days in between. Does that boost the joke?
The squiggle in the bottom right looks identical in the two final panels, and may be a hint of the guest artist’s signature. Does anyone here remember where we might have seen a listing of the guests and their dates?
Comics I Don't Understand 
According to reports in The Daily Cartoonist, the list of substitute authoresses for Nancy during Jaimes’s sabattical includes (here in alphabetical, and not chronological order): Caroline Cash, Shaenon K. Garrity, Leigh Luna, and Megan McKay.
P.S. Even if tripping over the boomerang on the ground is more “realistic”, I think the gag would have worked better if it had hit Sluggo in the head, perhaps expedited by allowing it to fall out of a tree.
I think this set of strips is a sort of a “brick joke”.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrickJoke
Based on the art style, it’s got to be McKay of Doodle for Food.
A subsequent Daily Cartoonist report (upon Olivia Jaimes’s return) does list the subs in chronological order, with inset graphics examples. https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2024/09/02/olivia-returns-other-comic-strip-data/