Archive for the 'Mark Trail' Category

Mark Trail, 11/18/09

Here’s a question for you: am I spoiled by Mark Trail? I mean, yes, this is the sort of wordless action strip that makes the feature worth reading, and yes, Mark has waded into the swamp to deliver a crushing blow to an alligator’s mouth, without regard for his personal safety, in order to save his mutant ward’s whiny little dog. I should just be able to sit back and enjoy it! And yet … well, he’s not using his fists, is he? He’s using a tool to do his fighting for him. Sure, for an ordinary human punching an alligator would be a recipe for certain death, but Mark is not ordinary, and may not even be human. When his violent righteousness turns on the poachers, as it inevitably will, will Mark think, “Hey, I am already holding this stick! It helped me beat the alligator — maybe it will help me defeat these men as well!” And once there’s an intermediary object between Mark and his targets, well, it’s all downhill from there. The next think you know, he’ll be suing them, or writing angry letters to the editor about their misdeeds.

Gil Thorp, 11/18/09

Today is the day that reveals the true shape of Gil Thorp’s football season B-plot: it’s Cyrano de Bergerac, if Cyrano were a band geek, and instead of feeding love poetry to Christian he just gave him recaps of high-school volleyball games, and while watching the whole drama you kept waiting for the action to switch back to Christian’s teammate’s brother in prison. Still, I have a feeling that Valerie will learn that the person who really enjoyed watching her play volleyball was a slightly cross-eyed clarinet player, and true love will blossom at last!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/18/09

You know, I really and truly would have been delighted if the whole Becka-Tim side story ended up being entirely tangental to the plot, with Cue successfully negotiating the return of the wayward oldsters with the crooked nursing home operator while Becka fended off Tim’s ham-handed advances. But now it appears that the two narrative threads will finally meet, so I’m hoping that the fisticuffs between the exceptionally dim small-time marijuana dealer and the socially awkward fishing magazine writer will at least be kind of hilarious.

Apartment 3-G, 11/18/09

“Kitchen staff” no doubt sets alarm bells off in Ari’s head. “Wait, she used to be rich, and now the only person she can afford to exploit to get her meds is me? Danger, danger!”

(By the way, if you’re trying woo a pill-popper with rice pudding in actual New York, might I suggest Rice to Riches at 37 Spring Street in Manhattan? YUMMY!)

Mark Trail, 11/17/09

Hello there, faithful readers! I think it’s been a little too long since you were last treated to the dimension-warping horror that is apparently the natural configuration of Rusty’s face when he’s excited about Sassy. So, enjoy! Take a good look at his eyes bugged out in terror! Against your better judgment, try to look down his maw, only to see darkness, infinite darkness! Watch each of his blue-black hairs rippling across his huge, bulbous head! And then maybe you’ll understand why Mark doesn’t let Rusty go to school with the other children.

Mary Worth, 11/17/09

So I’m guessing that someone over at King Features told the Mary Worth creative team to use the interweaving and ongoing Apartment 3-G storylines as a model, rather than this strip’s typical self-contained plots. The grinding of the plot-shifting gears are still loud and obvious; it’s just that we appear to be revisiting older plots rather than allowing them to vanish into Mary’s Successful Meddles file. Thus, we had “Adrian gets flim-flammed” followed by “Delilah in Charley’s sex den” followed by “Adrian’s boyfriend in a coma,” and now we’re back to Delilah again.

But! Perhaps Mary Worth needs to learn when a beloved character from the past should be revived! For instance, Adrian was a prime candidate for a plot sequel, since her previous storyline had ended with her emotionally devastated and in the process of being wooed by an unethical cop who was the son of Dr. Jeff’s secret schoolboy crush. EXCITING! When we last saw Delilah, meanwhile, she had rejected Charley’s lustful advances and was reconciling with her boring husband. We certainly don’t need to see any more of that. It’s possible that Delilah is calling to beg for advice on her compulsive need to rapidly change clothes, having somehow gone from a canary yellow number to an even more hideous salmon-colored tracksuit in just a few seconds; but more likely she’s just calling to let Mary know that she’s finally decided to embrace her womanly destiny and pop out a kid. If so, I hope for entertainment’s sake she at leasts brings the little squaller over to Charley’s no-children-allowed pad, to humiliate him further.

Blondie, 11/17/09

Most everyday objects in Blondie, like Herb’s weirdly top-heavy little car, are in a sort of boring version of the uncanny valley: while not cartoonish enough to be funny or interesting, they’re also not particularly realistic-looking if you really examine them for any length of time. I have to say, though, that in panel two pretty much nails that lonely exurban freeway off-ramp and overpass. The dark sky makes for quite an evocative scene, as these four white-collar drones head back to their identical houses, bickering in a desultory fashion about their hated jobs, in that incongruously cheery pastel car.

Family Circus, 11/17/09

Normally I’m against any and all premature expressions of the Christmas spirit, but if Dolly is humming her little tune slowly and creepily off-key while staring at Billy with that blank expression as a prelude to strangling him with a garland of tinsel, I’ll let it pass.

Marmaduke, 11/17/09

It probably shouldn’t come as any surprise that Marmaduke has harnessed the slower, plumper inhabitants of his community so as to more efficiently drag them off to his blood-drenched devouratorium. The question is, how did he get these poor damned souls to ingest the powerful tranquilizers that have made them so complaisant and easily led to their own doom?

Dick Tracy, 11/3/09

For me, the trajectory of a Dick Tracy storyline goes something like this: first it’s interesting because it’s so hilariously wacky and surreal; then the strip refuses to in any way engage in traditional “storytelling” that “makes sense” and I get irritated and start ignoring it; then the climax, with its promise of unspeakable violence, looms, and I get interested again. In this case, obviously-guilty-from-the-beginning evil clown Mr. Pops is about to be strangled, or ripped in half, or thrown down into a tiger cage and eaten alive, by circus giant/strongman Fee Fi. While it’s true that bad guys in Dick Tracy inevitably die in agony, they generally either perish in ironic accidents while trying to escape or are killed by Dick himself. I wonder therefore about the legal issues that might arise from this act of freelance vigilantism. Or will Dick merely praise the behemoth for his perp-mangling skills? “I like the way Pops’s enormous shoes kicked in terror right before you hurled him to his death! That was a nice little flourish.”

Blondie, 11/3/09

Dagwood should not be worried about the complexity of Elmo’s sidewalk diagram here — after all, what is childhood for if not the creation of elaborate and impractical systems? No, the real issue is his concern for Dagwood’s safety. Any self-respecting American youngster ought to be over the moon with joy at the prospect of two adults running pell-mell into each other face-first and then collapsing to the sidewalk in a heap of slapstick pain. Yet Elmo is determined prevent this hilarious event from recurring. Is this the end result of a generation raised on play dates and non-violent cartoons?

Mark Trail, 11/3/09

Oh my goodness, in my recap of possible Mark Trail plot points, I completely neglected the obvious: Sassy used as gator bait! I certainly hope we continue along these lines when Rusty inevitably comes out in his pajamas to look for his mewling pup. “We may be in luck, fellows … alligators love hideous, deformed little boy meat!”

Mary Worth, 10/29/09

I would appreciate anyone who could help explain exactly what the hell I’m looking at in panel two. It seems that the effect intended is “dramatic camera angle shot from just behind Scott’s shoulder, for some reason,” but everything’s also skewed at an angle that makes it look like Adrian and Scott are villains in the Adam West Batman TV show (if only), so it’s sort of hard to look at it and not see Scott’s chest as kind of rising up and his head tilted back. My interpretations: either Adrian is disconnecting Scott from the machines keeping him alive and forcibly dragging his dying form to the altar, or he’s convulsing at her very touch in a desperate attempt to escape their impending matrimony.

Mark Trail, 10/29/09

You know, Sassy gets a lot of crap from you people, but she and she alone seems to realize that Mark is on the verge of leaving the swamp without physically assaulting anybody, and is thus taking matters into her own itty-bitty paws. I’m assuming that we’re going to get the overly complicated plot-sequence of “Sassy almost gets eaten by alligators, Mark rescues her, Mark spots poachers while out and about,” or maybe even “Sassy almost gets eaten by alligators, Rusty rescues her, Rusty gets captured by poachers, Mark must rescue them both,” for all you Rusty-in-peril fans. I’d sort of like to see a version that cuts out the middle steps, where the poachers spot Sassy and recognize that her beautifully spotted off-tan pelt would make a charming muff. Fortunately, Mark’s ability to hear piteous mewling at a distance is superhuman.

Family Circus, 10/29/09

It seems that we’re only now seeing the consequences of the Keane’s decision to keep any and all information about sex and procreation out of the Kompound. Clearly Dolly believes that her parents “made” her baby brothers Jeffy and PJ out of clay or some other random crap they had lying around the house, though looking at them you can hardly blame her.

Pluggers, 10/29/09

Think what you will about this installment of Pluggers, but it can’t be worse than my initial misinterpretation, in which a starving, impoverished dog-man was about to eat a lint-covered hot dog he found underneath his couch cushion for lunch.

Your comment of the week shortly, but first, a few items! You may have heard that several cartoonists, including the odd couple of Stephan Pastis and Jeff Keane, recently travelled to Iraq to visit U.S. troops there. Well, one of said troops, faithful reader MolyBendum, got to chat with the former (if not the latter). If you missed his report in the comments, check it out!

Also! I received the following intriguing note from faithful reader David Shea:

I stumbled across a discarded poster today, and I thought you might be interested in seeing it. It depicts Mark Trail in his usual outdoorsy pose, and Andy, or perhaps a tuft of grass, suggests that you should attend the Corn Tassel Festival in Gainesville.

The Gainesville in question is Georgia’s, where a crafts festival has been held annually since 1966. The festival was renamed in 1993 when someone someone bothered to look up the namesake, George “Corn” Tassel, and found out that his greatest claim to fame was being hung for killing a dude in 1830. The case involves some legal sketchiness, since the Cherokee Nation probably had jurisdiction and Georgia hung George while things were being appealed, but still, no one wants that downer at their crafts festival, and it’s now known as the Mule Camp Market. Either way: Mark Trail.

And! Faithful reader Nigerian Business Executive sent me a link to this hilarious collection of comics mashups, which I had somehow missed.

And now it’s that time again … time for … COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

“I imagine the phrase ‘Don’t worry, Tommie. You won’t win’ plays over and over in her head pretty much constantly. Having someone say it out loud is just redundant.” –BigTed

And the runners-up! Also hilarious!

“The thing that really annoys me about Slylock Fox, as well as Encyclopedia Brown, for that matter, is that all you have to do to solve a mystery is catch the disreputable-looking character in a lie. ‘Rodney Rat wasn’t retrieving repellent, he was stealing money.’ I mean, really. He could have any number of embarrassing reasons for being out of his tent. ‘Actually, Slylock, I was masturbating.’ ‘Actually, Mr. Fox, I was trying to get the lady-duck over there to do some videos for my new foot-fetish site, Web of Lies.‘” –teddytoad

“Slylock wearing a suit, deerstalker cap, and a cape even in the desert? Total prick move. You’re not a superhero. You’re not even a lawman. You have no badge or license. You’re a rat-persecuting maniac, who trails Reeky and Rodney across the world, blaming every crime in a ten-mile radius on them. No wonder they’re reduced to living in tents.” –Strangefate

“I, for one, would like to know why the rabbit man is about to hand Rodney Rat a pair of trousers.” –ArtisticPlatypus

“I noticed today that Leroy Lockhorn’s feet are at least as long as his legs. Given these freakish new proportions (ultra short legs, rotund shape, giant nose, etc.), I can only assume that Leroy is secretly The Penguin. This can only improve the comic, as repeated guest appearances by Batman, increased explosions, and testing the latest umbrella-weapon on Loretta have vast entertainment potential.” –Alan’s Addiction

“After Tommie gets her makeover on I Dressed In the Dark, she’ll be ready to co-star in Margo’s new reality series, I Really Deserve a Punch In the Throat.” –Patrick

“Tommie needs the more intensive makeover offered by I Will Die Alone Then Be Eaten By My Dozens Of Cats.” –Ed Dravecky

“Reveal: I Dressed In the Dark will turn out not to be a makeover show. It’s a hard-hitting documentary about street people, and the producers have been humoring Ruby in the belief that she is queen of the hobos.” –Tim Cavanaugh

“I can’t believe that Cathy did something meta. Now meta has been ruined for everyone.” –Nekrotzar

“I am looking carefully at panel three and admiring the evidence that even campfire smoke obeys Mark’s mighty will. At ordinary campfires, smoke insists on rising and even gets in people’s eyes. This smoke, not wanting to be punched, cowers low.” –Poteet

“The only reality show Ruby and Tommie should audition for is I Dressed Under the Full Glare of Florescent Lighting.” –Victoria Dunn

“When I see someone with outspread arms, an expression of agony, and a glow around his head, I assume I’m looking at a crucifix. Duncan’s other big secret, apparently, is that he is the Son of God, dying for the sins of the world. I am baffled by this plotline.” –sarahtheawesome

“I love the jump to the third panel, where Gil is relating the conversation to Mrs. Thorp. ‘So he’s all, I’m laying bare my emotional distress to you, blah blah, my brother’s in jail and I cry all the time, waaaah. Poor kid, right? It’s all he can think about and absolutely no one gives a shit. Especially not me.’” –Mollie

“Ruby says Tommie’s clothes are ‘just’ boring. Just? Ruby, honey, Tommie’s got boring down to an art. She took a vow of extreme boring many years ago and has been a faithful practitioner ever since. She’s a professional bore-meister. If Tommie suddenly stripped naked and started humping the sofa arm, the only notice anyone would take is to straighten the doily.” –Farley’s Revenge

“I’m not entirely convinced that Duncan’s brother is actually incarcerated. To me, it looks more like Duncan is just experimenting with a new, hip alternative to the classic ‘In my pants’ joke, leading to some wacky misunderstandings when people take him seriously — IN PRISON!” –yuudai

“Why do I find Bernice sexy? Because she is unattainable? I better discuss this with my therapist later.” –LITTLE A. OF THE GRAND CONCOURSE JUNGLE PATROL

“I like Gil’s dim awareness of Duncan’s family situation. ‘Davey, right? I have vague memories of fucking up another Daley’s life six or seven years ago. It’s all a blur. Every year, they come to me poised at the brink of manhood, loaded with testosterone, and highly vulnerable to bad decisions. I should try and help steer them, but I’ve got the playdowns to worry about. Speaking of which, Dunc, how’d you like to kill Marty Moon for me?’” –Edgy DC

“Why is Ziggy even in the hospital in the first place? He looks fine. And by ‘fine,’ I mean more or less how I would assume a squat, bald dwarf with no pants on should look.” –Indichik

“What the heck kind of a prison is that? Karate prison?” –the good ship thetis

“Lousy joke aside, I am glad Ziggy is finally addressing his anal leakage problem. As is every one else who rides the bus.” –NoahSnark

“Duncan Daley is clearly exploiting his brother’s predicament as a path to realizing his bicurious identical twins fantasy. Croquet indeed, boys; break out those mallets! Meanwhile, Jailbird Daley provokes a guy who regrets patronizing Prince Valiant’s barber.” –Jessie

“Mud? In Dennis the Menace? Oh, I wish that were mud, but we both know that’s not true.” –Victor Von

“I like the fact that in deference to the elderly (the last demographic on Earth who read Rex Morgan non-ironically) the narration box refers to the escapees as an ‘older’ couple, rather than using a more straightforward terms such as ‘old,’ ‘cogerish,’ or ‘overly entitled Alzheimer-crazed gatecrashers.’” –Jake Morgendorffer

“Just so everyone’s clear, Mark refers to his left and right fist as ‘The Rangers.’” –Digger

“I was so taken with the new FW mission statement in panel three that it took me all day to realize that I don’t really give shit what happens to Cory.” –C. Havoc

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Apartment 3-G, 10/26/09

Oh my goodness, is flowzy floozy Bobbie Merrill trying to worm her way into my heart, or does this sort of behavior just come naturally to the pill-addled blonde? She knows how the world works, of course — you send a gift basket to the crooked head-shrinker who’ll write a script for whatever it is you’re jonesing for when you show off some ankle; that much is given. But that doesn’t mean that she has to like how the sordid game is played, or that she has to make nice with the gift basket industry that profits from these little social niceties or the concierges who piggyback on for the ride and expect their own cut. No, Bobbie has bigger fish to fry, and by “bigger fish” she means “a tractor-trailer full of Ambien,” and by “fry” she means “rob at gunpoint.”

Mark Trail, 10/26/09

You know what would be completely hilarious and rad? If Mark were really serious about leaving the swamp tomorrow without even a cursory attempt to track down the poachers vigilante-style and punch them. “Sorry, fellas, I’m on vacation! You can kill and skin all the alligators you want, see if I care.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/26/09

Wait a minute, Baldy “Punk Rocker” “Earrings” McPunky O’Thug’s real name (or real nickname) is Cue? As in a cue ball, which is white and spherical, much like Cue’s head? This is the greatest moment in Rex Morgan Sinister Bad Guy Billiards-Related Naming since the appearance of a black drug dealer named Eightball.

Presumably Cue will learn from his offscreen media-savvy friend that there’s a big reward out for these runaways, and will heroically drive them back to their substandard nursing home, where he’ll be lauded at a press conference and receive the key to the city from the mayor. Meanwhile, Becka and Tim will continue to drive aimlessly around soggy golf courses, staying out so late that Becka’s husband will suspect her of infidelity, leading to further marital turmoil, divorce, and emotional anguish. You may think that sounds harsh, but I want every non-Cue, non-Alzheimers-afflicted character in this story to suffer terribly. Even Rex and June should be punished, for abandoning us to this mess.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/26/09

“Things can always get worse” = the new Funky Winkerbean mission statement, obviously. The only question: is that cop ringing the doorbell to announce that Cory’s dead, or that one or more people are dead because Cory killed them?