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Mark Trail, 6/29/17

Oh, I bet you thought that three months ago, when Mark Trail paused to do some jokes about a mysterious incident Mark and Johnny got up to “a long time ago” at the “Water-World Theme Park,” it was all just a silly aside, a wink to those of us who know about how Mark’s various dramas often leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Well, guess what: it’s turned out to be extremely key to this storyline instead, actually! Since Mark rented his car under Lesley’s name (is this something you can … actually do? just rent a car in the name of someone whose ID you do not possess? guess they’re still pretty trusting at the rental facilities in America’s rural heartland), this has led the FBI straight to the Water-World Theme Park, which upgraded its name’s orthography to WaterWorld right around the time they ditched their popular but increasingly controversial “poke a captive orca with a cattle prod” exhibit. Anyway, this will result in Mark being … freed, somehow? Probably because Lesley Joyce has dealt with his car-destroying antics before, giving her an uncanny ability to figure out his next move, as Mark well knows. The Water-World Incident took place years ago, when Lesley was just a simple Customer Experience Enhancement Agent in charge of cleaning up the dolphin poop; now she’s climbed the corporate ladder all the way to Vice President of Octopus and Squid, but an encounter with Mark Trail is something you never forget.

Slylock Fox, 6/29/17

You know, maybe I’ve got it all wrong about how the Animals seized control of the world of Slylock Fox. Maybe there was no violent revolution, no singular Event when the beasts achieved sapience all at once. Maybe humanity mostly died out in a series of great pandemics, started when pseudoscientific beliefs convinced people to abandon immunization and other techniques that had kept the microbes at bay. Here we see the opening stages of the Great Die-Off, when affected household are required, under the emergency authority granted to the Plaguemaster General, to identify the diseases present inside. The dog just sits and watches, waiting for a new ecological niche to open.