Not enough people appreciate a good void these days
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Mark Trail, 12/18/24
Mark Trail can of course never be an anti-hunting strip per se, but it has always adhered to a strict moral code when it comes to the sport: for instance, it’s highly dishonorable to stage a canned hunt of a little girl’s pet deer (which is named “Lucky”) as part of an ill-conceived plan to run for governor, or to buy a rare white lion specifically to hunt it. But this is Nu-Look Mark Trail and we need to move on to modern hunting crimes, like hunting a deer that’s famous on TikTok specifically to gain clout on TikTok. They don’t say TikTok, but people definitely mean TikTok when they say “social media” generically right now, the same way everyone who said “social media” generically in 2011 meant Facebook and everyone who said it in 2018 meant Twitter. Anyway, will vengeful TikTok teens punch Cherry’s sister’s bad boyfriend out before Mark can get to him? More on this story as it develops.
Curtis, 12/18/24
The Elon Musk-related punchline to this strip is neither here nor there, but I actually think it’s very funny that for three panels we get Greg Wilkins explaining to his tween son, in earnest detail, what a snow globe is and how it works. I guess the joke is that the kids today with their cell phones and Tesla cars (?) don’t know what a snow globe is or how it works and have to have all that explained to them, but I’m actually pretty sure that most of them are at least passingly familiar.
Alice, 12/18/24
This joke is actually — well, “good” is too strong a word, but it’s definitely passable. The only problem is that it should involve a child looking at a huge bookcase packed with books, not a small end table with six relatively slim volumes stacked atop it. But I guess we should respect the fact that Alice never wavers from its commitment to always take place in a mysterious and mostly featureless void.
126 replies to “Not enough people appreciate a good void these days”
Blondie: The Blondie artists spent more time drawing a background fire hydrant in today’s strip than the Gil Thorp artist spent drawing foreground action all month.
I confess I don’t get the Curtis punchline. It wasn’t produced by Elon Musk why???
Alice: I actually sort of relate to this…?
I have a huge backlog of books that I cannot push myself to get to reading. As does my Mom.
Book #3 looks like a Bible. That might be part of the joke.
@Flipper
You asked a question the other day about how Zoos in the Slylock-verse actually work.
Funny, there is an anime called Polar Bear Cafe where, while animals are (sort of) anthropomorphic. They still have zoos, but the animals in the zoo enclosures are there to entertain the guests, and get paid for it.
For example the protagonist a Panda named Panda who works at the Zoo just has to roll around and look cute, eat bamboo, and do other generic panda things. The audience eats it up.
RMMD: so let me get this straight–if Buster would have prevented the stabbing he would be getting euthanized.
MT: There’s no patching things up. Mark will preach about the evils of staged hunting before Peachy gets punched after getting pitched for poaching.
Tina’s Groove. Is that supposed to be a urinal?
Wow, the people (?) of Alice have such tiny hands they could stick them in their mouths. Not Alice’s niece with her stunted arms, though.
MW: And with the statement, “That’s mature of you, Dawn,” the die is cast. Buckle up for some epic public humiliation.
DtM: Came BACK? I always assumed they could never hit the same mall twice, due to the blacklisting.
FC: Irresponsible spending? On fairy tale castles? Uh oh. Okay, maybe it’s too early to assume that Dolly has been possessed by the ghost of one of the relatively low-tier 19th century European monarchs, but if she starts humming Wagner then Thel better get her to an exorcist in Bavaria quick.
DT: I knew it. I freaking knew it. Sure enough, Junior himself went to the TA lockup and signed in at the front desk with his own name to murder Sprengstoff. This daunting list of seven people apparently took weeks for the metropolitan police to sort out, as the TA themselves weren’t able to keep track of the single visitor they’d had in a six-day stretch. No, really; after months of clearly-pointless tedium, this is how Dick and Pals are solving this case. There is no floor for how dumb this comic can be.
JP: Good thing hunky Hank doesn’t have a wife or girlfriend eight years after cutting ties with Neddy and her extendable neck. Still, not sure why Abbey needs to be told about Neddy’s sudden renewed interest in Hank when Sophie explicitly already told her about it a month ago.
GT: There you go, the bartender is confirmed to be Beth. Beth Healy, in fact, presumably named for her favorite type of gimmicky children’s footwear. I guess “Darby” is Aldo Kelrast’s cousin there. Anyway, Gil’s “crafty” emotional torment plan has already dealt severe mental health damage to Coach Gerads, Lucas Martin (not to be confused with Luke Martinez; goddamn it, Barajas), and Marty Moon, and now it looks like his girlfriend Beth is about to become the next victim in this chain of suffering, possibly via outright sexual assault. Our hero, everyone.
Luann: You sure you don’t want to make the wording a little more romantic there, Brad? Like “He acquired me through manipulation” or maybe “I am the property of an obsessive husband?” Honestly, a bit of possessiveness is probably healthy for most relationships, but who would actually want to bluntly advertise it like this, let alone be happy about doing so as their lover’s gift to them? Even an S&M couple would turn their nose up at this. Worst of all, this is clearly intended to be worn in public so that Brad can get people to stare at his wife’s chest for prolonged periods of time wondering if it’s supposed to be some kind of Jesus thing or an internet meme they missed before ultimately concluding that Toni must have cheated on him and wearing this awful shirt is her punishment. Merry Christmas.
MT “He poached a famous buck in a state” sounds about a degree away from “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” on the nonsense scale.
Curtis: Look closer, Curtis: that ‘snow’ is ketamine.
Curtis: Some globes have little birds instead of snow. I suppose Curtis is remarking that he doesn’t see a bunch of Starlink satellites.
Alice:
“Aunty, what do you do with all these books?”
“I throw them at drones, to try to help the public solve a deepening mystery! — haven’t nailed one yet, though.”
JP: …with her reproductive organs.
Luann: Forgetting their woman’s favorite color? You’ll never sexually reproduce (Tee Hee!) with her THAT way! Pssh! Men, amirite?
MT: “Social media named this albino deer ‘the white stag'”. I freely admit that I don’t know much about “social media”, but apparently they’re not very imaginative, are they?
Seeing as today’s Alice, was something that my Mom could heavily relate to in a sentimental way, I wondered if I could buy a tiny print of it, to hang on the fridge or something.
Nothing too big or elaborate.
I actually went onto the Comics Kingdom Print store, and HOLY SHIT…
Regular size print of the comic is 58 dollars CDN.
Regular size with black border is 118 dollars.
Large size with black border is 369 dollars!!!
WHO WOULD PAY THAT MUCH FOR ALICE???
MT: “He doesn’t hunt to survive” is a funny phrasing. How many Americans can there really be whose literal survival depends on them shooting a deer? (Note that the residents of Hootin Holler do not count for the purposes of this question)
MW – I wonder how Dawn maintains her silly hairstyle. Does she go to the salon once or twice a month and ask the stylist to “just crudely chop some random sections off the back, and I’m good”?
And can’t her stylist gently and diplomatically suggest something…less ridiculous?
I can tell it wasn’t made by Elon Musk because it’s not leaking, the weather stripping isn’t coming off, and there’s no crypto options.
The Family Circus Spanish to English.
Curtis: I *think* the “joke” is that domed cities on Mars would not have snow?
@19 astroboy: I always thought Dawn’s hair-don’t involvved a low hanging ceiling fan and pinking shears.
@jroggs: This list isn’t about the crime. This list is about how many stupid pop-culture references Ettinger can slip in.
Didn’t expect a “no head after marriage” joke from a Six Chix.
Alice: Today’s strip could have been a good opportunity to introduce the Japanese term tsundoku, or maybe something about poorly balancing a stack of books by placing larger volumes on top of a small one. There’s probably a funny German word for that is Alice were ever to have an interest in humor.
Mark Trail: In my neck of the woods, or open fields as the case may be, we had an episode recently where a mother and sons shot dozens of deer for fun, sometimes mutilating the corpses, sometimes just letting the animals bleed out by the side of the road. Very, very cruel and more relevant than a single albino stag, but I suppose even in nu-look it’s hard to depict a mound of dead ungulates (not to mention east-central Wisconsin).
Alice: Alice can at least leaf through the top three on her pile. It’s the fourth that always stops her. Being an unholy abomination, it’s tough picking up a Bible, you know?
The Great White Buck! Where’s George Utley when we need him? I never thought I’d see the day when Mark Trail would poach “Newhart” scripts!
Curtis: Ha! Joke’s on Curtis, those aren’t snowflakes or their polycarbonate equivalent, they’re cigarette ashes. (They’re also the only thing Gregg will leave Curtis in the will, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Mark Trail: The Lightweights in the Forest
Does it look like the snow globe blew up and cost your dad a hand while shaking it, Curtis? Of course Musk had nothing to do with its production.
@Giant Pondering Otter: WHO WOULD PAY THAT MUCH FOR ALICE???
____________________
The Mad Hatter.
MT: A man was sentence to two years in jail and fined $40K for poaching a buck in Ohio just a few days ago. To Rivera’s credit, these stories are a big deal in the conservation community.
Alice: That’s an extremely personal question, kid. Don’t you have any boundaries?
Thou shalt not have triangular legs and feet, for this is an abomination against thy God.
Curtis : My first thought was that Curtis was snarking about cybertruck and how its indestructible glass was destroyed in its demo.
MW: OY — that is the mother of all setups to either Jared being an absolute drill rod or Dawn absolutely breaking up a happy couple because there is just no way that BOTH of these two are “mature” enough not to “doink”
MW-Dawn can still hang out with Jared in adult ways.
@19 astroboy, @23 Baja Gaijin: Of course when Joe Giella was the artist, Dawn’s hair wasn’t all choppy as it is now, but instead it was perfectly flat and the exact same length all around. It was not an improvement.
RMMD:
“That’s great news about Buster, Officer! Now — what did you say to that miscreant perp when you encountered him here at the hospital?”
“I said, ‘Hello, amigo! — I’m Chiquita Banana and I’ve come to say/Bananas have to ripen in a certain way/And when they’re flecked with brown and have a golden hue/Bananas taste the best and are the best for you!’ ”
“Why in the world would you have said that to him, Officer?”
“I had to give him his ‘Carmen Miranda‘ warning!”
Mark Trail – The poacher Rick has a counter-strategy to undermine the opposition by making an albino deer getting attention while normal brown deer do not yet a distracting proxy war of identity politics, while his high paid lawyers and political connections keep him out of legal trouble. Also, the potential shut down of TikTok will disrupt the conversation and in the mad scramble, a deer most people didn’t really care about until it trended will fall to the wayside as people seek to rebuild their followings.
Curtis – Thanks to comic time, Curtis is no longer at the age where he would been old enough when the App Store first opened and a range of 0.99¢ novelty apps flooded the store. The butt of the joke in that era would have been Curtis preferring the phone version to his father’s analog version.
Alice – It’s a dangerous game Alice is playing by reminding readers there are much better things they could be reading.
@seismic-2:
I get that Brigman is doing her own take on the Giella HairHelmet, but she could have just scrapped it entirely and given Dawn something new.
Kind of reminds me of the worst tonsorial disaster I’ve ever witnessed. Used to be a middle-aged woman that went to my gym who sported a giant poodle GirlMullet. A giant two-toned poodle GirlMullet. And the two tones were grey and blonde. And the grey part was the party-in-the-back part, as if the stylist wanted to save time and hair color by only coloring the part the client could see.
When you’re in a hair-hole, stop digging!
Blondie: If you have to ask where’s the “fun” in buying your wife a form fitting black dress at her request that especially highlights her boobs and booty then you’re not the man I thought you were, Dag.
RMMD:
“Folks, I’m delighted to report that an image of Buster is going to replace that of McGruff as the anthropomorphic animated canine mascot of the National Crime Prevention Council!”
“Why is that, Officer?”
“He took ‘a bite out of crime‘ !”
“Look at all the snow!” “It was not produced by Elon Musk!” Mmmm, is this a joke about cocaine?
@seismic-2: ooh yes, Helmet Hair Dawn.
“Woke thinks white lives don’t matter, but I triggered the libs by killing an albino buck!” is, unfortunately, a very realistic depiction of a viral social media post. Equally realistic would be Rick being nominated undersecretary for agriculture
MW: See, this is <a href="exactly what I was saying yesterday! Dawn and Cathy traded heads again!
Alice: I don’t want to get into Cpt. Picard and “there are four lights” territory, but Alice and her niece should know there are six books. Just randomly throwing a 7 at the end of your dialogue does not change the fact there are six books on the table.
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver: So Buster is coming home. Now I assume they’ll find that the camera footage was fuzzy about what happened before and Merle is going to be arrested for being the aggressor. That would be great.
Why doesn’t Mark Trail give proper credit to its artist, Billy, age seven?
MW: Moy gets to reuse the infamous shot of Dawn running down the park path like a spastic Jerry Lewis as she flees Jared’s home after he introduces her to his “Boxing Helena” girlfriend.
Sex Organ V.D. : Careful with your pronouns, Officer Gump! Now they think BUSTER stabbed Mr Newton.
MT: It’s one thing to kill an animal on camera, but making the corpse participate in some memeable dance is taking it to another level.
Curtis: The snow globe didn’t explode or catch fire when his dad shook it, which is a telltale sign it wasn’t produced by anything Elon Musk owns.
Alice: Yeah, that little girl is almost Gasoline Alley-level disturbing, but she takes a distant second to the haphazard way those books are stacked. Eeeeeeek!
Curtis: Next Greg is going to teach Curtis about the pens with the bikini clad women who become topless when he turns them upside down.
Family Circus: Shouldn’t they be asking Santa for any of the toys they want in December?
Dennis the Menace: “This is my updated hit list”
Pluggers: Because you’re a dog person abomination you also have a very short lifespan and are covered in fur.
Marvin: He’s preparing for his future career.
Dustin: It’s because you choose to blatantly harass women who clearly want nothing to do with you and are out of your league. Why would any of them want to hook up with unemployed man children who still live at home?
Mark Trail: Hours and hours, all afternoon and into the evening, Jules Rivera spent going back and forth: “should it be Social Media named this white deer ‘The Albino Stag’ or Social Media named this albino stag ‘The White Deer’?”
Luann: I’m surprised TJ doesn’t already know Toni’s favorite color.
CS: Considering the extremely niche marketing of that commercial, Crankshaft must be up at 1 AM watching America’s Funniest Criminal Incidents Involving Bus Drivers.
9CL: Oh well. The reprieve is over. Now we’re back to notAmos and notEdda doing their thing, which is the same thing all couples do in the strip.
Does nu-look Mark Trail< punch people? My hometown newspaper ran Mark Trail on Sundays only so it took me decades to learn that it was not just a fun nature facts strip but a slow burn leading up every few months to some fool getting punched by Mark Trail, but it's hard for me to imagine nu-look Mark keeping it up.
@Schroduck: I don’t recall Snuffy having ever brought home anything bigger than a chicken–and even then he didn’t shoot it. His blunderbuss is largely for show.
@taig: I think TJ does and Brad doesn’t? Assuming TJ is the one on the right.
@KMD: audible snort from me on that
“Social media named this albino deer ‘The White Stag’. I guess it proves that social media is not very creative”
GT: In the funny papers Thirsty Thurston has been going *hic* for seventy years. Sorta demolishes all the seriousness they’re trying to do with Coach Gerads.
@matt w: He still punches. Indeed, since storylines are much shorter, the number of punches per year has increased
MW: “It’s also mature of me to go over there and make sure he knows what a mistake it was for him to dump me.”
FC: Wait a minute…the original strip postdates the time when women were allowed to have credit cards?!?
Dustin: Fitch was actually referring to the fact he doesn’t look like a Peugeot 205 GTI. Who’s the dumb one here, Dustin?
Today’s “Alice” makes her very relatable and I am NOT happy about it!
@matt w: Yeah, TJ is the one on the right. You’d think he’d help his friend out, but maybe he wants to sabotage the relationship. For reasons.
I just wish Dustin’s father would not teach his son to shake it repeatedly until the white stuff is everywhere
@Ettorre: *Curtis’
JP: “Neddy’s going to be a day late. Her age-appropriate new boyfriend is humping her brains out, and I hear he can go all day long.”
RMMD: “Yes, he’s free to come home now. You can pick up the body any time. You see, it was the darndest thing. There was come kind of clerical mix-up and . . . Well, we’re sorry about that.”
GT: I haven’t gone to bars in a long time, so I have no idea what “open or close” means, if anything. But I suspect Henry doesn’t either. He just threw that there in like he throws in random sports terms.
@Tabby Lavalamp:
And if you drop it it doesn’t land safely by itself?
“ This joke is actually — well, “good” is too strong a word, but it’s definitely passable.”
I think it’s just that it’s an actual joke that can be perceived by a rational mind, which is atypical for the strip.
Curtis: Or, “I assume this was made by Elon Musk — at The Boring Company.”
@taig: Wow. Mister Tom “Cancer is no laughing matter” Batuik making a mesothelioma joke. I guess missing out on that Pulitzer yet again has finally broken his spirit.
@Ettorre: Today’s “Alice” makes her very relatable and I am NOT happy about it!
‘We buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.”–Warren Zevon
@Jerp+jump: And nothing has blown up or turned into a gigantic vanity project soon to be given absolute immunity from civil and legal liability or regulation.
@Twinkles the Elf:
It wasn’t produced by Elon Musk because it didn’t randomly catch on fire.
@Anonymous: I fondly remember this kids show a ways back, called “Imagination Movers” the Imagination Movers’ boss was the most exaggeratingly boring character in existence. That was his gimmick and I found him absolutely hilarious by how far, and how many imaginative ways the writers could go to make him completely utterly boring.
Apparently kids didn’t agree as he was written out after Season 1. Bah.
MT: I’m hoping Peach’s “real trouble” is that Rick’s now calling himself “Herne the Hunter” and wears the albino deer’s horns on his head while playing his own version of “The Most Dangerous Game”.
Mark Trail: This comic has always walked an uneasy tight-rope because it treats hunting as the ultimate evil and doesn’t really want to acknowledge it’s necessity in the conservationism it ostensibly champions nor that many people hunt to survive, but it’s also a newspaper comic and doesn’t ever want to rock the boat by saying something even vaguely controversial. It’s solution seems to be stuff like this, where Captain Planet-esque strawmen will be the only kind of hunter that Mark and his family of wannabe Greenpeacers encounter while the vaguest of lip-service is paid to non-cartoon villain hunters. Frankly, I think it would be more impressive if they went full Arctic Circle and started portraying Mark as an ecoterrorist who does stuff like punching Inuit whale hunters or game wardens trying to keep deer populations down. At least it would be more interesting to read.
Curtis: The hilarity of attempts like this by newspaper comics to seem “with” the zeitgeist is that they instead expose that just how embarrassingly isolated from said zeitgeist the writer is by talking about stuff that’s starting to slide off the radar as if it’s still the hot new thing, the subject having only reached the writer’s ear third-hand months or even years after it’s debut in the public consciousness. Case in point; this punchline (I used that word generously) might have been seen as timely close to a decade ago when Elon Musk was just known as “that rich guy who runs a tech company that tries to make zany sci-fi stuff” to the people who knew of him. When he was making headlines for announcing futuristic cars or claiming he would colonize Mars. Now, years later, Musk’s reputation has largely fallen apart and he’s known as a pathetic, ultra-divorced nepo-baby who’s desperate for attention and uses his dad’s emerald mine money to churn out terrible products and do stupid stunts like buying social media sites or shooting cars into space in the name of getting such attention. The end result is that Curtis’ dumbass joke here works less than it already did; instead of snarkily comparing his dad’s snowglobe to a bleeding edge tech company’s output, he’s making a completely random and nonsensical reference to some guy who’s main claim to fame is running a failing social media platform and being whined about by keyboard warriors online.
RMMD: Folks, you’ve done it! Thanks to your generous outpouring of support for #justiceforBuster, he’ll soon be returning to the loving arms of his family! But we’re not quite there yet! By making a minimal purchase of Free Buster merch in these remaining hours, we can *ensure* that The Process plays out as expected! Don’t let a last-minute technicality doom Buster’s fate!
Our Legal Eagle has requested that we point out the “no-refund” policy on all Free Buster merch, and that it is, in fact, NOT free.
Alice: Considering their foreheads blend into the background, they are the void and the void is them.
RMMD: I’ve come to realize that Beatty has mastered the craft of the anti-story: The choices he makes for Characters, Setting, Plot, Conflict, and Resolution are usually the blandest and most pointless, with all possible drama fizzling to nothingness. Then again, maybe that’s his take on life in general and, by putting it in this format, he’s actually producing high art. Any art critics in the house?
Phantom: I think DePaul has lost the plot a little. Weren’t they all at this bar to watch a TV interview about the skull tattoos that was supposed to start in a few minutes? So far, those few minutes have lasted two weeks.
@Rube: Because Jules, trippin’ ballz cannot match that level of draftsmanship, so it would be libel.
Alice: This is the first joke I’ve seen in this strip that not only makes sense to me, but is kind of relatable: all avid readers (and probably a lot of non-avid ones) know about the stack of books that you mean to get to “one of these days.” Unfortunately the cost of this brief flicker of sanity is being forced to contemplate what sort of extended family Alice has, and that’s too much for my fragile mind.
Curtis: If your late elementary school (I’m guessing) child needs you to explain the concept of a snowglobe to them, that says less about their technology-steeped world and more about your failings as a parent.
MT: God dammit, Rick, haven’t you read the Narnia series? The White Stag only grants wishes for a live capture! Now Peach will never get that private island in the Bahamas!
@ectojazzmage: This is another area where the modernization of Mark Trail is badly hurting the strip. The stern men and the realistic, 1930s-looking art style gave MT some gravitas to talk about the morality of hunting. This bunch of pastel-colored goofballs looks more like the artist was trying to update Archie for the TikTok era.
C’shaft: ….Billings? Maybe a reference to Peter Billingsley, the child star of A Christmas Story? Or maybe Batiuk got tired of doing a Christmas joke and just turned it into a generic lawyer joke at the end?
DT: Why did Totten sign his real name? Nobody else did, apparently.
Dustin: Frankly I know a lot of women who would hook up with Quasimodo before dating you two. (Though honestly that says less about these losers and more about the fact that I know a lot of monsterf*ckers.)
GT: Someone needs to cut off the artist while we’re at it. (Also I thought Beth left her bartending job? Did she realize Gil can’t be a sugar daddy on his salary?)
HotC: You’ll never do numbers on Nextdoor with that attitude.
JP: Oh, Neddy’s with…um…some guy! Who we may or may not have met before!
MW: Mature, desperately lonely, six on one hand…
Phantom: I mean, when your main method of dealing with crime is punching people and branding them for life, it kind of goes without saying that you’re not a huge proponent of restorative justice.
RMMD: Oh good, the last remaining possibility for conflict has been eliminated. We should be able to wrap this up by the end of the year if we hurry.
Curtis-“Where did you get the money for a snow globe, old man?”
MT: Nah, Hircine, Daedric Prince of the Hunt, merely sent Rick on a side-quest to slay the great white stag and gave him a magical ring as a reward.
Once Rick reaches level 25 he’ll unlock a new quest where he’ll be asked to slay the last Unicorn.
MT: Just so you know – the famous The White Stag was not poached, he was fricasseed! (snort,snort) Just a joke, my friends!! A little dark Woodland humor! No, he’s actually alive and well – this was just an off-site portrait gig for him. They didn’t wanna show his purported demise, woulda been too intense for the sensitive audience. They wouldn’t even use the word “shot.” They weren’t so euphemistic back in the day when I was SHOT by a baddie in this comic.
You can see The White Stag in person – he prefers to go by “Casper” – at the upcoming Winter Solstice Festival! Remember, this is an all-inclusive holiday for EVERYONE So B there or B square (snort,snort)
@GarrisonSkunk: #29: Maybe next time Jules will rip off the famous Andy Griffith Show episode where Opie accidently kills a mama bird with his slingshot and raises the babies.
@Stephen M. Dallas, Esq.: We’ll know it’s reached rock bottom when Batiuk starts joking about Lisa’s death.
Alice: Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. He also wasn’t very funny, if this recently unearthed trove of his work is any indication.
There will be no sexual attacks this week in Thorp, as Coach Gerads is too drunk to climb over the bar.
JP: That guy is too skinny to be thick-necked Hunky Hank. Besides, Alaska doesn’t have palm trees. Neddy went back to Los Angeles and picked up some rando at a bus stop for sex purposes.
Alice: “If you go home with somebody and
they don’t have any booksthey only have six books, don’t fuck them.” — John WatersPhantom:
“I can’t believe they let him out already.”
Damn those George Soros-backed soft on crime judges and DAs!
@Guillermo el chiclero: Which the Simpsons ripped off(?), where Bart accidentally kills a mother bird and raises its babies… although at least with a very interesting twist.
@Sid, Agent to the Animal Stars!:
#82. Sid, so glad you cleared up confusion that Free Buster Merch really wasn’t free. You have costs to cover! Worked a church outdoor fair years ago and we put up sign “Families, come in. Drug and alcohol free fun.”. More than one car of young men pulled in to ask where the free drugs and booze were.
BLONDIE:. Had a Maya day yesterday, so guess it’s too much to ask for two in a row. Gotta agree with Blondie here–the surprise element is over rated. (Also In “Betty”)
JP:. Too thin and well groomed for Hank the Hunk. So Ned must be a boyfriend snatcher in NYC.
love is… past your prime.
MT – Why did the deer couple divorce? Just cuz the doe went to Vegas and blew few bucks….
Curtis – So…that was the world before global warming…hey, maybe if we shook things up, like with a nuclear winter, or something….
Alice – I press leaves and flowers and block doors open…what else….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
the friendly neighborhood albino buck being shot by someone who intentionally tracked it down for clout is very “ripped from the headlines” from fayette, virginia in 2022, though a google search turns out that this is a way more common thing to have happen than you’d think with various incidents across the US
and by fayette virginia I meant fayette county pennsylvania, urgh, the virginia incident was in 2021
Break of Day: Nibbles at his nose? That’s not a rabbit, it’s Jack Frost!
Fred Basset Spanish to English.
MARK TRAIL: Geez, if Rick wanted to hunt down “The White Stag”, all he’d have to do is go through the beaded curtain of certain video stores.
Alice: Alice…Alice…Alice…you are such a wimp…I have a room full of tall bookcases crammed with books two layers deep, plus a half dozen copier-paper size boxes stacked up in my bedroom full of books, along with a tall bookcase next to my closet, along with a handful of books from my local library on my nightstand, and have made it my goal to eventually read all of them. Yesiree.
@Giant Pondering Otter: #3
I CAN SO RELATE, OTTER!!!
@Sequitur: Having discovered Break of Day (from you) I want to thank you, I found it refreshing, genuinely funny at times (chuckle worthy not laugh out loud worthy) and the art is really good too.
@Sequitur: @Giant Pondering Otter: I read through the archives down to about past Halloween.
CURTIS: I’m pretty sure a world where everything is “all white” would be produced by Elon Musk.
CURTIS (2): Greg is such a hypocrite! He constantly talks about how much he hates “that rap garbage” and yet, here he is in panel #2 happily doing a verse from his favorite Stuffy Old Song About The Buttocks!
I think it’s obvious the snowglobe wasn’t designed by Elon Musk, Curtis, since it hasn’t even exploded or caught fire yet.
@seismic-2: MT: “Social media named this albino deer ‘Gilbert’”.
@108 Giant Pondering Otter:
The archives is your friend.
@Charterstoned: Sounds like “The Copper Clapper Caper.”
@Giant Pondering Otter: #17
Those prices are outrageous, for sure. What you could do is take a screen shot of the strip and print it out; I’ve done that with some strips I liked. :-)
Remember when CK was hawking prints of Wilbur Weston’s supposed demise when he fell off the cruise ship? Talk about crass merchandising…
GIL THORP: “I’m cutting you off.” Oh how I wish someone would say that to the artist!
GIL THORP (2): Beth: “I’m cutting you off.”
Coach Perm: “You can’t stop me from drinking, girlie!”
Beth: “That’s not what I mean” (pulls out a switchblade and aims for his ba–)
@ectojazzmage: on Curtis: A few years ago, The Simpsons produced an episode where Elon was presented as a magical, Edison-esque technological genius. That episode is pure cringe to watch today, mostly for the reasons you mentioned but mainly because as a voice actor, Elon has the charisma of a wet tree stump.
Mark Trail: You have to admire Peach’s ability to ugly-cry throughout this entire conversation, shedding streams of salty tears as she recounts an entire, seemingly very long story. But wouldn’t she be getting dangerously dehydrated? I hope Cherry has some water in that car, or whatever version of Gatorade would be considered environmentally friendly (maybe a home-brewed electrolyte solution in a recycled bamboo bottle). Be fierce but be safe, ladies!
JP: Say, is that Glen Neddy’s snogging with?
”Rich family, big house in the Hamptons, dead dad….he’s too old for my little sister, so I’m doing her a big favor by taking him off her hands.”
@118 Ukulele Ike:
Naw. That’s Neddy’s ex, Hank.
Nice try, though.
@Sequitur: He’s too much of a pencil-neck to be a meaty, muscular ex-Cavelton building contractor/manly Alaskan frontiersman. See me at #94, backed up by Activist at #97, who also notes his shavenness.
@120 Ukulele Ike:
You forget. I can see tomorrow’s syrip.
Don Abundio, translated:
“What a gorgeous babe!”
“Yeah!”
“And she works here every day!”
“Yeah!”
“They know how to get us to play more golf, don’t they?”
@Dr. Larry Erhardt: Interesting his journey from hero to villain. Somewhat orchestrated.
JP – Most comments say that this is Hank. I wasn’t sure, since it’s next to impossible to distinguish the secondary characters from each other. Heck, it’s next to impossible to tell Sophie and April apart.
Rex Morgan – I have a number of problems with this dreck. Maybe Terry Beatty shouldn’t have skipped school when the ninth grade English teacher covered the components of a story.
First, why does it matter if Buster bit the bad guy before or after he stabbed Merle? Surely the doorbell camera would show the bad guy threatening Merle with the knife. Wouldn’t an attack on him be justified? He was in obvious danger.
Second, the injury and surgery part of the story had the potential for drama but petered off into nothing. Think of the opening of every episode of Ben Casey, with the orderlies running and the gurney crashing through the hospital doors. Here, all we learned was that Merle’s wound was “serious.” This is allegedly a medical strip. Was an organ perforated? Injury to muscles? Damage to blood vessels? Who knows? Beatty could have milked the story a few more days by at least saying what the damage was. It might have introduced a little suspense. I also have an ongoing issue with Rex as a surgeon. He performed delicate eye surgery, and now he did something to fix Merle’s abdominal injury. I don’t think that surgeon certification works that way, but I could be wrong.
This is a poorly thought out crossover of a police procedural and a medical drama. Beatty may have been going for a Michael Connelly vibe, but he didn’t realize that Michael Connelly isn’t boring.
tl;dr – This is boring dreck.
MW — Hopefully Jared announces his engagement, resulting in Dawn’s self destruction.
@Schroduck: Hopefully not many anymore, but there are still hunters out there that are decent enough to eat what they shoot.