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Mark Trail, 5/14/26

Many years ago, we were visiting Vancouver during the delightful summer months, and in Stanley Park we encountered … like, a lot of raccoons, and they were uncomfortably bold. At one point a woman who was pushing a baby in a stroller was approached by a pair of the creatures, and she stepped away from the stroller so she could get a pic of her infant with the raccoons, who were quite close to the child and could’ve easily grabbed them and taken off into the forest before anyone could’ve stopped them. My wife and I discussed whether the kid would grow up to the be Sovereign Ruler of the Raccoon Kingdom, or would instead simply become that day’s lunch. But I don’t think there would be any such debate about Rusty. That boy doesn’t have a kingly bone in his body, but he has a decent amount of meat on his bones.

Pluggers, 5/14/26

I’m glad we’ve all moved way past hack jokes like “an old person needs a child to open a childproof cap for them,” and pluggers’ grandkids stopped speaking to them a while ago anyway. No, we’ve just landed on the chicken-lady with a facial expression that says “God damn it open you piece of shit, I need these pills to live” while the caption says “Pluggers are as incompetent as little babies.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/13/26

Oh, did you think that maybe Lonnie’s blackmail scheme might generate sustained dramatic tension of some kind? Well, sorry, Mae Mae got bored with this plot even faster than I did and has decided to just short-circuit the whole thing. I do enjoy the fact that she doesn’t seem to have a phone of her own and has to borrow the short order cook’s. Just a few days ago this guy was worried about not having enough customers to keep him employed, but when Mae Mae posts this video to his TikTok account, he’s going to be catapulted into the upper tier of “Lorninfuencers” (he will still have work as a short order cook, Lorninfluencing is not a lucrative job).

Marvin, 5/13/26

Marvin can never decide if its title character is a preverbal infant who shits himself or a child who talks and goes to school and also shits himself. I guess today’s strip is really leaning into the first take on the character, as he’s just sitting there thought ballooning while his grandfather ignores him. His grandfather is probably thinking about a big tasty plate of liver and onions, honestly. Maybe he’ll wander over to the diner and get some, forgetting Marvin on the park bench to die of exposure! Wouldn’t that be swell?

Hi and Lois, 5/13/26

No, Trixie! You’ve chased away the sun, giver of life! You’ve destroyed us all!

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Gil Thorp, 5/12/26

The Vegas sportsbooks have had a rough last few years. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association that states could set up their own regimes of regulated sports betting, and many did, leading to a flurry of betting apps available on every phone; then in early 2025, Kalshi, a “prediction market” that let users bet on any upcoming events and that claimed to be a futures market and thus regulated by the federal government, decided that betting on sporting events was just another kind of predicting and because they were under federal jurisdiction, they could offer sports betting everywhere, even in states that banned it. Still, I don’t know if “betting on high school golf” is what’s going to bail Vegas out on this one, though maybe they signed some kind of deal with the Valley Conference back when they were doing prison football, which you have to admit is more exciting.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/12/26

I’m not a big fan of the way that mermaids in Mother Goose and Grimm are depicted as just kind of floating around even when they’re not in the water. I’m also not a big fan of the really numb facial expression on this undersea king’s face; like, he’s not outraged or horrified, he just spent a minute looking at an old acquaintance — not a friend, really, but someone he knew enough to talk to, knew about his family — all dead and fried and sitting in a cardboard box and eventually he thought, you know what, I can’t bring myself to eat this one. But that’s a lot grimmer to think about, so I’m going to mostly complain about the floating thing instead. Are we expected to believe this is some sort of underwater fast food restaurant, despite the presence of a normal human guy behind the counter? C’mon.

Curtis, 5/12/26

Hmm, I don’t know, Curtis, I actually think that learning how to recognize when your boss is using company resources to indulge his own obsessions to the detriment of the health and safety of the organization and its employees is a pretty useful skill in the professional world! But then, so is gaslighting, so I do honestly see both sides here.