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Mark Trail, 9/5/11

It’s always worthwhile every once in a while to check in and note how thoroughly removed from reality the motivations and behavior of every single human being in Mark Trail are. First off, our Mountie is worried about an influx of tourism into this remote valley. Now, it’s true that such concerns are legitimate, but it’s also true that isolated communities are falling behind economically, and generally officials of the national government — such as members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — are always looking for ways to bring tourism dollars in from the outside.

So, that’s neither here nor there. But a million bazillion times more insane is the idea that this flood of flashy big-city tourists will be drawn by … news that one or two geese were found with biblical verses printed on bands around their legs? This concept doesn’t exactly have the same drawing power as, say, a water park, or a casino/concert venue. And even if you take the entire set of people who might be intrigued by the idea of an aggressive, honking bird bearing a tiny gold band engraved with a Bible verse, you have to question how many of them are going to fly out to the middle of nowhere so that they have the chance to tramp around the woods looking for said geese. Now, if you had a water park, or a casino/concert venue, where the geese with Bible verses on their legs were collected in a nice habitat where you could go look at them in comfort, that might bring in some tourist dollars.

Or, hell, what do I know? Bible geese hold no interest for me, so how can I try to predict the motivations of the target audience here? Maybe for your average Bible-goose nut, wandering around the forest with a pair of binoculars, hoping to catch that golden glint that you just know has a citation from Genesis on it somewhere, maybe that’s the whole point of making the trip in the first place. Maybe the idea of a cage full of sad geese with grubby little Bible bands on their legs, which you’d stop to gawk at for a few minutes while walking from the casino floor to the amphitheater on your way to catch Tony Danza’s fantastic one-man show Extravadanza, would just fill you with contempt for the way that the proud tradition of Bible-banding geese has been commercialized.

Anyway, long story short, the fact that Officer McQueen is very seriously discussing all this with his dog Princess is really the least of the problems with this strip.

Herb and Jamaal, 9/5/11

Ha ha, joke’s on you, Herb! Your children have never seen one of your old-fogey “CDs” in their lives.

Apartment 3-G, 9/5/11

I feel compelled to point out that Paul and Lu Ann are nowhere near anything resembling a porch swing in today’s Apartment 3-G strip.

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Apartment 3-G, 9/3/11

“Also, I thought people with the ability to teleport instantly across dozens or hundreds of feet of space in mid-sentence were only in terrifying sci-fi thrillers!”

Lu Ann’s shocking discovery that not all porch swings were ritually burned by squads of fanatics in the Great Outdoor Seating Purge of ’68 might make some sort of sense if she were a Manhattan native, since the closest such a person would get to a porch swing would be a wobbly folding chair left out on the fire escape in violation of building safety codes. But since she’s actually from South Dakota, a state I assume to be lousy with porched houses, I find her surprise puzzling. Maybe it’s like when you hide a baby’s toy under a blanket and the baby thinks that it no longer exists? “I haven’t seen a porch swing in months, I assumed they got rid of all of them!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/3/11

“It also looks like I got engaged to someone without ever asking anything about her parents! I suppose I probably should have tried to find out more about you instead of blathering about my book and my dead wife and my book about my dead wife, constantly.”

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Who knew that all this time the Funkyverse was working on a full-on multi-temporal synch-up of (I assume, but it’s a pretty safe assumption) gloom and death? Just as 10 years ago (or 20, or however many years separate Crankshaft and Funky) Cayla accidentally caused permanent brain damage to her opponent, so too in the present will … something bad happen! I think I speak for everyone everywhere when I say that I’m rooting for a repeat of the past and hope that Les will be concussed to death, or at least have his jaw broken so severely that he’ll be permanently unable to smirk. My biggest fear is of course that the scenario will be reversed and that Les will somehow manage to kill Cayla. Having lost two life partners to tragedy, his suffering will escalate to such repulsively high levels that it will tear a hole in the fabric of space and time.

Apartment 3-G, 8/31/11

“Quickly, girl! Are you a gold digger? Are you a whore? Are you barren? I’m old and dying, I’ve got no time for niceties!”