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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/21/17

In their blind haste to develop self-driving cars, elitist Google ignores nutritional needs of rural Americans. Sad!

Beetle Bailey, 9/21/17

Got the celery and the baguette, but still the lamest Art Frahm knock-off ever.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/21/17

Heather gets her longed-for baby, and Rex gets an ocean between himself and his patient. It’s win-win!

Sherman’s Lagoon, 9/21/17

Fascinated by the island monkeys, Sherman asks Big Kahuna to transform him into one. I’m more than a little concerned about this! “Beach apes” are food to Great Whites like Sherman, yet he becomes a primate every time he gets a chance. A dimwit shark is funny; a dimwit self-loathing shark is just confusing.

Gil Thorp, 9/21/17

Prodded by evil Uncle Gary, promising left tackle Rick Soto must choose between a chance at high school gridiron glory or wowing the Elks Club with 1928 Kurt Weill show tunes. Follow your extremely modest dreams, kid!

B.C., 9/21/17

You’d think a prehistory-themed strip would know a little more about reptiles.

Luann, 9/21/17

Tiffany put on some weight, which is somehow now everybody’s business. Her nominal friends spring into action: Bernice to read to her from that big copy of Cosmo, Dez to light calming incense, and Luann to set things up with the team.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/20/17

Times may be tough for newspapers elsewhere, but in largely illiterate Hootin’ Holler the editor of the Gazette is settin’ purdy. Not only did the recent subscription drive vastly expand the paper’s distribution area, but judging from the contents of Jughaid’s satchel, it also raised circulation a solid 50%. Far away in the flatland of Tysons Corner Virginia, a Gannett regional manager selects Bowtie McPencil for the quarterly sales award and a shot at the President’s Club cruise to Barbados.

Judge Parker, 9/20/17

Oh look, it’s chesty newsminx Toni Bowen from the factory-collapse story, and she’s going to save her national-desk job with an exclusive scoop of April’s video!

But hey waitaminute it was Sam holding April’s SD card — how and when did Toni meet him? He wasn’t at the factory collapse, so it must have been later, during his paranoid yarn-on-the-bulletin-board period? Or when he sent her all those nasty emails? She certainly doesn’t know April, even to look at. So Toni is staking her career, and making an enemy of the CIA, based on an unverifiable video sent by a guy she knows only as a belligerent raving lunatic. Cynical, streetwise career move, or first step on the way back to covering mall openings and/or extraordinary rendition?

Haha Randy’s lampshade looks like a Disney elephant huddle.

Mark Trail, 9/20/17

And now we arrive, as ever we must in Mark Trail stories, at the Bear in the Cave. But in truth, faithful readers, the Bear sleeps within us all. In our deepest Cave, far beneath our civilized façade, out of sight or even waking awareness — but angry when roused, and eager to strike. Consider then what great Bear must slumber within Mark Trail: a mountain of an animal, primitive, grizzly, and possessed of Biblical strength.

Asleep through countless months of slights, insults, and indignities by Baldy and his accomplice, through the endless ride across the great prairie, through fistfights, thunderstorms, and tornadoes, Mark’s Bear now stirs — beware his mighty paw! He will not be stayed by the facile trick-riding of Johnny Lone Elk, nor beguiled by the candy and Barry White CDs in Sheriff Don Stober’s saddlebags. No weapon can wound him. He plods upward, consumed with rage and thirsty for blood. O Baldy! You have wronged a Man of Nature; now tremble at Nature’s wrath!

I’m fully prepared to accept that Lone Elk, Stober, and Samson embody the ego, superego, and id, and that we’re entering a new, metaphysical phase of the Mark Trail mythos — one in which the mere idea of Mark Trail conquers evildoers. But I’m gonna miss the fistfights.

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— Uncle Lumpy

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Mark Trail, 9/13/17

Now look, folks, I’m just a simple city boy. I’m used to God’s honest American landscape, where you never have to walk more than 10 minutes to get to a bus stop and you can get Thai delivery anywhere. So forgive me if I’m a little naive about how things work out in the countryside. But … when there’s a tornado coming, it doesn’t affect horses more strongly than other creatures or objects, right? It doesn’t pull them upright with mysterious force and leave humans standing around just feet away unaffected? Horses don’t stand on their hind legs in mysterious circles, whinnying up to their Wind God to take them up to the Sky Pasture before smiting the earth and the Saddling Ones upon it with His mighty hoof? That’s … not a thing that happens, right?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/13/17

Lukey claims Elviney’s going to give him the business about spending the day goofing off. I think he’s honestly more worried that, once again, she’s going to make him feel like a fool by gently reminding him that, in order to catch fish, you have to actually cast your line into the water, not out into the bushes in the complete opposite direction.