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Mark Trail, 2/8/20

Oh my god, “Harvey completely made up the story of a yeti ripping his leg off and actually he just had juvenile diabetes” is a so much better ending (?) to this story than I could have possibly imagined. I don’t know what I want more for Monday: Harvey digging his way out of the avalanche and yell-growling “The yeti was a METAPHOR! … a metaphor for JUVENILE DIABETES, my greatest foe!” or just a smash cut back to the cabin in Lost Forest with Mark saying “Yes, Rusty, I did see some unusual animals in Nepal!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/8/20

Oh my god, I had forgotten that June mentioned Aunt Tildy had been married to a man “she called the Count, but he didn’t seem to be rich.” Shoutout to Rex Morgan for surprising me for the first time in literally years: “Andrzej and Tildy are destined to be together” seemed so obviously set up that I entirely missed “Andrzej and Tildy were together once and will be in the future, time is a flat circle, all of this has happened before and will happen again.”

Judge Parker, 2/8/20

Oh my god, what if Sophie decides to not run the campaign of her old family friend but instead puts her considerable political skills to the service of one of his rivals? From what we’ve seen of it, Alan’s campaign is focused on prison abolition and left-leaning NIMBYISM from a perspective of noblesse oblige, and I’m interested to see if his opponent, aided by Sophie’s inside information and all-around smarts, attacks him from the left (“Alan Parker should be put in jail as a class enemy”) or the right (“Alan Parker should be put in jail as an actual criminal, who broke several laws”).

Crock, 2/8/20

Not to be all “poor me” over here, as making fun of comics is something I obviously enjoy and I appreciate getting to earn part of my income from it, but let me just tell you that I read this strip and thought “Huh, I bet conditions on the plantations where they grow pepper are pretty dire, I wonder if there’s some joke to be made out of that,” and ended up opening multiple browser tabs, learning that, for instance, the bottom has fallen out of the Vietnamese pepper market, and that India attempts to protect its native pepper industry with tariffs and price controls but this has led to a a pepper smuggling pipeline from Vietnam via Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, big American companies like McCormick are investing in sustainable pepper operations, at least according to this advertorial “hosted by” The Guardian. I wasn’t really able to mine a lot of laffs out of all that, unless you count the meta-explanation of it I’m doing in this post, but I 100% guarantee that I put a lot more thought into this than was put into this joke.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/8/20

The Smifs have lost track of their baby as he crawls through the knee-deep trash that completely covers the floor of their filthy hovel! Ha … ha?

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Funky Winkerbean, 1/21/20

ME FOR THE PAST WEEK: Ugh, I am so irritated by this plot about nice people desparate to make a movie out Les’s book while he pisses and moans about it, can we please move on to literally anything else

ME TODAY, SUDDENLY CONFRONTED WITH THE PROSPECT OF A RETCONNED FLASHBACK TO TEEN NERD LES HAVING NO DOUBT WILDLY AWKWARD AND UNFULFILLING SEX WITH HIS MOST POPULAR CLASSMATE: Ugh, no, go back to the movie, go back to the god-damned movie

Hi and Lois, 1/21/20

“We taped it to the front window to create the illusion of a disorienting pocket universe where different sides of the house face the same direction but look into different timeframes, hopefully confusing and alarming you enough that you’ll just buy the house because you’re afraid you can never escape it. Is it working?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/21/20

Ha ha! It’s funny because Hootin’ Holler, isolated and impoverished, is ignored by the mainstream financial services industry, and predatory local institutions have stepped in to fill the gap!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/23/19

At first I thought it was kind of sad that Barney Google was sticking around Hootin’ Holler for Christmas. Doesn’t he have any friends and family, back home in the big city of [refuses to consult Wikipedia], let’s say, Chicago? But then I realized: of course he doesn’t. He’s like 120 years old! He’s watched everyone he’s ever loved grow old and die! The only correct place for him to celebrate another in his infinite string of Christmases is with the Smiths, his fellow immortals.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/23/19

Ah yes, the tale of nog,? so scary we had to relegate to to off-panel. Now can we get to the real horror: the tale of these eggs, and what their reproductive cycle is? Why is there a “parent” egg and a “child” egg? Have eggs managed to evolve not only sapience and the desire to tell scary stories to each other, but also the ability to reproduce themselves without a chicken being involved at all? Do they just bud asexually? Do they fuck? Do eggs fuck? And why is there a barn? Why are these eggs in a house but you can see a barn outside, a bar like you’d find on a farm where chickens lay eggs? But in this scenario we’ve established that chickens aren’t necessary, so: what’s going on in the barn? What’s going on in the God-damned barn?

Judge Parker, 12/23/19

In the wacky ways of Hollywood, Neddy and Ronny’s movie about April the CIA assassin has now become a TV show about April the CIA assassin, because viewers love binge-watching high-concept prestige longform storytelling but only go to the movies to see superhero flicks with nine-digit budgets. Anyway, the real question is: will April, who only gave her blessing to a movie version of her life, emerge from hiding and murder everybody, and if so will it happen before or after we get to watch trained actors recreate the famous “work them like a claw” scene from April and Randy’s first date?