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Mark Trail, 4/5/14

Kinda sad Mark is ENDING THIS today, though it’s hard to see how anything could have topped the first panel of today’s strip, as Mark forcibly tackles Marlin into the shallow waters where sea turtles will now be able to frolic without fear of having their eggs poached. I certainly hope that the copter-borne police got a good look at that squirming mass of bejeaned legs, protruding from the lake like some kind of denim-clad sea anemone.

Judge Parker, 4/5/14

At first glance, this seems like a touching conversation between the fathers of two young people who are about to get married — until you find out that what they’ve been talking about over the course of this week’s strips is that April’s dad wronged some Romanian arms dealers, who are even now bearing down on this heavily armed jungle compound in a helicopter gunship, determined to kill everyone. Alan wants to know even more, though! What sort of ordinance do their enemies carry? How many civil wars has April’s dad helped perpetuate through his arms-dealing business, and how profitable has that been over the years? Has the ability to manufacture powerful weapons relatively cheaply ended the nation-state’s monopoly on violence forever?

B.C., 4/5/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Secret Service agents have repeatedly gotten in trouble for paying for sex over the past few years! This is the sort of thing that angry parents would be writing into papers about demanding to know “How am I supposed to explain this to my children?” if anyone young enough to have young children still got a newspaper delivered at home. Anyway, in related news, Secret Service agents are very much not in the military.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/5/14

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is about how life is an endless series of bland, mind-numbing experiences that we undertake to stave off death, which honestly makes me nostalgic for the jokes about piano-fucking.

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B.C., 4/1/14

B.C. was groundbreaking in a number of ways when it debuted in the late 1950s, but if you were born in the ’70s or ’80s, probably your chief memory of it is how it came to reflect creator Johnny Hart’s sincere and also somewhat aggressive Christianity. Hart died in 2007, with a new creative team led by Hart’s grandson taking over, and after a rough start B.C. has settled back into the groove as a perfectly serviceable legacy syndicated comic strip that will continue to extract declining revenue from the print newspaper industry until that industry inevitably collapses in the next 10 to 15 years.

Anyway, while I have no clue as to the religious convictions of the current strip creative team, the universe of B.C.’s cavemen has been free of Christianity or indeed any other identifiable religion from our own world over the past seven years. But today’s strip reveals that the characters are still subject to the whims of a capricious and cruel deity — specifically, of MASON, whose signature stands in for the ineffable godhead like the flaming Aleph of Jewish mysticism. “APRIL FOOL’S” the god-name announces, as one of its puny creations, expecting only a pleasant swim, plummets to an agonizing death, his final moments spent in confusion and terror.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/1/14

Meanwhile, poor Uriah the mailman, the only representative of the hated Federal government who dares to set foot in Hootin’ Holler, is about to be subject to a much more human prank. What lurks in that mailbox? An angry baby rattlesnake? A rabid raccoon? A low-grade explosive device? Whatever it is, it’s bound to be hilarious, for people who aren’t Uriah!

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Mark Trail, 3/29/14

OK, fine, I haven’t been keeping you properly up to date on the doings in Mark Trail, but at least I’m letting you know when Mark finally gets around to punching someone! Let’s all … wait, what? That’s … that’s not Mark’s fist? That’s Mark’s face? Oh, man, I gotta … I gotta lay down. Gotta rest up. Rest up for next week. There’s gonna be all kinds of punching next week. Mark hasn’t been punched in a while. You can tell from the dust cloud that puffs out from where Marlin’s fist makes impact. He’s not going to like this. Not one bit.

Apartment 3-G, 3/29/14

Wait, did Lily the deer just say “bleat”? Jeez, the forest animals are never going to accept her city ways! “I say, fellow deer, this grass certainly is more lush than what I’m used to in Central Park! Anything around here to wash it down with? Surely there must be a Starbucks nearby! Bleat!”

B.C. and Wizard of Id, 3/29/14

B.C. did a joke about “haters” and Wizard of Id did a joke about “cougars,” in case you were still holding on to your will to live! The best I can say here is that at least B.C. didn’t try to draw a hater.