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Mark Trail, 10/28/14

So here’s a little mystery for you: last week when Bill proposed to send Mark and his family into the Great Dismal Swamp, the nefarious chemical company involved was called “Petroxx Chemical,” which name I worked into a joke I was a little too inordinately proud of. But not long after the post went up, an anonymous commenter pointed out that in version online the company’s name had changed to “Riverway Chemical”; this is the name they seem to be going with now, and Mark is going out of his way to point out that this Riverway Chemical outfit is totally one of the good industrial mining concerns. Did just the name “Petroxx Chemical” offend some powerful interests? Is this storyline just going to become increasingly neutered, with any evidence that Mark cares at all about the environment vanished down some Stalinist memory hole? When we look at the strips from these dates three weeks from now, will Mark and Doc be talking about how titanium dioxide keeps a fish’s scales soft and supple?

Rusty, meanwhile, doesn’t care about any of this fancy tree-hugger talk. Mostly he wants to know: is this swamp full of dangerous reptiles that will kill and eat him? Will his pointless existence finally be snuffed out by blessed oblivion? Will he at last be able to contribute something to the world, as food in a gator’s belly?

Beetle Bailey, 10/28/14

It may sound like Miss Buxley is just babbling nonsense in panel three, but she’s probably just killing time so that the undercover EEOC agent at the next table can gather enough corroborating evidence about this mandatory lunch date with her boss, during which he’s already ordered that work matters not be discussed.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/25/14

Not sure what denomination Chaplain Staneglass is supposed to be, but mainstream Christian theology has had a ready answer to this one since at least Aquinas and probably Augustine. The short version is that God is eternal and exists outside of time as we understand it — indeed, the linear progression of time, including the concept of cause and effect, is part of His creation, so it doesn’t really make sense to talk about Him being created by anyone or anything. You can find this logic varying degrees of satisfying based on your own personal beliefs, but the idea that a clergyman would respond to a sincere question about it with “WELP ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” makes me a little depressed about the quality of ministry available to our soldiers and/or cartoonists, and I’m an atheist.

Six Chix, 10/25/14

You can see this as a cartoon about a dad being a sullen dick about doing a joint Halloween costume with his daughter, but I prefer to interpret it as a clever little girl doing the best she can to work with the requirements of an unusual court order.

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Apartment 3-G, 10/20/14

Well, this is certainly the most shocking development in Apartment 3-G in some time: during Tommie’s multi-month absence, Margo hasn’t gotten bored and come up some new vaguely aspirational business plan, but has instead continued to be a publicist when the plot demands it! You might remember Skyler as the young starlet who Margo’s employee/sex slave/secret enemy Evan flirted with so that Margo would refuse to take her on as a client. Skyler used to be a brunette and then had black hair and now is a blonde, which is par for the course for actresses, I suppose. Less realistic is that she’s wearing a shapeless pink sweatshirt, or that she now looks more or less exactly like Lu Ann, or that Margo is a good enough publicist that anyone would try to hire her after she cruelly rejected them for no good reason.

Mark Trail, 10/20/14

Since this is Mark Trail, it’s a safe bet that the folks on TV here are aggrieved over some kind of nature or environmental issue, which makes me even angrier that, in an age of rapidly shrinking journalism budgets, Woods And Wildlife Magazine can still afford a high-rise office for its wholly out of touch top editor. Still, Bill Ellis’s uncanny resemblance to LBJ has never been more appropriate than it is here, as he smirks with hooded eyes at some damn hippies protesting on his television set.

Judge Parker, 10/20/14

Just in time for Halloween, and then for the seven to fourteen months after halloween: as darkness falls, the Parker-Driver clan is going to drive the Road Queen into a spooky, abandoned RV park! How many chainsaw-weilding murderers will be lurking there, and how much money will our heroes get as a reward when they arrange for those maniacs to be captured by the local police, with very little effort on their part?

Family Circus, 10/20/14

Remember the innocent days when the Keane Kids would cheerfully blame their transgressions on adorable ghost-things “Not Me” and “Ida Know”? Well, that’s all over now. Reality has set in. The kids know that nobody buys that crap anymore. One of them is going to have to take the fall. The question is: who? This will only be settled by an ugly outbreak of violence.

Beetle Bailey, 10/20/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Beetle is injured and writhing in agony and begging Sarge to drive more carefully, which Sarge callously refuses to do! But the real joke is that all those injuries were almost certainly inflicted by Sarge in the first place.