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Mark Trail, 5/31/14

I don’t want to alarm you, but Mark Trail has spent almost as much time expressing affection for his wife (a human female) as he did gaping in wonder at the majesty of animal-on-animal combat. Will new-model Mark Trail now consist of episodes of Mark feeling emotions like a real person interspersed with violence dished out by the natural world? If so, my pick for the next animal attacker is the hawk in panel three, which has had enough of all this making out in its forest home and is swooping down to dish out harsh justice with its razor-sharp talons.

Beetle Bailey, 5/31/14

If it’s Saturday in Beetle Bailey, it must be General And Mrs. Halftrack Loathe Each Other With A Terrifying Passion Day! Here they are reading the paper in the morning, glowering at each other through sad, drooping eyelids and carping about the General’s ignorance about everything, including the institution to which he’s dedicated his life. Why should she ask him about the army? Why ask him about anything at all? Why talk? Why go on living?

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Beetle Bailey, 5/28/14

Beetle Bailey trufans know that Wednesday is Miss Buxley Wednesday, when the strip’s increasingly crudely drawn resident sexpot is guaranteed to appear for the delight and arousal of the strip’s increasingly aged core audience. Which is why I found today’s strip, in which she insults and humiliates her boss/constant sexual harasser, so intriguing. Will we go further and further in this direction?. In a year or two, will Miss Buxley Wednesday just consist of a panel with her saying “Why on earth do I come to work in a professional setting in a little black cocktail dress? Wait, are you masturbating to me right now? You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/28/14

I’ve been joking for months that this Sarah plot would devolve into “Sarah is forced to go through the motions of painting performatively, like an animal at the zoo,” but … it looks like that’s really going to happen? I guess her parents were so focused on all the money she was going to make that they didn’t pay much attention to this part of the contract, ha ha! A million thumbs up to Rex Morgan for taking things to their logical conclusion, which also involves Sarah theatrically pouting. More Sarah pouting, I say! Pout, girl! Pout with all your might!

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 5/25/14

Let’s ignore, for the moment, that Count Weirdly has developed a functional, practical, and presumably quite marketable virtual reality device and is only using it to irritate Sly and Max. I think that the form he’s chosen for his holo-annoyance is quite revealing. Forget about random geographic inaccuracies; it’s more important that Slylock and Max have been thrust back to a world of pre-sapient animals, one where humans like Count Weirdly are still the dominant species. It would be as if we were suddenly confronted by specimens of Australopithecus africanus, Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis: we would be far too unsettled at an encounter with our primitive ancestors, very much like us but at the same time separated by a vast intellectual gulf, to really spend much time griping that the native habitats of these various species were separated by thousands of miles and millions of years.

Perhaps Weirdly’s choice of holo-program reveals why his incredible invention has remained in his castle lab. If ultimately he can only imagine the animal species who dominate the outside world in terms of the primitive forms from his own childhood, then surely the idea of selling advanced technology to them must fill him with horror and contempt.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/25/14

Speaking of primitive societies, Snuffy Smith is here to remind us that notions of romantic love are a luxury available only to the global elite. In most times and places, simple economic calculations are the primary factors in choosing a mate.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 5/25/14

On Memorial Day weekend, the soldiers of Beetle Bailey finally achieve a tragic degree of self-awareness — just enough to understand their predicament as characters in an absurdist comic strip, but not enough to do anything about it.