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Mark Trail, 1/5/09

With yet another Mark-spurns-a-pretty-non-wife-lady plotline behind us, it looks as if Mark Trail is finally going to touch the third rail of Mark Trail storytelling, by tackling the pretty wife-lady whose advances Mark also routinely spurns. Cherry is so worked up that she’s dispensed with her usual polo shirt and put on a sexy pink robe that’s allowing us to see her collarbone. “I hope he notices that I’ve changed my hair again!” she says, as she gingerly touches the vaguely rearranged curls perched upon her unnaturally large skull and stares at nothing in particular with her horrifying pink eyes. All the while, she’s thinking about her plans to fall on Mark and ravish him the moment he walks in the door, like an owl grabbing a mouse in its razor-sharp talons and tearing it to bits with its beak, only hotter, and with Mark maybe not being killed at the end.

Meanwhile, Doc is thinking “I hope he notices that I’ve paired up this baby blue cardigan with my orange shirt! I think the color combo really does wonders for me!” But he’s too shy to say this aloud, so he just stands there smoking his pipe, and waiting.

Beetle Bailey, 1/5/09

As you may or may not know, for the first six months of its 58-year existence, Beetle Bailey was actually a college strip, following the antics of Beetle and his fraternity brothers; then, one day in March of 1951, Beetle spotted the two girls he was dating both heading towards him simultaneously, ducked into an Army recruiting office to escape, and has been in the military ever since as the subject of some kind of terrifying black-ops time-freezing experiment. The draft has ended and he completed his term of service decades ago, so technically he can leave whenever he wants; however, as his totally neat and keen outfit today suggests, the still twenty-year-old Beetle is completely unequipped to deal with modern collegiate life, with its Facebooks and casual sex and kids wearing flip-flops in the dead of winter for some reason. He will no doubt go crawling back to his captors at the Defense Department’s Chrono-Retardation Corps soon enough.

Crock, 1/5/09

Today’s Crock is actually a philosophical masterpiece of metanarration. Poor Figowitz’s whole purpose for existence in the world of the strip is to be an unlovable sad sack; by deciding to abandon his deepest essence and force his features into a grin, he unravels the very fabric of his universe and brings everything in it — that is, the strip Crock — to an end, plunging his world into inky nothingness. This is intriguing from a metaphysical standpoint, and heartening in that it implies that Crock will cease to exist and we won’t have to read it anymore. If we’re really lucky, the universe-collapse will also occur along the time axis, eliminating the past of the strip and our memories of ever having read it.

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Shoe, 12/17/08

Hey, here’s something fun I like to do when I’m having coffee with an old friend: in the middle of a conversation, I deliberately structure my sentences so that they’re ambiguous and my interlocutor has to ask for clarification! It’s great way to “mix it up a bit”!

Ha ha, just kidding, obviously, if anyone in real life did this you would think that they were unbearably pretentious, or perhaps suffering from some kind of head injury. “But Josh,” you’re probably thinking, “aren’t these birds? Shouldn’t we be impressed that they’re using recognizable English at all? Cut them some slack!” I suppose you’d be right if we saw these birds engaged in more typical bird-oriented activities — flying, chirping, preening, hanging out on tree branches and telephone wires, crapping on cars, vomiting half-digested insect parts down the throats of their offspring, etc. But these birds have developed any number of advanced behaviors, including coffee-drinking, cup-using, clothes-layering, and crappy-art-from-Pier-One-hanging, so I frankly expect more from them in terms of pronoun use.

Beetle Bailey, 12/17/08

If the U.S. military’s mandatory retirement age applies to Camp Swampy, then General Halftrack was born no earlier than 1944, so even as a young man he must have been quite the nostalgist. Still, we shouldn’t question the wizenedness of someone who either appears to have been utterly defeated by this newfangled “CD player” thingamabob, or is simply too feeble to get up and walk six feet to put the disc in. (The possibility that this is all an elaborate ruse to get Miss Buxley to bend over in front of him does come to mind as well.)

Spider-Man, 12/17/08

Wait, don’t count on … him … can’t saving Jameson? Man, the tension and drama in this strip are entirely syntactic.

Marmaduke, 12/17/08

Marmaduke was in that window being groomed long enough for his many enemies to get wind of his location and arrange this ambush.

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Dick Tracy, 12/14/08

Dick Tracy has moved on from the “lives shattered and corpses mangled” section of the storyline to the “valuable lessons learned” portion. Liz’s ham-handed soliloquy — “Yes, Tracy, robots have a place in police work” — sounds like the sort of self-congratulatory statement you’d hear when someone in an after-school special overcomes terrible prejudice, though in this case that prejudice is against improbable, l33t-speaking robots that despite their crime-fighting value will have only occasional appearances in future installments of this strip.

Meanwhile, in typical Dick Tracy mangled-time fashion, the final panel of the last three strips has consisted of Diet Smith offering then refusing to help Dick’s wife over the phone. This is unfortunate, because it has forced us to repeatedly look at the inventor’s grotesque baby-like face.

Beetle Bailey, 12/13/08

Say, what’s more embarrassing than having only three comics acknowledge your 90th anniversary? Having a fourth add its own feeble contribution nearly three weeks after the fact, of course! That 19-day gap is, to the best of my knowledge, shorter than the lead time for strip publication, so it’s not like Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC saw those tribute strips on November 24 and suddenly lurched into action, but I can’t offer an alternative explanation for this delayed tribute. Perhaps there’s some dispute as to the actual launch date of the strip back in the mists of time, and we’ll be seeing tributes to Gasoline Alley’s continued zombie existence dribbling out over the comics pages for weeks to come.