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Mark Trail, 8/3/24

Bill, I know you’re very busy with all the jobs the editor of a modern 21st century publication like Woods and Wildlife has to handle (mostly working on greenwashing sponcon articles extolling the environmental bona fides of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company), but Mark is not making a pun! He’s playing off the polysemy of a single word, not using a word that sounds like another word! Your editorial staff would be ashamed, if you hadn’t replaced them with the Grammarly browser plug-in.

Curtis, 8/3/24

The Curtis summer storyline is about how Curtis got a job at a local florist shop, which he likes, except the shop is going to close down soon because it’s not doing well financially, and its owners are going to move back to England, where they’re from. It’s been pretty boring so far, and I wasn’t really interested in it, until today, when I learned that the store parrot wants the store to fail, and is blocking innovative new revenue ideas to ensure that happens, and now I am locked in.

Marvin, 8/3/24

Good news, everyone! Marvin characters are starting to be haunted by the spectre of death! I certainly hope this trend soon starts to move in on the strip’s more prominent characters, who I’ve gotten to know and really dislike over the years.

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Mary Worth, 5/20/24

Yeah, sorry I didn’t talk about Wilbur making a beautiful flowered coffin for his dead fish Stellan Sunday, but I just sort of stared at it for a little bit and couldn’t process it properly, so I’m glad I have a chance to reassess today. Anyway, pretty fucked up, huh? Ha ha! My dad had a fish tank when I was a kid and over several years we got more and more fish and upgraded to bigger and bigger tanks. Obviously fish died over time but I don’t really remember us doing anything special for them; I assume we probably just flushed them or threw them out, and we had so many fish that even though you would get attached to individuals there were enough that losing one wasn’t a huge tragedy. Then one day we went to our usual fish store and there was a real crazy looking fish in there and we were like “What is this?” and the guy was like “Just got it in, honestly couldn’t tell you” and we bought it and over the next few weeks it ate all the other fish and then died. Not sure how my dad dealt with that, since the horror ended when I was at my mom’s, but I bet he didn’t give it a big funeral either, even though by that time it was definitely too big to flush. Anyway, tune in over the course of this week to see if I have any other vaguely topical anecdotes to help us all forget about the nightmare of what Wilbur is doing!

Curtis, 5/20/24

On Twitter, once, I saw a guy do an entirely earnest tweet thread about how Silicon Valley disrupted old-fashioned, conformist business uniforms like suits and ties for a more comfortable and unique aesthetic, illustrated by pictures of multiple fiftysomething dudes wearing identical chinos-and-fleece-vests. Anyway, I just want to note that the stuffy shirt and tie were a casual alternative to more formal codes of dress once, and in the Curtis-ruled future, a baseball hat tipped jauntily just so will be a requirement for entry into polite society, to be worn at all times.

Beetle Bailey, 5/20/24

Yeah, man, usually when someone gets arrested, they are in big trouble. That’s a good observation, Killer, thanks for keeping us informed.

Alice, 5/20/24

Alice, you were kidnapped by aliens last week! That seems like a pretty big deal or at least a conversation starter.

Tina’s Groove, 5/20/24

I’m a 49-year-old man and my entire life I’ve assumed that a “halfway house” is called that because it represents a way station halfway up the path between your troubled past and the better future that you’re working towards. Does it … does it not mean that. Is getting closer to one bad in this metaphor. Do you want to go all the way down to zero, so you have no house at all. I gotta go lie on the couch quietly for a while.

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Curtis, 3/1/24

The weird thing about arrested-in-time strips like Curtis is that we, who have been reading this strip for decades, have internalized the rhythms of the family dynamics and recognize today’s episode as one of an infinite number of subtle variations of the “Curtis asks his dad for money” gag. But Curtis, in theory, is only 11 for a year or so, and in a strange way he’s experienced much less of his own life than we have, and so can’t predict what’ll happen next. Look at his smile in panel two! “Throw his money out a window?” he’s thinking. “What a charmingly odd idea! Not sure where he’s going with this but I’m sure I’ll have some cash in my pocket by the end of it.” Anyway, Curtis, have you considered getting a Spotify subscription? They have Six-ribs’ whole catalog, along with a huge number of other hip-hop artists, and 60 bucks could get you six months!

Marvin, 3/1/24

It took me a minute to figure out, but I think the joke here is supposed to be “The dog, who should not be eating people food, will end up eating the meatloaf, because someone will be surreptitiously feeding it to him, ha ha!” But this is a strip where dogs and babies have adult human-level cognition, so don’t they shouldn’t act like we’re supposed to be surprised or amused that they might eat adult human food. Anyway, my initial read on this was that the joke was about the dog not wanting to fill the house with horrible odors vented from his bowels, which would at least be kind of a twist for this strip.

Mary Worth, 3/1/24

Toby is truly one of my favorite ancillary Mary Worth character. Unlike Wilbur, she’s used sparingly enough so that it’s a true delight when she occasionally shows up and says things like “I want to take up cooking, which my husband would love, but my neighbor up the hall, who rarely cooks for us, is so much better than me at it, so why bother?” This would be hilarious even if the thing the lady up the hall had just dished out wasn’t the most disgusting brown glop you could possibly imagine. Anyway, Mary is being either incredibly kind or incredibly sarcastic when she calls Toby “a talented artist and a great friend,” because she definitely isn’t the former and I’d be willing to bet quite a bit that she’s isn’t the latter either.