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Mark Trail, 12/18/24

Mark Trail can of course never be an anti-hunting strip per se, but it has always adhered to a strict moral code when it comes to the sport: for instance, it’s highly dishonorable to stage a canned hunt of a little girl’s pet deer (which is named “Lucky”) as part of an ill-conceived plan to run for governor, or to buy a rare white lion specifically to hunt it. But this is Nu-Look Mark Trail and we need to move on to modern hunting crimes, like hunting a deer that’s famous on TikTok specifically to gain clout on TikTok. They don’t say TikTok, but people definitely mean TikTok when they say “social media” generically right now, the same way everyone who said “social media” generically in 2011 meant Facebook and everyone who said it in 2018 meant Twitter. Anyway, will vengeful TikTok teens punch Cherry’s sister’s bad boyfriend out before Mark can get to him? More on this story as it develops.

Curtis, 12/18/24

The Elon Musk-related punchline to this strip is neither here nor there, but I actually think it’s very funny that for three panels we get Greg Wilkins explaining to his tween son, in earnest detail, what a snow globe is and how it works. I guess the joke is that the kids today with their cell phones and Tesla cars (?) don’t know what a snow globe is or how it works and have to have all that explained to them, but I’m actually pretty sure that most of them are at least passingly familiar.

Alice, 12/18/24

This joke is actually — well, “good” is too strong a word, but it’s definitely passable. The only problem is that it should involve a child looking at a huge bookcase packed with books, not a small end table with six relatively slim volumes stacked atop it. But I guess we should respect the fact that Alice never wavers from its commitment to always take place in a mysterious and mostly featureless void.

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Curtis, 10/7/24

While we all like to see a syndicated newspaper comic keep up with times, I’m afraid the occasional bit in Curtis where Curtis faithfully tunes in to his favorite online comic, Dear Ol’ Dad, feels a little out of date, like it’s grounded in the big webcomics boom of the late ’00s and early ’10s. Not that there aren’t still plenty of good online comics, but unless you really go out of your way to follow them (“Dad, can I have $5 a month for the Dear Ol’ Dad Patreon?” “I’m broke, Curtis”), you mostly encounter them appearing at random on your Facebook or Instagram feed. If you’re lucky, they’re cloying panels where blue aliens describe ordinary situations in cutesy circumlocutions; more likely, you get either Off The Mark panels from 2014 that have had the dialogue changed to be racist, or horrifying AI slop where a crying soldier is eating dog food out of a can while dozens of children with too many fingers point and laugh at him, and the caption is “Best Comic Funny [three cry-laughing emojis].” I’m assuming what Curtis is enjoying is the latter.

Slylock Fox, 10/7/24

I think it’s funny that the text makes clear that this is an enlarged photo of Slick Smitty. The strip wants you to know that the new animal society is fully capable of producing normal-sized photos, OK? They just chose not to in this case, for some reason.

Alice, 10/7/24

Reading this panel left-to-right was fun because at first I thought, “Ha ha, it’s funny because Alice is in desperate financial straits,” but then I got to the ATM and was like “AHH AHHH IT HAS LIPS AND A TONGUE WHY ARE THEY THAT COLOR WHY IS THE TONGUE FLAPPING AROUND LIKE THAT AHHHHH”

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Curtis, 9/19/24

Derrick and Onion are canonically the bullies in Curtis, but their game has been slipping for a long time. Way back in ’06 they were hard-core car thieves, but their malfeasance dwindled into vaguely threatening confrontations in school hallways accompanied by labored “Yo Mama” insults. Onion lost his trademark (“Onion”) quotation marks around 2016 and honestly hasn’t been entirely himself since. Tuesday we learned his given name is Norman, which doesn’t carry quite the same panache.

Now Derrick and Onion are in Mrs. Nelson’s class along with Curtis, assaulting the poor woman with flowers, candy, and honeyed words. Is this a redemption story, in which the two Learn the Error of Their Ways? A Josh-infuriating trauma plot, with a Big Reveal about the characters’ Painful Past that Explains Everything? A long con, as Curtis suspects? Or, intriguingly, one of those postmodern reframings of evidence that was right before our eyes the whole time, revealing Curtis as the real bully? I bet Curtis’s brother Barry would like to weigh in on that last one.

Dennis the Menace, 9/19/24

Oh, speak of the devil low-ranking demon, here he is with his familiar, Hot Dog. Wikipedia correctly pegs Hot Dog as “rarely seen.” He doesn’t have the personality of the Mitchell’s dog Ruff, and mostly just sits there in a lump with a smug expression on his face. So how would Mr. Wilson know he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do? Maybe he just assumes that about cats, based on his observations of Heathcliff and Garfield.

Gasoline Alley, 9/19/24

What I love about Gasoline Alley is Jim Scancarelli’s art: the guy’s an old-school natural, and so long as he doesn’t try to get all photorealistic on us, there’s an easy elegance to his work that takes me back to when newspaper comics were a Big Deal and worthy of craft (cf. L’il Abner, Out Our Way, Pogo, Steve Canyon, many more). And it’s charming when Scancarelli gets locked in on something he clearly wants to draw, like a locomotive or today’s World’s Most Adorable Water Heater. Just look at that thing: lovingly rendered hot and cold water lines (copper, no PEX for 18″ ’cause it’s gas), corrugated vent duct shared with the chimney flue no backdrafting here no siree, igniter access panel, overflow pipe, inspection tag, for Pete’s sake! There’s even an International Residential Code-compliant stand to protect against ignition of flammable vapors. But what does that sucker hold, maybe two quarts?

It almost makes up for the cutesy animals and Joel’s lame pun.

Baby Blues, 9/19/24

Zoe turns the tables on the old “just wait ’til you have kids” trope: sour grapes for Wanda!

Crankshaft, 9/19/24

Crankshaft joins Arctic Circle in the Ain’t-It-Awful Hall of Fame.

—Uncle Lumpy