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Mark Trail, 5/25/18

Wait, what’s this? Does Cherry have someone from her past who she’s nervous about seeing again? Does she have a past? Did she not spring forth from Zeus’s forehead to be Mark Trail’s asexual mate? Is this mysterious “Jim the PA” her mortal enemy, just as the iguana is the mortal enemy of the scorpion? I am very excited to find out! Chances of Mark punching out someone at a nice dinner while Rusty tries to flirt: increasing.

Dennis the Menace, 5/25/18

Wow, going from planning a germ warfare assault on the neighborhood to demonstrating embarrassing ignorance of the many convenient Great American Cookies locations in only a single day: truly some menacing whiplash going on here.

Gasoline Alley, 5/25/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because Slim may have suffered a debilitating head injury, but he’s afraid that seeking medical attention will leave his family destitute!

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Mary Worth, 5/24/18

OK, so all of us [checks comments] some of us [digs deeper into comments and also into Facebook and Twitter replies] I for one have been enjoying this Wilbur humiliation/unearned redemption arc over the past several … weeks? Months? Time has no meaning, here inside Wilbur’s troubled psyche! But anyway, I’m glad things seem to be wrapping up, because, warmly as I feel towards the Weston clan, we’ve been seeing an awful lot of Wilbur and Dawn lately. Mary Worth has traditionally been about the random one-off nobodies who get their lives meddled and then promptly walk off into the narrative sunset, but if we’re not going to do that next time around, let’s at least get into some of the other Charterstone regulars. Like Toby and Ian! God, I love Toby and Ian, and we haven’t had a good Ian story since that time Toby almost left him, so I’m really looking forward to him being eased back into the strip in a context where he’ll almost certainly say something really cutting and demeaning to Wilbur at a dinner where the ostensible goal is to cheer him up. The “promise” Mary is about to extract from Wilbur is that he wear tear-away clothes so that at the first sign of conflict he and Ian can settle matters in the greco-roman wrestling pit she’s conveniently set up in Charterstone’s rec room.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/24/18

Heather is of course merely a nanny, and isn’t capable of running an aerospace company like Avery International. But if there’s some disaster — well, that’s when you need to turn to a nanny to run your aerospace company, obviously! A good example of a disaster would be if someone were to try to sell the company to a high-tech Indian firm, boosting shareholder value in the process. You’d definitely want to call in a nanny to prevent that sort of thing from happening.

Marvin, 5/24/18

Marvin has spent the week doing an incredibly unfunny series of jokes about Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant, which for some reason they’ve decided to refer to as “Alfafa” … because of the popular Little Rascal, I guess? The Little Rascals, the incredibly current cultural reference that’s always at the top of everyone’s minds? Anyway, that’s just the an unfunny structure providing the base for the unfunny jokes, and you really have to keep reminding yourself as you read that at least they aren’t making unfunny jokes about shitting.

Dennis the Menace, 5/24/18

Dennis definitely has measles, an alarming number of his schoolmates are vulnerable thanks to anti-vaccination hysteria, and this is clearly his most menacing move yet.

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Mary Worth, 5/16/18

“Doctor, I have some things to get off my chest… I want to talk about the women in my life! Iris … Fabiana … Dawn, who it will probably squick you out that I put her in the same category as the first two but you ain’t heard nothing yet … and Wendy, the elusive Wendy. I want her, I need her wisdom, but she’s always … just out of reach. Is it possible to love a woman who doesn’t exist? To make love to a syndicated advice column persona? Will I have to quit writing the column in order to consummate my life, and also purchase some elaborate VR equipment?”

Crankshaft, 5/16/18

Very briefly I thought that Crankshaft’s adventure in this mysteriously hostile and empty bank was supposed to be taking place in some kind of empty parallel dimension, like the Upside-Down from Stranger Things, and that he had been exiled from our reality as part of a twisted science experiment gone actually right, for once. But then I spotted the little triangles in the corner of the first frame, denoting that we should be thinking of it as a photo in an old-timey album, an affectation that used to call us back to the distant past in this strip when Crankshaft was young, but now just means “time that took place at some previous to the current narrative, perhaps as little as a week ago.”

Mark Trail, 5/16/18

Oh, wow, I apologize for saying yesterday that Mark was going to brutally pummel this poor schmo with nature facts. Nope, our hero will just sassily waggle his weirdly tiny index finger at him and get on with the business of whale-saving. Still, I’ve got to imagine that some day — he won’t know when, but the day will come — this gruff tourist will awake and find himself strapped to chair, forced to watch Mark Trail Sunday strip full of nature facts after Mark Trail Sunday strip full of nature facts, his eyelids pried open Ludovico Technique-style.

Spider-Man, 5/16/18

Oh, boy, it’s Spider-Man vs. the TSA, that recurring Newspaper Spider-Man plot point beloved by everyone somebody, somewhere presumably. Anyway, Peter is nervous about his secret identity being blown, as usual, but presumably they’re just about to pull out something really embarrassing, like a canister of cotton-candy flavored vape juice that’s over the legal 3 ounces.

Dennis the Menace, 5/16/18

The only thing menaced by Dennis is the oppressive machinery of the modern state. NO GODS NO MASTERS