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Mark Trail, 3/13/14

Haha, so, obviously I was right about Marlin being a terrible nogoodnik, and since he’s a Mark Trail villain he’s also a moron, keeping meticulous photographic records of him and his buddies doing illegal things. It seems Jessica isn’t implicated in the nefariousness, though; presumably this sinister, silent army of pelicans that she’s nursed back to health has been trained to obey her every command and will unleash hell on the boyfriend who betrayed her trust.

Heathcliff, 3/13/14

Wow, so Heathcliff’s dad isn’t the only one in the family who’s an actual convicted felon! It actually minimizes my respect of Heathcliff as a notorious badass that he feels like he needs to kiss his parole officer’s ass like this. Look how badly he’s sweating! Is he afraid he’s going to fail his drug test?

Slylock Fox, 3/13/14

The relationship between sapient predator and prey animals in this strip is not, in my opinion, adequately explored, though today’s Six Differences offers some tantalizing hints. Based on that wolf’s facial experession, I’m guessing he’s watching some kind of sleazy porn for carnivores. “Oh, my,” says the pig, as he slowly unbuttons his tuxedo, “I certainly am feeling plump, juicy, and succulent today.”

Dennis the Menace, 3/13/14

Wow, congrats, Dennis, you’ve actually summoned up a fairly disturbing scenario I hadn’t contemplated before! If I had to guess, I’d imagine something like this?

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Pluggers, 2/27/14

After all these years of mocking this strip, I still can’t tell if the central conceit is supposed to be “pluggers are lower-middle-class exurban reactionaries” or just “pluggers are old.” Honestly, I think it wavers from day to day. Today’s panel I’m tentatively putting into the second of those two buckets, because while I wasn’t aware of this particular joy of aging, I also can’t imagine that it has anything particularly to do with anybody’s socio-cultural position within the American mosaic. So, leg-baldness is a thing? A thing that I’m going to have to look forward to? Greeeat.

Dennis the Menace, 2/27/14

Dennis has a known hatred of books and learning, so I guess it’s no surprise that his distorted, terrified vision of his own literate future involves hours of slogging through endless words in dull, aniconic tomes. Still, you can understand why he’s sad about giving up his current reading material, since it looks super rad. Is it about lions driving cars? Lions attacking cars? Just a bunch of lions, stone-cold flipping over cars, and mauling any panicked passengers attempting to flee?

Gasoline Alley, 2/27/14

Gasoline Alley has always been a strip of gentle, low-stakes whimsy — it once had a plot about trying to get a DVD player working that lasted for more than a month — and so it’s always thrilling with the action suddenly bursts into insane violence. When Slim hired a mercenary to drop tons of space-rock on some basketball-playing teens who annoyed him, the story was at least kind of cartoonish. Today’s strip, in which, as predicted, society has completely broken down into chaos due to rumors of the existence of an immortality elixir, seems much more realistic. The foregrounding of the actual jackboots of the billy-club wielding police charging into the melee to brutally restore order is a particularly vivid artistic choice.

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Curtis, 2/21/14

Remember when that dolphin swam into Brooklyn’s extremely polluted Gowanus Canal and then died, more than a year ago? The creators of innumerable parody Twitter accounts, along with the creators of Curtis, hope you do! Curtis has been sad about these poor trapped dolphins all week, but now Magical Caucasian Gunk will rescue them with his Flyspeck Island powers, after stripping to the waist! I’m mostly just relieved to learn that Gunk’s nipples, unlike his eyes, are configured in the usual way.

Crankshaft, 2/21/14

Speaking of half-naked people in the icy cold, it looks like Crankshaft has somehow managed to lock himself out of his house wearing only a towel and set off the burglar alarm trying to get back inside, ruining his family’s vacation in the process! Thanks to Big Government, we’re not allowed to print a drawing of Crankshaft’s exposed junk in the newspaper, but panel three uses a clever reaction shot to illustrate what an unpleasant experience it would be for you if we were.

Dennis the Menace, 2/21/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because literally nobody wants to spend any time with Dennis! Looks like the person he’s really been menacing has been … himself.