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Mark Trail, 8/28/10

Oh, he’s going into politics! That explains the giant fence. He’s not building some kind of private hunting preserve; he’s planning on running for office on the always popular “let’s round them up and put them into concentration camps” platform. The fence is his tribute to America’s can-do spirit. We don’t need wasteful government agencies like FEMA to build our internment compounds for us! Private enterprise can do it more efficiently! Look, I’ve already managed to imprison my wife and ugly little stepdaughter, and some dumb baby deer they adopted!

Note where Cherry picked up this juicy bit of gossip: at the hair salon. Remember when Cherry went to get her hair done, four months ago? You probably thought Jack Elrod had forgotten all about this, but Jack Elrod never forgets. Obviously the whole point of Cherry going to the salon in the first place was for her to pick up this plotline-advancing tidbit. The point certainly wasn’t for her to have anything done to her hair, because it looks exactly the same as ever.

Dick Tracy, 8/28/10

“Detective Tracy” and “Miss Sue Doko” are in extra large font here, and while it’s almost certainly just because otherwise the words wouldn’t take up enough of the word balloon, I’d like to think they’re both saying things really loudly and sarcastically, like Steve Martin saying “Well excuuuuuse me,” mostly because neither of two can believe how stupid the other’s name is.

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Pluggers, 8/11/10

You have to give Pluggers a little bit of credit for coming up with a half-assed excuse to rerun panels (“Spotlight on readers who have nothing better to do than send in tons of Pluggers ideas!”); some cartoons just rerun strips in no-assed silence, which speaks to a certain lack of pride of craftsmanship. Anyway, as a professional comics-reader, it’s interesting to keep track of how my own immediate, visceral reaction to a panel can change from month to month. For instance, when this panel first ran back in May, I apparently was moved to write some weird diatribe about awkward sentence construction, Jewish stereotypes, and plugger sex. Whereas today, I just laughed a cynical laugh, because it’s obvious to me now that point is that pluggers are cheapskates who’ve never given anyone a tip in their lives, and plugger wife here dies a little inside every time they sneak out of the diner without leaving anything on the counter, and now Mr. Plugger is making a big joke about it. And certainly he’s not going to do anything nice for his wife, who just has to take care of him for free, without expecting any sort of reward, even emotional rewards, ha ha! You might want to keep an eye on those scissors, buddy.

Dick Tracy, 8/11/10

Considering the important social function served by the morgue in the corpse-lousy Dick Tracy universe, it’s no surprise that the building’s facade features enormous letters that presumably light up at night, so people know right away where they should be dumping the bodies.

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Judge Parker, 8/9/10

Well, it turns out that Sophie’s cheerleading-driven powers of all-knowingness only give her universal access to cold, hard facts about whose ex-boyfriends are back in town, and whom those ex-boyfriends have divorced. The underlying motivations behind those circumstances are as opaque to Sophie as ever, and it’s kind of heartening to see that the youngest Spencer-Driver foundling is still an unsettling android-child, despite her makeover into a tween fashion plate. “NEDDY-UNIT: THE SOPHIE-UNIT DEMANDS INFORMATION ABOUT LOVE AND THE EXPERIENCE THEREOF! WILL LOVE OVERLOAD THE SOPHIE-UNIT’S CIRCUITRY IF SHE ATTEMPTS TO INCORPORATE IT INTO HER TOP-LEVEL ALGORITHM? THE SOPHIE-UNIT WILL INITIATE THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘IRRITATION’ (SUCCESS OF IRRITATION-INSTIGATION SUBROUTINE ESTIMATED AT > 95%) IN THE NEDDY-UNIT UNTIL THE DESIRED INFORMATION IS GIVEN!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/10

Ha ha, the chicken has fallen in love with Snuffy, whose main source of food is the chickens that he steals and eats! This has the potential for being one of the funny pages’ great tragic love stories. Let’s hope the artists don’t shy away from the heartbreaking beheading scene!

Dick Tracy, 8/9/10

Wow, usually we don’t get to see the badly decomposed corpses until the end of the Dick Tracy storyline. What exactly is that lump floating atop the body in panel one — is there an alligator lazily feeding on the poor sap, with Officer Hugepelvis gingerly sneaking up on it with plans to taser it? This could be the greatest Dick Tracy plot ever, if by “greatest” you mean “with the highest body count,” which is really the only metric I can think of that fans of this strip would respect.