Post Content

Mark Trail, 7/30/09

Thank goodness there’s been a slight lull in the madness over at Mary Worth, so I can check in with the madness over at Mark Trail! You might recall that our hero carried a wounded Joey Williams away from this very pile of chemical drums after he was felled by a long-distance sniper. But not killed! Mark says that the mysterious sniper took on the very difficult task of wounding Joey deliberately, because Joey’s no good to the gangsters dead. And Mark would know! He’s a smart guy! You can tell he’s smart because of the way that he’s just standing idly about, presumably in an ankle-deep puddle of toxic waste, at the scene where mere hours ago a hidden assailant brought down a snooper with a single shot, talking conversationally to nobody in particular about the bad guy’s plans, before deciding that he won’t be able to crack the case without his dog. I’m not sure if panel two’s extreme close-up of Mark’s forehead is supposed to help us better imagine the burning smell of Mark’s brain circuitry as he thinks extra-hard, or if there was supposed to be a rifle-scope target imposed over the scene that was accidentally left out.

Family Circus, 7/30/09

Their previous attempt may have failed, but the Keane parents seem determined to sacrifice their children to the terrible Ant Gods. Let’s wish them luck!

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 7/29/09

The action in today’s Beetle Bailey obviously violates every workplace sexual harassment regulation known to man, not that I expect Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC to realize that there might be something inappropriate about handing a co-worker a skimpy undergarment and then demanding that she put it on right in front of you. Ignoring that for the moment, though, I do have to say that I like the (probably accidental) way that the always-unsettling wiggle lines of horniness emitted by Killer’s hat-nodules form what appear to be quotation marks around the word “present.” “I got you a ‘present.’ Well, it’s not really a present for you.”

Crock, 7/29/09

Now here’s a problem that arises when the art in your strip is mangled and impenetrable: I guess today’s punchline is supposed to some cruel joke about how the librarian’s girlfriend is ugly, but this being Crock, who can tell? Whether the joke is about supposedly ugly people or supposedly pretty people, they’re all just barely-recognizable Crock-squiggles.

Dick Tracy, 7/29/09

Wait, did I say that Dick Tracy was like German expressionist film? Now that we have an elaborately dressed ringmaster responding to a tragic scene by repeatedly shouting “It happened!”, I’m updating that assessment to David Lynch.

It’s nice of Dick to address our no-doubt-implicated-in-the-crime-but-still-emotionally-tortured ringmaster as “Mr. Ringmaster.” He knows that it costs him nothing to be polite, just as it will cost our overburdened court systems nothing when he executes everyone involved without trial in front of hundreds of horrified onlookers.

Mary Worth, 7/29/09

Oh, goodness, Charley isn’t just a sex pervert, but also an alcoholic, by which I mean “someone who drinks alcohol that isn’t the terrible ketchup-red wine they serve at the Bum Boat.” Delilah is right to cringe on that couch in terror! Of course she wants plain soda water, as flavored sodas are far too exciting.

Family Circus, 7/29/09

As several faithful readers have pointed out, this Family Circus camping sequence actually consists of reruns from the early 1980s. This explains the vintage station wagon, and the hanky code.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 7/23/09

There’s a song that’s traditionally sung at the Passover seder called “Dayenu,” a Hebrew word that means, roughly, “It would have been enough.” The thrust of the song is that, during the whole fleeing-from-Egypt thing captured so memorably on film by Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston, God did any number of classy things for the ancient Israelites (smiting the Egyptians, parting the Red Sea, establishing a law code in easy-to-carry stone tablet form, etc.), of which any one would have been plenty good for most people; after each verse, in which one of said divine acts is described, everyone shouts “Dayenu!”

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that we may never get to the promised land of classic Gil Thorp summer wackiness (and the so-far snoresville B-plot about hobo Ted Pearse and the Uninterested News Bears doesn’t raise my hopes), but no matter how it turns out, we’ll always have today’s glimpse into Coach Kaz’s Pier-1-Orientalism-ariffic living room to remember fondly. Is the man some sort of secret martial arts master, running his own dojo out of whatever shabby one-bedroom apartment he can afford on an assistant high school coach’s salary? Or does he just really like having a bunch of random Asian crap scattered around his love pad? You know, when I first saw that hanging gong thing, I thought for a minute that it was a framed record album, and that his rap-metal single “Playdowns (Next Year For Sure)” had finally gone platinum, which, you have to admit, makes exactly as much sense as whatever’s going on here.

Not to be neglected in the midst of Coack Kaz’s unsettling decor are his unsettlingly ripped shoulder muscles. Fortunately, Kaz knows that ordinary humans would be intimidated and terrified by his rockin’ body if they saw it without being adequately prepared, so in panel two he’s thrown on a Hawaiian shirt that covers up the guns and illustrates how fun and relaxed he is.

Dick Tracy, 7/23/09

Despite being quintessentially American in subject matter and politics, Dick Tracy is always on the verge of becoming some kind of Weimar-era expressionist film in tone and presentation, and the current plotline, in which Tracy’s daughter Bonnie Braids (really!) insists on taking her parents to the circus, is no exception; one assumes that “Here’s where the clown fires into the air and a surprise falls out of the sky” sounded less stilted in the original German. And anyone who finds clowns even slightly unsettling will be seeing panel two, in which a grim-faced, dead-eyed specimen cocks his gaily painted musket at the ready, in their dreams for weeks to come.

Mark Trail, 7/23/09

The orange-clad Mark Trail assassin in the current storyline may not be the brightest guy in the world, but I have to say that I like his style. There’s something that might tip off the cops to his identity? YOU BETTER BELIEVE HE’S GONNA SET THAT SHIT ON FIRE! I can’t wait to see what he does when he realizes he left a witness to his latest crime alive; we’ll see if Mark’s extremely wooden speech style means that he’s actually made of wood, and thus particularly flammable.

Family Circus, 7/23/09

And with that, the printed material allowed inside the Keane Kompound was further limited; now only the Bible and issues of Reader’s Digest published before 1989 would be permitted.

UPDATE: Oh my goodness, I almost forgot to add: BID ON this Ziggy cake pan on eBay! It appears that any cake made in this pan will more closely resemble E.T. than Ziggy, but whatever. ONLY FOUR HOURS LEFT!