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Mark Trail, 4/21/17

Gosh, it seems like Mark and our bald kidnapper are just destined to be at cross-purposes, aren’t they? Mark isn’t making “wisecrack” in panel one; remember, his extremely linear mind can’t even conceive of what a “joke” is! He’s just offering useful information to a fellow who he suspects doesn’t know much about the cartographical conventions of rural areas. It’s a darn shame his sincerity is going unappreciated!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/17

Hey, remember “vendos,” the Funkyverse-specific slang term for vending machines? Remember how they took the vendos out of the school and everyone was mad, for some reason? Well now they’re still there, but nobody uses them, and they just induce terrible anxiety about mental health care being used as a weapon of the omnipresent security state when people even think about them! Ha ha, what a truly whimsical world this strip takes place in.

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Mary Worth, 4/19/17

I know that eventually we’re going to get around to the Hoosiers and their smoking-related marital strife and that will be the “real” part of this storyline, and it’ll be fine, I’m sure, but for the life of me I’d be happy with like six to eight more weeks of Mary and Toby just enjoying the cruise industry’s more pedestrian pleasures and describing them to each other in excruciating detail. Today, Mary is excited about the formal dinner they’re about to enjoy, but wants everyone to know that come tomorrow for lunch she’ll be wearing sweatpants at the buffet, shoveling as much lukewarm chicken down her gullet as she can handle under the harsh fluorescent lights. She isn’t some kind of snob or anything. (She still paid the extra fee for sheets changed daily and “premium access” to the lifeboats, of course.)

Funky Winkerbean, 4/19/17

Generally speaking, I don’t try to write things about teenagers that much, which is good because they terrify and confuse me and I don’t know much about them. But one thing I do know better than this strip, which ostensibly has a teen cast, is that teens do not care for Facebook anymore. I learned yesterday that a cutting thing teenagers call Facebook is “Mombook,” in case you want to feel a kajillion years old!

Mark Trail, 4/19/17

Mark’s kidnapper is in that special intermediary zone of cleverness, where he’s smart enough that he can’t be tricked into saying his name, but not so smart that he realizes that he’s the one with the gun and the sinister agenda so he’s supposed to be telling Mark where they’re going, not the other way around.

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Marvin, 4/17/17

Far be it for me to claim Marvin is largely pieced together from pre-existing clip art and then dialogue sort of wedged into it. Maybe there’s another explanation for why Marvin’s mother is grinning broadly when she says “Why on earth would you want to do that?” to her father in the first panel. Maybe, for instance, she knows her child is an awful hell-baby and the very idea that anyone, certainly someone who knows just how terrible he is, would want to spend any more time with him than absolutely necessary is, literally laughable. Her crestfallen face in panel two indicates her horror at the sorry state of her city’s transportation infrastructure. “My god,” she thinks, “is traffic so bad that someone would be willing to be alone in the car with Marvin to shave time off their drive? Our Marvin? What a nightmare!”

Funky Winkerbean, 4/17/17

I’m glad we get classroom scenes like this to remind us that not only is Les an awful husband, but a terrible, cruel teacher as well!