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Mark Trail, 10/24/17

Hey, remember this guy? The guy from the bank-robbing gang who was so worried about the fancy new facial recognition software the FBI has on hand? Of course you do, because the last time you saw him, way back in April, it was literally the same drawing:

Now, I know what you’re saying: “Ha, this guy was worried about facial recognition software but he thinks he can beat it by just getting a haircut?” Well, sadly, he didn’t even do that! He just died his ponytail to match the upholstery in his plane:

Anyway, I’m not sure why, if the bank-robbing gang had access to a plane, they didn’t just all get in the plane to escape, rather than one guy getting in it and the other two taking the money and a hostage to a remote airstrip and meeting up with the plane guy there. I guess that’s why I’m not in the bank-robbery game! Too many moving parts for my feeble intellect!

Hi and Lois, 10/24/17

There’s so much that I don’t understand about what’s going on here. Is there an occasion for this strip, in which Hi and Thirsty are suddenly taking the subway home with Leroy Lockhorn, Walt Duncan, Greg Wilkins, Homer Simpson, Mario, and … an Orthodox Jewish (?) character in the foreground I don’t recognize? Is there some common theme holding these guys all together, other than “they’re from cartoons, or, in the case of Mario, a video game?” Aren’t crossover events usually cheerful affairs? Why is this one built around a totally unrelated “joke” about how Hi and Thirsty feel unmoored and adrift in life, with everyone looking extremely depressed? Why does Walt look so disheveled? Why is Homer given a standard white-person flesh tone rather than his native bright yellow? Why are Thirsty and Hi on a train when they’ve always been depicted as driving back and forth to their pedestrian-hostile suburb?

Funky Winkerbean, 10/24/17

Funky Winkerbean: You Always Swore You Were Going To Get Out Of This Town, But Somehow You Never Did™!

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Mark Trail, 10/10/17

Say what you will about Mark Trail’s methods, but he will never, ever stop laying down the nature facts. It doesn’t matter how desperate the situation is, who’s sticking a gun in his face, whatever. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, probably a third of the soliloquies we get in the Sunday strips happen while he’s under extreme duress of one kind or another. If someone has a misapprehension about tornados or whatever, Mark will nip that false line of reasoning in the bud. If “A tornado is the vortex of wind, not the condensation cloud!” is the last sentence to pass his lips before he takes a bullet to the gut, it will have been an honorable death.

Hi and Lois, 10/10/17

I actually kind of love that, having seen this little one-bedroom bungalow with a pool, a fireplace, a deck for grilling, and satellite TV, our bachelor has flipped out his collar, ’70s-style. His emotional world was shattered and he was living in a depressing rented hovel but now thanks to Lois’s real-estate savvy he’s back, baby! These are the days when the job is really worthwhile to her, when she makes a difference in someone’s life. The difference is he’s gonna be having a lot more sex, and she’s earned that commission.

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Hi and Lois, 10/9/17

Fall is here, everybody, and you know what that means: comics doing jokes about leaves changing color for the fall, and those jokes being totally ignored by the syndicate colorists, who just dump a green fill into the leaves as usual, making the strip completely incoherent! Today’s Hi and Lois is even worse in that clearly somebody realized that at least some of the leaves needed to be orange, and so colored the ones falling but left the ones still on the branches a uniform green. Because leaves stay a bright green color until they’re ready to fall off a tree and then immediately turn orange when they detach, right? This reaffirms my belief that the coloring staff all work in some tropical nation with extremely low labor costs and no deciduous trees, or maybe in dank underground prison.

Crankshaft, 10/9/17

Crankshaft has basically the same problem here, except that it has that extra “Crankshaft twist,” i.e., the strip’s title character literally raging against God for His manifest failures.

Sally Forth, 10/9/17

Sally Forth at least got the memo: each leaf should be its own individual color! Unfortunately, it seems they’re working on the assumption that each leaf should be a unique color, which means the colorists quickly ran out of earth tones and had to move onto pastels. Seriously, look at those pink and blue leaves Ted is kneeling amongst. Are those … leaf-shaped marshmallows?

Funky Winkerbean, 10/9/17

In non-leaf news, we can tell that, after a decade, Les is finally moving on from his dead wife Lisa because he’s dumped the labor of organizing her memorial walk onto the local Rotary Club. Sorry, Rotary Club, dead Lisa’s ghost is going to haunt you now! I don’t make the rules!

Mary Worth, 10/9/17

You know where it’s not fall? Beautiful, tropical Colombia, where Wilbur’s hot new Colombian girlfriend is going to introduce him to the wonders of salsa! She’s already introduced him to the wonders of having a girlfriend who wears skin-tight leopard-print pants.