Post Content

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.

Post Content

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.

Post Content

Hi and Lois, 10/5/17

I guess the joke here is about how Ditto cleaned his hands by … ruining one of the good towels, with his hand-filth? Anyway, I’m more intrigued by the giant steaming bowl of light-brown whatever on the counter behind Lois. Be sure to get all the dark brown off your hands, Ditto! Your whole family is going to be elbow deep in the light-brown goo soon enough! You don’t want to contaminate the goo, do you?

Spider-Man, 10/5/17

Ah, yes, our heroes have executed their strategy perfectly: isolate the villain from the substance he needs to stay alive, then claim that, despite the villain’s control of an army of thousands, only Spider-Man, with the proportional strength of an creature that we can all agree is primarily known for its digging prowess, can dig to said substance in time, then save the villain’s life and rejuvenate him so that he returns to the height of his powers. There are literally no holes in this plan!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/5/17

Hmm, looks like Rex Morgan is pivoting away from dogs too nightmarish to look upon and senile billionaires and the people who get to live their houses rent-free to … counterfeit comic book art being auction off on eB[I PASS OUT FACE-DOWN ONTO MY KEYBOARD OUT OF BOREDOM BEFORE I CAN EVEN FINISH THIS SENTENCE]