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Mark Trail, 4/5/14

Kinda sad Mark is ENDING THIS today, though it’s hard to see how anything could have topped the first panel of today’s strip, as Mark forcibly tackles Marlin into the shallow waters where sea turtles will now be able to frolic without fear of having their eggs poached. I certainly hope that the copter-borne police got a good look at that squirming mass of bejeaned legs, protruding from the lake like some kind of denim-clad sea anemone.

Judge Parker, 4/5/14

At first glance, this seems like a touching conversation between the fathers of two young people who are about to get married — until you find out that what they’ve been talking about over the course of this week’s strips is that April’s dad wronged some Romanian arms dealers, who are even now bearing down on this heavily armed jungle compound in a helicopter gunship, determined to kill everyone. Alan wants to know even more, though! What sort of ordinance do their enemies carry? How many civil wars has April’s dad helped perpetuate through his arms-dealing business, and how profitable has that been over the years? Has the ability to manufacture powerful weapons relatively cheaply ended the nation-state’s monopoly on violence forever?

B.C., 4/5/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Secret Service agents have repeatedly gotten in trouble for paying for sex over the past few years! This is the sort of thing that angry parents would be writing into papers about demanding to know “How am I supposed to explain this to my children?” if anyone young enough to have young children still got a newspaper delivered at home. Anyway, in related news, Secret Service agents are very much not in the military.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/5/14

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is about how life is an endless series of bland, mind-numbing experiences that we undertake to stave off death, which honestly makes me nostalgic for the jokes about piano-fucking.

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Phantom, 3/22/14

Oh hey it’s time for Uncle Lumpy Reads Comics that Even Josh Won’t Read, So Nobody Has To Except for Poor Sad Me, a regular feature. Spunky reporter Lara Bell recruited lowlife adventurer Rick Grubber to take her into the Deep Woods, where they were set upon by the Bandar and brought to the Phantom at his Skull Cave. Phantom gave Lara an interminable tour of his Treasure Rooms, interspersed with braggy vignettes illustrating his complete awesomeness and coy little asides to Guran about how they were going to amnesiate Rick and Lara using Powerful Bandar Medicine®.

So Lara got all “You’re so hot, let us wed!” but the Phantom was like “Nuh uh I’m all married ‘n’ stuff”, and that night Grubber tried to steal stuff but it wasn’t even the right stuff and [WHOOSH!] the bush pilot went back to Bangalla and surrendered to the Jungle Patrol, and the mysterious aeronaut reappeared in his balloon to thank the Phantom for saving his descendants.

I feel much better, somehow.

Dennis the Menace, 3/22/14

Oh, Dennis – I knew Buckaroo Banzai. Buckaroo Banzai was a friend of mine. And you, kid, are no Buckaroo Banzai.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/22/14

Oh look – wordplay. “I wasn’t making a considerate comment about my father’s condition. I was making a commonplace observation about my own reaction to it. Um, ha ha, see?”

Judge Parker, 3/22/14

Ooh, we’re in the lair of the Hat Guys, Flico and Flaco. Flico jerked on the stick and spilled his drone upon the ground, so now he and Flaco will have to make contact up close and personal at the party tonight. They’ll probably run into Randy, who will chat them up for hours waiting in vain for his bribe.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/22/14

If you won’t listen to your own daughter, Rex, your readers would like a word with you.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Judge Parker, 3/20/14

The Bowers/Abbotts père et fille share a private moment and a little shop talk. The thought of simply declaring her Dad’s gift and paying import duties and taxes on it never crossed April’s mind. “Can money even move in that direction — ‘away’?”, she muses. Somehow it doesn’t seem physically possible!

Welcome to the family, girlfriend – a true Parker at last!

Or maybe not? Long-running strips need to be really careful about irrevocable steps like marriages, graduations, and deaths. They upset a strip’s balance, limiting the ways characters can contribute. And if there’s one constant in Judge Parker over the last fifty years, it’s that Randy Parker is a clueless, self-satisfied tool, perpetually used and discarded by women. This principle is so much a part of the strip’s bedrock that even on the eve of his wedding, I can’t believe they’ll go through with it. I fully expect that April will die in a hail of gunfire or (more likely) disappear into the jungle at the last possible moment. Anyway, stay tuned — we’ll know in mere months!

Luann, 3/20/14

That said, what on earth is going on in Luann? Everybody’s been moving through middle-school and high school over the strip’s 29 years, and now they’re seniors announcing college plans for the fall. Ethnic ciphers Rosa and Delta are off to Yale and Howard, most of the cast to nearby “Moony Uni” (OK sure, some kind of Unification Church outfit, I guess), and Luann to the local Community College.

Is Luann really just six months away from becoming a “college hijinks” strip, or a soaper about declining academic standards and unsustainable student debt? Is inert, self-absorbed, academically dishonest Luann even remotely plausible as a college student? All these questions will have to wait, because: OMG YOU GUYS PROM!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/20/14

Yet another newspaper drops Herb and Jamaal, and Herb blames his son for it.

Spider-Man, 3/20/14

“I was going to save those men — but their plight has flushed Spider-Man out of hiding! Now they can just die for all I care, for putting that stink on my beloved city!”

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— Uncle Lumpy