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Mark Trail, 5/5/12

Oh, man, you didn’t expect this Mark Trail storyline to end without a powerhouse moral lesson, did you? “Rusty, America’s landscape is lousy with marijuana, and probably most of your little school friends are dopers! It’s not safe out there for anyone, so maybe it’s better that you just stay in the Lost Forest compound, forever. Those friendly beavers won’t try to push a reefer at you, I can promise you that!”

Crankshaft, 5/5/12

Don’t Leroy and Loretta usually at least try to make their hostile asides about one other relate in a vaguely punny way to whatever situation they find themselves in? Like, Leroy should be stage-whispering this to a salesman as they shop for a new car. Just blurting this stuff at a party reeks of even greater levels of desperation than we’ve seen before. “Loretta’s hair isn’t factory color. I mean, she dyes it. Her blonde hair is a lie. A lie like our marriage. Oh, God, I hate every waking moment. Do you have a gun in the house? Can you put it to my head and pull the trigger? I’ll pay you!”

Funky Winkerbean, 5/5/12

Many of you may have already heard about the blockbuster Gay Teens Go To The Prom storyline Funky Winkerbean’s got lined up for the spring. I’m fully in favor of this because (a) I think gay teens should go to the prom together if they want and should be depicted as doing such in comics where proms happen and (b) any Funky Winkerbean strip time dedicated to gay teens going to the prom is strip time not dedicated to beloved characters dying in agony, leaving emotional devastation in their wake.

The mechanics of such stories are a bit tricky in comic strips like this, in that if you suddenly make an established character is gay it seems a bit deus ex machina just to make the plot happen, whereas if you suddenly introduce generic gay characters who only exist for the purpose of the storyline, it makes it very obviously an Issue Story rather than a story about the characters in your strip. Probably the best way to do it would be to introduce a new character who then becomes a part of the recurring cast (which is what Archie did), and who knows, maybe these two guys will stick around, though there are already so many Funkyverse teen characters that I can’t keep track of them all. Hopefully they’ll be given names at some point, at least.

But maybe they won’t! Because as the third panel reveals, the nemesis of gay teen happiness for the next several weeks will be Becky’s mom, who, if I’ve got my Funky history right, once launched a moral crusade to get Comic Book John’s comic book store shut down, because comic books are smut. Thus the important lesson that Gay Relationships Are Valid will probably just serve to make clear the real point of the storyline, which is that Becky’s Mom Is Terrible.

Crankshaft, 5/5/12

But maybe we won’t get to see any of this played out, because it turns out that the entire Funkyverse is really just a series of tales Grandma Rose is telling to her grandkids in order to scar them emotionally.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/26/12

I had always hoped that, if there were anywhere in America where the bane of helicopter parenting had yet to arrive, it was Hootin’ Holler. And yet here we have the Smifs hovering intrusively over their toddler instead of just letting him engage in the sort of non-supervised play in a trash-strewn backyard that made Americans from previous generations healthy and strong (those that survived, anyway). My one consolation is that Snuffy is still pretty bad at this, having stuck li’l Tater in a dog house that’s almost certainly filthy beyond description.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 2/26/12

I suppose that Loretta needed to be in the back seat in order for this joke to work (to the extent that you would consider this a “joke” that “works”), but that still doesn’t solve the mystery of who this grim-faced fellow is in the front seat. He sort of looks as he’s being driven somewhere by the Lockhorns to be done in execution-style and dumped in a shallow grave, but if that were the case he’d probably be happier to see this cop, so I’m assuming that he’s just listened to them talk for 15 or 20 minutes and has now completely lost his ability to feel joy.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 2/26/12

It seems that Rodney Rat has graduated from eager teenage grifter to “career criminal,” with sunglasses and everything. It makes me a little sad that he’s hit this elevated status in his criminal trajectory while his much awesomer relative Reeky is left back in the small time. I also question the practicality of the rope-lasso as a prisoner-retainment device, which may help explain why Rodney gets to make a career out of his criminality.

Panel from Mary Worth, 2/26/12

Mary, no! You don’t have anything to prove to her! YOU’RE LETTING HER INSIDE YOUR HEAD!

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The Lockhorns, 11/28/11

My goodness but this is a delightful Lockhorns! I’m not entirely sure what’s supposed to be happening here, but since Leroy is in his pajamas and looks miserable and ill, while Loretta is already up and about and dressed and carrying something indistinguishably horizontal, I’m going to guess that he’s been staring at that mirror for hours now, trying to decide whether or not to follow through on his drunken boast from last night that he was going to kill himself. “Let me know how it ends!” Loretta says cheerfully, fully aware that if he doesn’t have the courage to end his awful, soul-crushing marriage, he certainly doesn’t have the guts to finish himself off.

Gil Thorp, 11/28/11

Way back in the mists of times, Gil Thorp plots ended in wacky hijinks and weird psychological ploys, but apparently someone decided that this wasn’t realistic enough, so now Gil solves his problems like a real high school football coach would: by ignoring them until it becomes clear that they won’t go away, and then yelling at people. Last year’s great budget cut debacle concluded when Gil showed up at a school board meeting and dragged his enemy’s private life into public scrutiny; now he’s just straight up humiliating the president of the team booster club in front of his buddies. Presumably everyone else will literally fall in behind Gil, now that the true alpha male has been identified.

Archie, 11/28/11

In this Archie rerun from the mid-1990s, Ms. Grundy worries about the teenage pregnancy epidemic (not that we’ve ever seen a pregnant teenager in Archie, but I guess she has a TV set). Well, don’t fret, long-ago Ms. Grundy! Over the next decade and a half, teen birth rates will plummet, eventually hitting their lowest point since the 1940s. Teens continue to not use pins as tokens of affection, though, if you still want something to complain about the kids today.

Marvin, 11/28/11

Obviously — obviously — Marvin’s sudden Internet fame involves time spent on the toilet.