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Mark Trail, 6/19/26

Oh wow, I think this gorilla sanctuary storyline is adding yet more layers of moral complexity. If you ran a failing gorilla sanctuary and needed a cash infusion to keep these noble creatures well cared for, how far would you go to do it? Would you scam a guy online for money? Would you have sex with him if he showed up in person? Would you marry him, if he asked, which Mark’s dad did, by the way? Would you give the gorillas to a more successful sanctuary? No to that last one? You’ll do the sex/marriage thing, instead? Interesting. Interesting.

Marvin, 6/19/26

There’s lots of philosophical yammering these days about whether AI chatbots are intelligent or sentient or however you want to describe it. From my perspective, there’s only one way I’ll admit that a machine-mind could be a being like me with inalienable rights: if it loathes Marvin, the main character in the comic strip Marvin, as much as I do.

Shoe, 6/19/26

“A bird? A bird that can talk and play guitar? Like a bird with feathers, the kind that flies in the fucking sky? Thank God you warned us. Deploy the police. Call in the army. We’ve got to stop this monster before it’s too late for the good people of Kansas City.”

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Mark Trail, 6/9/26

The “Mark’s dad is getting romance-scammed” Mark Trail storyline has had some pleasing twists and turns: we learned Mark “Happy” Trail Sr. was sending money to a gorilla sanctuary due to the entreaties of young “Dreama,” who was hitting him up for money at said sanctuary where she claimed to work, but then it turned out that her pics were photoshopped/AI-enhanced images of Gail, the owner (?) of the sanctuary, and it turned out that Happy had also been sending AI-enyouthened pics of himself to Dreama, so it seemed like an embarrassing incident that would end with two older nature lovers finding love with each other. But today we learn that, nope, Gail is in fact evil, and has mostly been outsourcing all this catfishing to her dweeb-ass son anyway. You can tell she’s evil because she lets gorillas just wander aimlessly around the sanctuary parking lot, without any enrichment toys!

Crankshaft, 6/9/26

Oh, did you think that those pictures Eugene brought over were going to result in some emotionally affective revelations? No, sorry, we’re just learning about how the current Funkyverse cast has in fact been entangled with one another for multiple generations, in exactly the sort of plot development that everyone loved when Star Wars kept doing it. I like how the strip’s namesake has kind of wandered over from whatever it was he was doing to take in all this information. Maybe he’ll learn he’s Les Moore’s uncle or something! You never know!

Dennis the Menace, 6/9/26

Love the look of absolute delight on this woman’s face. She’s the Chief Marketing Officer at the National Potato Council and she’s here to confirm the rumors: the chosen one has arrived.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/9/26

Can you imagine a dog — a dog, mind you — that knows what lattes are and enjoys drinking them, but has never heard of pilates? Well, you don’t have to: that’s the joke in today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, printed in newspapers everywhere!

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Mark Trail, 5/14/26

Many years ago, we were visiting Vancouver during the delightful summer months, and in Stanley Park we encountered … like, a lot of raccoons, and they were uncomfortably bold. At one point a woman who was pushing a baby in a stroller was approached by a pair of the creatures, and she stepped away from the stroller so she could get a pic of her infant with the raccoons, who were quite close to the child and could’ve easily grabbed them and taken off into the forest before anyone could’ve stopped them. My wife and I discussed whether the kid would grow up to the be Sovereign Ruler of the Raccoon Kingdom, or would instead simply become that day’s lunch. But I don’t think there would be any such debate about Rusty. That boy doesn’t have a kingly bone in his body, but he has a decent amount of meat on his bones.

Pluggers, 5/14/26

I’m glad we’ve all moved way past hack jokes like “an old person needs a child to open a childproof cap for them,” and pluggers’ grandkids stopped speaking to them a while ago anyway. No, we’ve just landed on the chicken-lady with a facial expression that says “God damn it open you piece of shit, I need these pills to live” while the caption says “Pluggers are as incompetent as little babies.”