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Mark Trail, 12/5/17

I for one am extremely excited for Mark Trail to finally become the full-on avant garde art project we’ve always imagined it to be. When the one-eyed man and his companion, a gentleman with a blue suit and pocket square who’s cosplaying a mid-level Ancient Egyptian official from the 19th Dynasty from the neck up, encounter a wizened old clown who just screams and screams, American newspaper readers will experience the mingled terror, confusion, alienation, and catharsis formerly available only to highbrow types seeing radical theater produced in big cities.

Family Circus, 12/5/17

I have to admit that I genuinely laughed out loud at Jeffy’s smug facial expression here. “Eh?” he’s saying. “Breakdown of traditional gender roles? Eh? Eh?”

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Mark Trail, 11/30/17

FACT: Chris “Dirty” Dyer is a notorious animal poacher who enjoys nothing more than dismembering majestic, endangered beasts for his own profit.

FACT: The Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus was in its final years mired in numerous controversies regarding its mistreatment of elephants and other animals.

CONCLUSION: Chris “Dirty” Dyer was from a young age a sociopath who reveled in grotesque animal-torture entertainments.

ALTERNATE CONCLUSION: Chris “Dirty” Dyer was a normal young boy who had his ability to feel empathy for animals deadened as he watched cruel circus taskmasters heartlessly treat noble elephants as unfeeling objects while the audience members around him jeered.

FACT NOT RELATED TO THE FOREGOING BUT STILL IMPORTANT TO NOTE: The “Tingling Brothers Circus” definitely sounds like the porn parody version version of the Ringling Brothers Circus.

Mary Worth, 11/30/17

Hmm, so what I’m taking away from Iris’s dialogue in panel one is that she may not be as familiar with as wide a variety of sex acts as Zak might be accustomed to with his younger partners, but the ones she does know she knows very well, as she plans to show Zak repeatedly until Tommy gets back from Goleta 48 hours from now, Mary’s passive-aggressive notes slipped under the door about Charterstone’s noise regulations be damned.

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Mark Trail, 11/29/17

Oh my God, it was just yesterday when it seemed like the tornado bank robber storyline had at least until Friday before it limped to its conclusion, but then today, mid-week, BAM, we’re suddenly re-introduced to Chris “Dirty” Dyer, a rhino poacher who died as a result of Mark’s rhino-poaching-busting actions, but then later wasn’t dead at all and in fact planned to come home to America after years living in Africa for the purposes of “sport”, which we all assumed was a euphemism for “hunting and killing Mark Trail, his sworn enemy.” That last linked strip was way back in February and we hadn’t heard from him since, so it’s a true Christmas miracle to see him pop up here in glamorous Miami, thousands of miles away from where Mark is busy foiling the dumbest bank robbery/hostage scheme known to man. I’m very excited for The Hunt to finally begin, but I have to admit that it’d be pretty funny if every eight or nine months or so we just got a day or two of Dirty’s largely uneventful life after his return to the States. Today, for instance, he’s briefly mildly surprised after spotting a newspaper box, since all the US media he read online during his life as an expat in Africa led him to believe that print was dead.

Dennis the Menace, 11/29/17

We get all sorts of menacing in this strip, from the subtle to the overt, but Dennis cheerfully offering to rearrange some poor woman’s face with a rake crosses the line into an outright threat.

Pluggers, 11/29/17

I guess the way I know I’m a coastal elitist and not a plugger is that I have my cat on a pretty strict mealtime schedule and whenever I eat a snack and she’s looking at me accusingly, instead of feeding her I defensively yell “I’M A HUMAN … A HUMAN” through a mouthful of Cheez-Its.

Blondie, 11/29/17

WELCOME TO YOUR NIGHTMARES EVERYBODY