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Archive: Mark Trail

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Mostly soapy Saturday

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Mark Trail, 7/9/22

Hey everybody, remember Sassy? He was Rusty’s adorable little puppy (distinct from Andy, Mark’s big macho dog), and he was always prone to getting into trouble, just like Rusty! He sort of faded away in the past few years of the strip but now he’s back! … just in time to die horribly from whatever gross skin disease is afflicting Lost Forest. RIP Sassy, 1981-2022, you will probably not be missed.

The Phantom, 7/9/22

Man, I’m barely even going to try to explain the current Phantom plot, which has been very, very long and difficult to follow but is mostly a series of nesting narratives from Old Man Mozz explaining how the Phantom will ruin his life if he tries to bust his former flirtation partner Savarna out of prison, and it’s never quite clear if we’re watching the big guy actually doing this stuff or just hearing Mozz spin a what-if narrative about it, but the point is that you can apparently show a couple guys just straight-up dying from taking a bullet to the chest, right here in the funny papers! It’s Saturday, I guess? You can show dudes getting shot to death, on the weekend? And maybe if it’s just a story-within-a-story told by a wise old sage and not something really happening in the strip? Do the practices and standards departments at major newspaper comics syndicates take into consideration the layer of narrative distance at which a violent murder happens?

Mary Worth, 7/9/22

“I mean, I’m definitely going to have a lot of different opportunities to explore once the state Physician Assistant Board finds out about our extremely inappropriate relationship and I get my license taken away!”

Slylock Fox, 7/9/22

Welp, let’s take a look at the details here and see if we can guess the six diffOH MY GOD, is that a human femur, is that GRANDMA’s femur, oh my GOD

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Funkymancer

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/6/22

Man, wouldn’t it be cool if Funky Winkerbean made an abrupt change in its narrative style and suddenly became a retro-cyberpunk strip (set in the original 1980s heyday of cyberpunk, even) where Harry Dinkle used his computer hacking prowess to gain authority over Westview High without his techno-ignorant colleagues even noticing? It wouldn’t even have to be a permanent abrupt change. Just for one storyline would be a relief from the endless puns. Computers in the ’80s couldn’t make puns, right? That was beyond their capabilities?

Dustin, 7/6/22

I’ve made some jokes about how the unstoppable passage of time has shifted Dustin’s core “Boomer vs. Millennial” concept to a significantly less bankable “elder Gen X vs. young Millennial/first-wave Zoomer” scenario, but I think we can agree that no matter what the actual ages of the people in the strip are, the main engine of the whole thing is Boomer dude condescension. How else do you explain today’s punchline at the expense of Abba, a band that was always pretty beloved and has undergone a critical appraisal of late? “Ha ha, Abba,” says the strip’s viewpoint character, about one of the best-selling music acts of all time, which spawned a wildly popular stage musical and film series, “I think we can safely do a punchline predicated on notion that we all agree that they suck!”

Mark Trail, 7/6/22

Look, it’s come to our attention that Mark Trail’s core audience may be tired of long storylines about how cryptocurrency is bad or whatever. So, we’re going back to the core story topics that have made this strip great: animals, and their gross rashes. Hope you enjoy the close-up drawings of weeping sores, freaks!

Gasoline Alley, 7/6/22

Gasoline Alley: the long-running continuity strip that’s in touch with everyday real Americans, their lives, and their problems. Also, it features a talking bird who strictly enforces sexual morality. It’s a real nightmare place!

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Somewhat murderous Saturday

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Dennis the Menace, 2/12/22

This is in reality an extremely egregious example of working backwards from a punchline to a joke, without putting much effort in trying to figure out how to make the backstory work logically, but damn it, now I’m trying to figure out the backstory behind a guy receiving an epiphany from the Lord above at a church and then switching to another church. I’m imagining the heavens opening and a divine voice informing Mr. Wilson that his current denomination, the General Six-Principle Baptists, were heretics, as were the General Association of Baptists, the General Association of General Baptists, and the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, and only the General Conference of the Evangelical Baptist Church carried the true faith.

Mark Trail, 2/12/22

You know, I remember a time when Rusty would be over the moon just to be allowed to go on a trip with Mark and Cherry, and would certainly not plan on killing a cryptid for social media fame without their permission. I guess it’s true that the only way to raise a respectful ward son is to keep him in a “Rusty coop” out back 350 days a year. Parents these days are going soft, and it’s the source of nothing but trouble!

Pluggers, 2/12/22

I think a lot about a story a friend once told me about a Bay Area Vietnamese restaurant that was famous for serving fake but very convincing meat in its dishes. Once my friend was eating there and a guy came in and started berating the owner, who always was out and about serving as host, about how even though they weren’t serving meat they were still promoting meat culture, which is a culture of death. The owner listened to his whole diatribe stone-faced and finally just replied, “Look, we’re Buddhists, we like pork but we can’t eat it.” Anyway, after seeing this panel, I’m going to spend my weekend working on “horseshoe theory, but for pluggers.”

Dick Tracy, 2/12/22

This doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Moran case directly; Dick just knows that the best way to loosen up and get his head “into the zone” as we go into the weekend is to hunt a PR guy for sport.