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Mark Trail, 4/21/17

Gosh, it seems like Mark and our bald kidnapper are just destined to be at cross-purposes, aren’t they? Mark isn’t making “wisecrack” in panel one; remember, his extremely linear mind can’t even conceive of what a “joke” is! He’s just offering useful information to a fellow who he suspects doesn’t know much about the cartographical conventions of rural areas. It’s a darn shame his sincerity is going unappreciated!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/17

Hey, remember “vendos,” the Funkyverse-specific slang term for vending machines? Remember how they took the vendos out of the school and everyone was mad, for some reason? Well now they’re still there, but nobody uses them, and they just induce terrible anxiety about mental health care being used as a weapon of the omnipresent security state when people even think about them! Ha ha, what a truly whimsical world this strip takes place in.

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Mary Worth, 4/19/17

I know that eventually we’re going to get around to the Hoosiers and their smoking-related marital strife and that will be the “real” part of this storyline, and it’ll be fine, I’m sure, but for the life of me I’d be happy with like six to eight more weeks of Mary and Toby just enjoying the cruise industry’s more pedestrian pleasures and describing them to each other in excruciating detail. Today, Mary is excited about the formal dinner they’re about to enjoy, but wants everyone to know that come tomorrow for lunch she’ll be wearing sweatpants at the buffet, shoveling as much lukewarm chicken down her gullet as she can handle under the harsh fluorescent lights. She isn’t some kind of snob or anything. (She still paid the extra fee for sheets changed daily and “premium access” to the lifeboats, of course.)

Funky Winkerbean, 4/19/17

Generally speaking, I don’t try to write things about teenagers that much, which is good because they terrify and confuse me and I don’t know much about them. But one thing I do know better than this strip, which ostensibly has a teen cast, is that teens do not care for Facebook anymore. I learned yesterday that a cutting thing teenagers call Facebook is “Mombook,” in case you want to feel a kajillion years old!

Mark Trail, 4/19/17

Mark’s kidnapper is in that special intermediary zone of cleverness, where he’s smart enough that he can’t be tricked into saying his name, but not so smart that he realizes that he’s the one with the gun and the sinister agenda so he’s supposed to be telling Mark where they’re going, not the other way around.

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Mary Worth, 4/11/17

It’s a good thing that Mary and Toby aren’t the kind of friends and travel companions who feel like they have to do everything together, because they obviously have very different interests. Mary, for instance, enjoys looking out over the waves thinking quietly to herself, “I love the sea! You know, in the abstract. I’m not going to swim in it or anything. It’s full of monsters!” Meanwhile, Toby is in the ship’s gym, running in place with a bunch of other workout nuts, shouting “It’s fun to stay at ♫ the Y-M-C-A! ♪” at the top of her lungs. They’re not playing the song on the gym soundsystem or anything and she’s not, it goes without saying, staying at the YMCA. She just likes yelling things.

Mark Trail, 4/11/17

Meanwhile, over in Mark Trail, things are taking a much grittier and more realistic turn than in the high-seas fantasy world of Mary Worth. “It has proven to be a good career for me to provide for my family!” says Mark, unaware that, even as he tussles with this illiterate gunman, back in New York analysts at the private equity firm that recently took over Woods and Wildlife Magazine’s near-bankrupt parent company are going over the books and discovering some truly hair-raising numbers. “So, this guy is on the payroll as a full-time employee with benefits, but he files maybe three, four stories a year? And he’s tied to the company’s skyrocketing insurance premiums? Well, first thing we do is shift him to contractor status. And we won’t need any more of these 12,000-word essays about ferrets or whatever; he’s welcome to send us some clickbait ‘You won’t BELIEVE which National Monuments have the most celebrity nude sunbathers’ slideshows for $250 a pop. OK, with that taken care of, let’s look at our spending on office space — I think there’s a lot of savings we can find there, too.”

Family Circus, 4/11/17

Oh, man, Billy is definitely just one step away from “and why isn’t there a WHITE history month????” right now.