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Family Circus, 7/8/16

One of my favorite things about the way the Family Circus constantly reuses art that’s decades old is that somewhere along the line some editor realized, “Oh, crap, everyone is supposed to wear seat belts now! The Family Circus, as an incredibly influential part of today’s media, can’t afford to send the dangerous message that not wearing your seatbelt is ‘cool!’ Looks like we’re going to have to add seat belts into all the old art, when we inevitably reuse it!” This has produced laughable results like today’s panel, in which, if I know my classic American station wagons, Dolly is supposed to be sitting in the “back back” or “way back,” i.e., the storage area where there’s no seat of any kind, where all of us kids born before 1980 or so were free to just roll around without any restraints or safety equipment and died in droves. Anyway, please join me in enjoying that seat belt, coming out of nowhere, hooking over Dolly’s back, and connecting to nothing. It almost makes me sad that once we got to the era when all children under the age of 10 had to be in car seats everyone involved in the production of this strip was just like “Enh, screw it.”

Mark Trail, 7/8/16

Hey, remember when Mark’s face accidentally fell on Carina’s face, back in the cave, and she tried to get him to do sex things with her, and the first thing he thought of to make her stop trying was to say “Yes, Carina, I am happily married”? Well, that definitely counts as being “made” to decide take some time off and invest in his relationship with his wife. Presumably they’ll voyage to the mysterious South Pacific, to frolic on a beach where they’ll discover these lovebirds’ mouldering corpses.

The Phantom, 7/8/16

I’ve sort of assumed that Kit Jr. was going to Tibet but I think they’ve only been saying “the Himalayas” so I guess it’s possible he’s headed for a Buddhist monastery in the northern fringes of India, or Bhutan or Nepal, which would qualify, barely, as “the subcontinent.” Still, has he considered that the monastery probably doesn’t have Internet? Also, you know where there’s Internet? The Skull Cave! He could learn a lot about the subcontinent back at the Skull Cave, is what I’m saying.

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Mark Trail, 7/2/16

So our mysterious circa 2014 sea-tourists have decamped to a deserted island, to make out! Hat Lady’s pouty face in panel one looks hilariously sarcastic to me? [fake baby voice] “Aww, I’m so sorry something bit your tender skin, little boy. NOW GET OVER HERE AND KISS ME LIKE A MAN WOULD KISS ME.” Presumably when Mark stumbles onto this island two years from now, these two will have fully mutated into ant-people.

Shoe, 7/2/16

A fun thing to do when you encounter an obvious euphemism for “had sex,” like “been romantic” in panel one here, is to contemplate whether an editor demanded the change or if the writer knew it had to be toned down for the “funny pages.” I for one yearn for the days when a bird-man wearing saddle shoes and what appear to be purple leg warmers but no pants can have a frank, honest, and open discussion about his sex life in the newspaper.

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Mark Trail, 6/27/16

Oh man, so after dragging on for a really long time, the Mark Trail cave adventure ended … extremely abruptly? Mark swam out through an underground passage and then Gabe and Carina followed shortly afterwards and they all emerged in the Rio Grande, the end! Suddenly, two years earlier, some wealthy couple is wrapping up their South Seas cruise on their gynormous yacht. The key questions we need to ask ourselves: Why are we seeing this in flashback? Will Mark and company stumble upon the wreckage of this yacht in the present, and need to figure out why it exploded? Because let’s make one thing absolutely clear: that boat is definitely going to explode.

Slylock Fox, 6/27/16

Oh my God, this is the most horrifying Slylock Fox mystery solution yet. We now know that the animapocalypse granted sapience to animals at all levels of the food chain, no matter how short their lifespan. “Here, try this so-called ‘magic potion,'” Slylock says to the mayfly, its mind already in a constant whirling panic over its impending mortality. “Maybe you’ll be able to stave off your inevitable death for another few days! Please, it’s for science.”

Crankshaft, 6/27/16

Newspaper comics creators have of course sworn a solemn oath to protect their shrinking revenues from print syndication: they must never read newspapers online. Some of them refuse to even acknowledge that newspapers put their articles on the internet; others, like Crankshaft, realize that this is an important part of the modern media landscape, but have no idea how online news works, per se. Fun fact: my very first grown-up job was at an “online magazine” where we published like 16-20 articles a month, and we published them to our website all at the same time, on the 20th of each month! This was in 1999.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/27/16

“What? No, they’re going to cut our funding. What the hell is wrong with you?”