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Panels from Mark Trail, 1/17/16

Wow, it sounds like these so-called fishermen are making a ton of money from animals that aren’t even fish! What a bunch of frauds! Sure glad Mark Trail is on the case to blow the lid off of these seafaring phonies.

Spider-Man, 1/17/16

Oh, look, it’s my favorite kind of industrial accident, right after the kind that produces “Oops! All Berries” Cap’n Crunch: the kind that accidentally results in a comic strip being uploaded without any black in it! This will be probably fixed by the time you read this, but this is what the strip looked like when I found it. The panels are strangely beautiful, and definitely 100% less annoying now that you can’t read any of the dialogue or figure out exactly what’s going on.

Panels from Blondie, 1/17/16

“You don’t understand, Blondie! It’s just cheap and physical with Herb! He’s only for when you’re not available! You’ve gotta believe me!”

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Pluggers, 1/14/16

I’m not sure what the context would be for anyone, even this plugger, to buy a new DVD player in the year 2016 — maybe he finally put in a disc into the old one when there was already one in there one too many times — but I do like the way the letters seems wobbly in his word balloon, really conveying his sense of desperation. “Please, son, you gotta tell me how to hook this thing up. I got all these old westerns and All In The Family episodes, I already switched from VCR tapes to these discs, I’m not switching to iTunes or whatever they have now. I don’t even know what an iTunes looks like! That neighbor kid who used to do my computer stuff won’t talk to me because I put too many politics memes on his Facebook wall! You gotta help me!”

Mark Trail, 1/14/16

Haha, is it a good idea, Gabe? Is it an idea you in fact suggested to him literally two sentences earlier in this very conversation? How dumb do you think we are exactly, Gabe?

Wizard of Id, 1/14/16

Oh, hey, let’s check in with the Wizard of Id! What’s going on over there? Oh, they’ve introduced a new character? And he’s a muscular, hornèd demon from the depths of hell? And the human ladies want to have sex with him? Let’s never check in with the Wizard of Id again.

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Mark Trail, 1/13/16

Gabe, I’m sure you’re a very distinguished chiropterologist, and your skill at delicately plucking bats off of cave walls is unsurpassed, but you don’t know anything about selling magazines, OK? If America’s magazine-reading public (mostly airline passengers and people who accidentally clicked the “auto-renew” box on Magazines.com six years ago) see a big story in Woods and Wildlife about a healthy bat colony, they’re not going to think “Oh no! We need to act now to fight white-nose syndrome, probably by allocating millions of tax dollars to whatever university has Gabe on the faculty!” No, they’re gonna think “Wow, look at all those plump, healthy bats. Plenty more where those came from. Bet we could eat ’em, or mine ’em for coal, somehow.” If you want to move hearts, you need to show some full-on bat devastation. I dearly hope this plot climaxes with Mark carefully calibrating his punches to only stun the bats for the photographer, who then daintily daubs talcum powder on their noses for a heartrending but entirely fraudulent cover shoot.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/13/16

At one point in Alan Moore’s Watchman comics series, the psychopathic vigilante Rorschach is captured and arrested. Physically slight, he’s hassled on his first day in prison, but swiftly and brutally ends his first fight by grabbing a pan of hot grease from the cafeteria line and dousing his attacker’s face, leaving him screaming in agony. As the other prisoners look on in horror, he growls his most memorable line: “I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me!” I just thought of that when reading this strip, probably for no particular reason.

Gil Thorp, 1/13/16

Gil Thorp’s basketball season plot has been snoresville so far, but is it about to involve some mid-game pantsing? I could get behind a rash of tit-for-tat pantsing leading to a new record for technical fouls in the Valley Conference.

Judge Parker, 1/13/16

Sorry, American “linguist”! You’ve no doubt done seen and done awful things in the name of protecting your country from the shadows, but Katherine wants that step-grandchild real bad, so it looks like you’ll be dying alone in a Serb prison!