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Gil Thorp, 1/12/15

There’s been a definite and sad decline in the number of Marty Moon plotlines in Gil Thorp lately, which is really too bad because he’s an amazing character who’s engaged in lots of fun hijinks over the years. Like the time he got grifted at golf by a Ben Franklin lookalike and ended up passing out drunk in his car, or when he had a public access TV show dedicated entirely to talking smack about Gil but then his bosses got tired of his routine and replaced him with a pair of dumb teens. He even once pretended to be a kid’s dad, in order to trick Social Services into believing that kid had a stable home life! But lately he’s been reduced to asking Gil occasional pointed questions and doing his play-by-play from a inside a wooden packing crate. So I’m excited about Gil warning his naive young player about Marty’s unscrupulous journalistic practices, because hopefully that means we’re going to be treated to some actual unscrupulous journalistic practices, or at least Gil rousting himself from his usual ennui to yell at Marty Moon for perceived transgressions.

Mark Trail, 1/12/15

Just based on this strip you might think this alligator attacking Bald Ponytail False Flag Ecoterrorist is some kind of coincidence, but in fact Mark spent most of last week carefully luring this villain to an “alligator mound,” which I guess is a mound that … alligators … live … in or near, or something, and as someone who gets most of his nature info from Mark Trail, I’m going to go ahead and believe this is a Real Thing. Anyhoo, I’m a little disappointed that our baddie has turned into a stiff, expressionless Ken doll at the moment the beautiful and violent alligator lunges at him, but I am quite charmed by the evocative final panel, as his useless pistol falls to the earth while he’s presumably being devoured off-panel.

Apartment 3-G, 1/12/15

There was a point, early in this blog, where I used to do some jokes about how Margo loves cocaine. It never really became that much of a running bit, but, just for the record, she still really loves cocaine.

Heathcliff, 1/12/15

If being rolled up into a giant Wicker Man-style effigy made out of snow and worshipped like a god by mice is wrong, then Heathcliff doesn’t want to be right.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/11/15

You know, all week I’ve sort of felt the urge to feature Apartment 3-G to update you on the doings therein, but no individual strip has struck me as interesting enough to feature on the blog. Fortunately, the strip has a longstanding policy where they spend Sunday rehashing the week’s developments! So, it’s like this: Sam told Margo at lunch that Margo’s mom is under the sway of some psychic lady who is interfering with wedding plans, and then Margo left lunch and almost fell in front of a car, but then some mysterious gentleman stranger who somehow knows her name saved her! Is he part of the league of psychics who have their claws in Gabriella? Is this some indication that Margo really is the center of the universe and her whole reality is an elaborately constructed Truman Show-style simulacrum? Probably not, and the actual answer will be a million times more boring than either of these possibilities, but the last storyline in this strip involved Tommie and some other lady talking to each other endlessly about a usually off-panel baby deer and an even more usually off-panel emotionally withholding large-animal vet, so it can’t possibly be duller than that.

Mark Trail, 1/11/15

You know what’s not dull at all is today’s Mark Trail Teaches You About Nature installment. Horrible cannibal fishes distract each other so they can eat each other’s babies! You drag each and every one of these monsters out of the water and leave the lake to good-hearted, God-fearing organisms like kelp, Rusty.

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Hi and Lois, 1/5/15

Oh, man, those knowing looks Hi and Lois are giving each other in panel one are chilling me to my very core. What erotic scenarios have played out in the Flagston household that include food and praying? Lois’s deflated expression in panel two confirms everyone’s longheld belief that the bevy of Flagston children mainly exists to get in the way of the title characters’ varied and active sex life.

Mark Trail, 1/5/15

I’ve never murdered anyone or been murdered, but just based on what I know about humans and how they operate, probably if you’re actually going to kill a few people in cold blood for money-making reasons you don’t necessarily spend a lot of time telling them about it, right? And the people who do keeping jawing on the subject maybe aren’t the most serious about the whole affair. What I’m trying to say is that, as a rule, you shouldn’t up and smack some armed dude who’s planning to kill you, but Cherry may not be completely off-base on her ability to get away with this here.

Slylock Fox, 1/5/15

Hmm, let’s just check out the solution here and “Slylock used his sense of taste” OH MY GOD HE LICKED IT, HE LICKED THE BOAT, I know he’s a fox and all but it sure reduces his Clever Detective cred now that we know he goes around licking things, right? “Used his sense of taste,” honestly.