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Mark Trail, 12/12/14

Looks like ol’ Mitchum isn’t just going to sit around waiting for Justin to become a tree-hugging environmental radical, as chemical company CEOs inevitably do when they spend more than a day outdoors. No, he’s going to hire some local thugs to take Mitchum out, and, even more diabolically, turn the whole thing into false flag operation! I look forward to seeing Mitchum live on TV, still splattered with Justin’s blood after his narrowly failed rescue attempt, giving an impassioned speech declaring that if we don’t start mining the Great Dismal Swamp for its precious metals right now, the eco-terrorists will have won. There won’t be a state or national park left unplundered thanks to the rising tide of pro-mineral development patriotism!

Crankshaft, 12/12/14

This Crankshaft flashback is continuing, proving that it’s not just emotionally fragile children our cut-rate Santa can make cry! Anyway, the most alarming thing about today’s strip is that I finally figured out that the aghast Montoni’s employee is supposed to be Funky, before a decade of sadness and failure grays and bloats him.

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Mark Trail, 12/3/14

In bygone times, rulers were considered to be anointed by God, and criticism of them was illegal or unthinkable, and so political discontent tended to settle on their counselors. The king is of course noble and good, but he has been getting bad advice from those slippery men who have wormed their way into his entourage! This trope often appears in Mark Trail, too: Senator Baldy wasn’t really in favor of drilling for oil in a national park, it’s just that his corrupt staffer was blackmailing him! That nice lady CEO met an adorable raccoon and put a stop to all the environmentally harmful business plans laid out by her sinister ex-boyfriend! And the cycle of eternal return has brought this narrative to the funny pages again: our brushcut CEO will shut down this project once he sees that the Great Dismal Swamp is really beautiful and was named ironically, in one of those Iceland/Greenland kind of deals; meanwhile, his short-tied underling Mitchum, who has invested his own money in this specific deal in a move that probably makes for an extremely confusing corporate structure, will try to keep the CEO on the path of rapacious profit-minding. Anyhoo, I was going to say something about how this proves that modern society imbues our current corporate 1% with the same semi-divine aura that once was given to kings of old, but then I realized that Mark Trail’s relationship to “modern society” is tenuous at best.

Crankshaft, 12/3/14

Hey, did you know that Crankshaft’s Bald Friend Whose Name I Forget ran a movie theater? I sure didn’t, and I’ve read Crankshaft every day for years! I guess it’s just good narrative practice to introduce something into a character’s life that brings him joy so you can yank it away from him in front of your audience. Today’s strip is particularly hilarious, if by hilarious you mean “cruel.” Yay, your theater is going to be saved, old man! Oh wait no saving it will be expensive, haha never mind, hope you like the taste of leftover popcorn and shattered dreams.

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Mark Trail, 11/29/14

“If only this person with political/economic power could see how beautiful this natural area is, surely they wouldn’t despoil it!” is a common Mark Trail trope, and is obviously completely realistic: why wouldn’t the chief executive of a possibly publicly traded corporation write off a multimillion dollar land investment when they discover that nature is pretty? It’s possible, though, that Mark has something more sinister in mind. Doesn’t his smile in panel two seem a bit cruel? Remember, a couple of weeks ago Mark went swimming and encountered a bull shark … a “monster”, you might say. Mark is going to lure this sinister environment-destroying CEO to a bloody, horrible shark-death, is what I’m trying to get at. He’ll listen to the man’s dying screams, stare grimly down at the gore in the water, then call his masters at the Earth Liberation Front. “The shark ate him!” he’ll say.

Beetle Bailey, 11/29/14

Yes, at last, General Halftrack admits the troops under his control are completely outside the U.S. military command structure! Can we please get his treason trial underway now?

Mary Worth, 11/29/14

HEY SEAN SHE’S THINKIN BOUT YOUR HOT BOD JUST FYI