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Mark Trail, 11/4/20

Oh snap it’s Kelly Welly, everybody! Real Trail heads remember Kelly, who was sadly absent during the James Allen era, as one of Mark’s greatest foils, always trying to simultaneously steal Mark’s stories and get into his pants (or Bill Ellis’s pants, or the pants of whoever might help her write her next story). My friend Kaycee brought her to life years ago in the unforgettable Mark Trail Theater.

Anyway, while I think new-look Mark Trail has sometimes been a little too aggressive on the “look, we’re different now!” front, in the long run if the strip isn’t going to remain an anachronism, it has to come up with answers to the questions of “What would the Mark Trail characters be like if they lived in the year 2020,” and I think “Kelly Welly is a brash, nature-focused Instagram influencer” is absolutely a correct answer to that question.

Marvin, 11/4/20

You know what’s never going to change, though? Marvin, a comic strip that features babies chatting amicably about what kind shit-innable undergarments they’re wearing, They’re chatting about it now, and they’re going to keep on chatting about it, forever.

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Family Circus, 10/27/20

I am extremely tickled that Dolly is standing on a stool in order to deliver this joke. I assume it’s a practical cartooning matter — if she were on the floor, she’d be cropped out by the circular border of the panel — but I’d like to imagine that she laboriously dragged the stool in in from the other room and climbed up on it so she could really get in her mother’s face with her latest nonsense, with Ma Keane refusing to make eye contact with her or acknowledge her in any way all the while.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/27/20

So it turns out the bad thing Sarah did was … that she gave her self a haircut, and not even in a comical or interesting way, and June was able to fix it without too much trouble, and even if she couldn’t, Sarah is like eight years old and does everything by Zoom right now, so who cares if her hair looks a little funny, you know? But that isn’t going to stop us from debriefing about it for days, and it won’t stop Rex — who, remember, is working in a COVID ward and the current strips are taking place in the initial wave of the pandemic so presumably he’s watching multiple people die daily despite his best medical efforts — from treating this as the biggest disappointment he’s encountered in his life to date. Rex says that he would’ve never thought to cut his own hair as a child, and it definitely tracks that he was boring as shit from the minute he was born.

Mark Trail, 10/27/20

Oh, huh, I see that Happy Trail Farms really is where various Mark clones are spawned using forbidden science, exactly as I predicted. Maybe we need to have a Crisis on Infinite Trails, with DoddTrail, ElrodTrail, and AllenTrail vanquished in combat, before RiveraTrail can thrive, to the extent that freelance writing in the clickbait era can be called “thriving.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished and isolated that it cannot participate in the modern economy, which is built around the mass manufacturing of complex devices out of standardized and interchangeable components!

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The Phantom, 10/24/20

Next week: NEW ADVENTURE!!!! Hopefully its climax will be as exciting as this one: The Phantom dozing off while his wife natters on about the romantic destiny of her teen son and their daughter’s friend.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/24/20

Good news! Adeela was about to have her life destroyed by a terrible combination of bureaucratic incompetence and institutional cruelty, but then one of the formerly most powerful people in the world was convinced to make a phone call and it solved all her problems! Everyone who’s more than one degree of separation from a current or former political leader can go fuck themselves, though.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/24/20

I am not a parent, but I know enough parents to sometimes get a glimpse of why the Family Circus has historically been beloved among parents, and I truly admire today’s panel, which features Daddy having been pushed to a place in his life where he’s attempting to earnestly reason with a pre-verbal toddler.

Mary Worth, 10/24/20

[cackling evilly] YES … YES! … IT’S A THREE’S COMPANY-STYLE MISUNDERSTANDING … BUT WITH CRACK AND/OR METH!

Mark Trail, 10/24/20

Mark’s new assignment is sending him to Happy Trail Farms, and based on the last two panels here, my guess is that he escaped from there years ago after being grown there in a vat.

Crock, 10/24/20

Like, a significant portion of the time the jokes in Crock are pretty difficult to parse, and normally I’d complain, but today? When the joke is about how beloved character “Maggot” got horny at the movies? I appreciate this protective layer of obfuscation.