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Archie, 9/26/13

“Ha ha, yes, it can be somewhat inconvenient to read a newspaper outside, especially if there’s a breeze. But let’s be honest: Is there a way to get the day’s news, features, sports, and weather, along with fun stuff like comics, other than printed on paper? Nope! So if you like keeping up with current events, or just want to enjoy good-natured Archie Comics Publications Inc. content in bite-sized chunks, you’re going to have to subscribe to the newspaper, and that’s the way things are going to be for a long, long time.” –An Archie newspaper comic originally written some time in the late 1990s

Mark Trail, 9/26/13

“I want the senator to reconnect with the joys of killing animals one at a time! Sure, it’s not as efficient as destroying their habitat to drill for oil, but it’s much more emotionally satisfying.”

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Mark Trail, 9/24/13

Mark Trail is tired of only portraying ancient technologies like Ma Bell-supplied bakelite phones from the ’50s, d’you hear? From now on, this strip is future-proof. That’s why today’s installment features a next-generation communications device: a flat, featureless, book-sized object that sits on your nightstand, from which you need to extract a smaller flat object that you talk into. Presumably it only takes 30 to 90 determined seconds to pop out that handset as the flat thingie rings and buzzes, though don’t cut your fingernails too short or else you’ll be in real trouble.

Archie and Apartment 3-G, 9/24/13

I’m pretty sure the comics pages are supposed to be a refuge from the intense and troubling emotional scenarios that bedevil our everyday life. Thus, I deem today’s Archie, in which a teenage girl is so wracked with need for romantic affection that she declares her willingness to throw every other happiness aside for it (declares this, it must be pointed out, directly to her rival for the attentions of her beloved), a complete failure at this core mission. Much safer for teens is today’s Apartment 3-G, in which a girl learns that her beloved dad is deliberately withholding information about his brain tumor from her because he only shares that sort of thing with sexy blondes that he wants to sleep with. That’s the sort of dilemma that none of us can relate to! What a relief!

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Better Half, 9/19/13

Boy, those sure do sound like sophisticated cockroaches! Just scuttling all over the place, their dark red chitin gleaming in the light, their awful legs somehow capable of wielding tools now, humanity’s only advantage gone in a stroke. Three forks waving about like their antenna, and yet still they can achieve a sort of rolling, lopsided locomotion with their other three legs. The forks plunge into food, into garbage, into feces, into anything even vaguely organic, because the cockroaches can eat all of it. They can eat it even faster, now that they’ve figured out how to use forks. They’re getting bigger. They’re getting stronger. They’re biding their time, but they won’t have to bide their time for much longer.

Mark Trail, 9/19/13

“Personal interest” is supposed to imply that Johnny is on the payroll of some sinister big oil conglomerate, and this implication will turn out to be true, because storytelling in Mark Trail is 100% linear and has no room for narrative feints or misdirection of any kind. But still, Johnny’s real personal interest — his personal passion — seems to lie not so much in loving oil but in hating wildlife. Stupid, stupid wildlife. In the end, he doesn’t care if fracking poisons the water table or if nuclear waste irradiates the forest or if strip mining just peels the entire ecosystem right off the face of the earth, as long as something kills a bunch of animals, and the more quickly the better.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/19/13

One way to write a story is to have all your characters be extremely unlikeable!