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Mark Trail, 10/1/13

Happy U.S. government shutdown day, everybody! In keeping with his tendency to say vaguely nice things to everybody and let his underlings take all the controversial stands, Senator Mason has decided that Washington, D.C., is an extremely unpleasant place right now and that he’d much rather head off on a little vacation. As a federal employee, Dusty Rhodes is now officially furloughed, but that’s OK; instead of being forced to tell the senator about all the stuff he’s not supposed to do on federal land, he can join Mark and the gang in shooting as many animals as they want, digging for oil at random, and burning down huge swaths of forest, for kicks. Who’s gonna stop them? The government? Hahahaha!

Heathcliff, 10/1/13

I don’t want to alarm you but it appears that the Garbage Ape has started to attract notice even beyond the readership of this blog. I’m all for Heathcliff’s brand of off-putting surrealism finding a wider audience, but I think creating a Robin to the Garbage Ape’s Batman in an attempt to cash in on the character’s growing renown is too precious by half.

Momma, 10/1/13

You can tell I’ve been reading Momma for far too long because what mainly irritated me about today’s strip on first read was the weird, awkward way Francis just looks at Momma in silence for two panels and not, say, the unspeakable Oedipal horror.

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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!