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Mark Trail, 9/3/13

Oh, man, this Mark Trail plotline is just getting started — it involves a mysteriously dead elk Mark found on Lost Forest property — and already there’s punching! Panel two is a true classic of the Trailian punching genre, with hat and gun flying in opposite directions as Mark interprets “turn around, mister … slowly” as “turn around mister … very quickly and then punch me in the face as hard as you can.” I guess it’s a little bit awkward that Mark ended up punching his friend Dusty, but that’s just the price you pay when you punch first and verify identities later! Everyone’s all smiles and there appears to be no permanent harm done, unless that parabola emanating from Dusty’s mouth in panel two is meant to be a trail of spittle following behind a dislodged tooth, which it almost certainly is.

Shoe, 9/3/13

I grudgingly respect the fact that Shoe follows the logic of at least one aspect of a society of bird-men to its logical conclusion and has a bird that feasts on the dead as the town undertaker. I do wonder how many casual Shoe readers know that Mort is a mortician-bird-man, which I’m pretty sure is a key piece of information for this joke. Not that it makes much sense anyway? Ha ha, did you enjoy your time at the opera … in a coffin? Because you’re a mortician-bird-man, and opera is a dying genre? Eh? Eh? Death?

Momma, 9/3/13

Well, it looks like I was right yesterday, and we are going to get a multi-day plot in Momma, a strip that never, ever does multi-day plots. So since we’re going into uncharted territory, I guess why not take a head-first leap into howling madness, with MaryLou walking up the aisle of an airplane, shoving big steaming spoonfuls of glop into the mouths of the weirdly compliant and passive passengers? I look forward to further airborne insanity over the rest of the week!

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Beetle Bailey, 8/28/13

“I guess he’s a pile of shattered bones and mangled organs, mostly! Aw, Sarge looks kind of sad, like he vaguely regrets beating Beetle to death in a savage frenzy of violence.”

Mark Trail, 8/28/13

“That is a good job, Rusty — and speaking of jobs, isn’t about time you started contributing financially to this household? You’re not an actual blood relation, so it’s not like we have an obligation to keep feeding you free of charge. Say, I hear the new glove factory in town is looking for line workers! They’ll pay you 50 cents an hour and all the irregularly stitched gloves you can fit into a gunny sack!”

Crankshaft, 8/28/13

“I’m not really sure what Rocky Rhodes’s name is supposed to say? I guess it was meant to be punny, years back when we first introduced this character, but who can really remember now.”

Family Circus, 8/28/13

“Mommy, is Grandma a filthy foreigner? Is our bloodline tainted? Can we only be redeemed by cleansing this entire condo complex with purifying fire?”

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Mark Trail, 8/27/13

Welp, Rusty’s dino-dream only lasted a week and he avoided being eaten, so we’re spared any Inception-inspired musings about how if you die in a dream you die in real life or enter some weird limbo state or whatever. Still, I’m a little miffed that Mark is giving credence to his ward’s assertion here. The fevered images that Rusty’s REM sleep recycled from whatever outdated dinosaur books were available at the local library do not provide any kind of scientifically rigorous evidence about what human-dinosaur interaction would have been like! It’d be more accurate for him to say that “it probably is a good thing that humans and the burgeoning proto-sexual anxieties that my subconscious represents as terrifying beasts of yore don’t coexist.” OH WAIT WE HUMANS DO HAVE TO COEXIST WITH THOSE, RUSTY, THANKS A LOT.

Later, Rusty returns to Lost Forest and expresses his pathetic delight at whatever terrible room-temperature pizza Cherry drove an hour to get from an off-brand convenience store at the nearest highway exit. I’m kind of surprised that the pizza isn’t being depicted on panel, though? Just add some pepperoni to a pre-existing pancake drawing and boom, there you go!

Spider-Man, 8/27/13

OK, Spidey, look, we get it, you’ve voyaged to a foreign land where you don’t speak the language, it’s not ideal but lord knows many of us have done it, I certainly have. Also, you’re hanging out with a friend who, in addition to being a native speaker of the local language, is also fluent in your language. You know what bilingual people aren’t really impressed by? Monolingual people picking out occasional words in languages they don’t speak and being super self-satisfied about understanding them! I mean, if your spider-sense can’t protect you from being banged in the back of the head, why should we expect it to protect you from social embarrassment, I guess.

Pluggers, 8/27/13

Today, Pluggers takes a break from blurring the line between dog-men and actual dogs and blurs the line between bird-ladies and actual birds instead.