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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 The fevered images that Rusty’s REM sleep recycled from whatever outdated dinosaur books were available at the local library do not provide any kind of scientifically rigorous evidence about what human-dinosaur interaction would have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.

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Mark Trail, 8/19/13

Oh my goodness you guys, Rusty dreams of dinosaurs! (I sneer at your pedantic “pterosaurs aren’t technically dinosaurs” gripe, Rusty and Mark were talking about dinosaurs all week and you know we’re going to get some.) While this will provide lots of opportunities for awesome dinosaur drawings, it also provides Mark with an opportunity to abandon his hideous ward in the woods, as you’ll note that Rusty has just dozed off on the ground without Mark being anywhere nearby. Looks like that fishing trip was just a last hurrah, or, more likely, an excuse to take Rusty so far away from home that he’ll never find his way back!

Funky Winkerbean, 8/19/13

This is a pretty textbook example of how things go down in a Funky Winkerbean 3.0 strip. The dialogue could be construed as a little light-hearted joking, but the grim facial expressions show that in fact everything is meant to be taken in deadly earnest. “No, really, the football team is terrible, and there’s literally no chance of it getting any better. Certainly not with me in charge of it. I’m the worst!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/19/13

Dang, Snuffy’s reputation precedes him … his reputation as a man who steals chickens so he can dismember and eat them. Ha ha, it’s funny that the chickens are afraid of Snuffy, because they don’t want to die!

Pluggers, 8/19/13

Pluggers just have to poop all the time.

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Mark Trail, 8/12/13

No use denying it any longer. Mark Trail has taken Rusty fishing — it says so right there in the strip. A treasured Comics Curmudgeon article of faith — that Mark never, ever takes Rusty fishing; that such an event is not physically possible — lies in dust and ashes. Can you imagine how the Seekers felt when their prophesied flying saucer failed to show up back in December 1954? You can? Well, this is nothing like that — this is how the rest of us would have felt had the saucer arrived right on time, picked up the Seekers, and left us all to die in the flood.

It’s hard to feel too bad about it, though. I mean, look at the little scamp so darn happy there in panel two. You just want to give him a big hug, never mind that he’s hideous, fictional, and holding a fish.

Slylock Fox, 8/12/13

As is widely known, Count Weirdly genetically engineered animals into sapient bipedal monsters in a deranged effort to replace humans lost to an unnamed apocalypse. Here we see the horrific cost of his obsession: the graves of a century of victims from his early, failed experiments. None tears at the heart more than poor Rita Rabbit, doomed by ruined DNA to live her short life backwards, dreaming only of the chance to savage her insane creator/tormentor one time before her teeth recede into their gums and she is deconceived forever.

Beetle Bailey, 8/12/13

Sarge deadpans a perfectly symmetric, perfectly ambiguous punchline: at once, the pillow is insufficiently firm to meet Army regulations and Army regulations insufficiently rigorous to ban the pillow. From the depths of his forbidden/permitted pillow, Beetle grins directly at his audience: See? We can do irony as well as the next guy — but as hardened warriors, we just don’t go in for all that postmodern self-referential bullshit ;-)

–Uncle Lumpy