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Mark Trail, 10/19/12

Oh, man, I can tell it’s going to be hard to not just post Mark Trail and say “THIS IS FANTASTIC!!!!” every day during the current Mark Trail storyline. It is pretty fantastic, though! I myself would rather take a fancy boat than the vague promise of money, since I assume there are people who would pay good money for a fancy boat. But I don’t know how liquid the black fancy boat market is at present? I also thought at first that our villain was winking lasciviously as he urged Mark into his boat, but now I’m pretty sure that he’s actually experiencing a stroke.

Judge Parker, 10/19/12

Obviously I always knew that this Judge Parker storyline wasn’t going to end with Avery’s bloody death, but I thought it would take more than a week to get from “Bubba threatens to dismember Avery with a chainsaw in a dank abandoned mine shaft” to “Bubba and Avery relax, drink scotch, and talk about modern art in a climate-controlled abandoned mine shaft.”

Heathcliff, 10/19/12

Heathcliff, everybody! I can’t believe I’ve been doing this blog for more than eight years and haven’t taken on America’s second-favorite long-running cartoon cat. But Heathcliff will be in my rotation from now on! Anyway, it turns out that Heathcliff is kind of an asshole.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/17/12

If you were seeing this strip out of context, you might think that its implications about Killer’s notoriously aggressive sexual advances are really quite dark, with Miss Buxley’s worries about the “tree” being “hurt” being some kind of protective psychological displacement mechanism. But longtime Beetle Bailey readers know that it probably just has something to do with the fact that both Killer and Miss Buxley like to hump up on trees, constantly.

Mark Trail, 10/17/12

There’s a lot to say here about global income inequality, which means that someone who considers themselves middle- or even working class in the U.S. lives a life of unimaginable privilege compared to most in the developing world; or we could discuss the ambiguity that arises when employees have access to corporate luxury assets, and what this says about their wealth in practical terms. Mostly, though, I just wanted to put this comic here so that every embittered worker in the various dying wordsmithing industries can grab panel two and use it as their computer desktop wallpaper.

Apartment 3-G, 10/17/12

Guys, I’m … I’m beginning to suspect that Margo may not be very good at running a publicity agency.

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Mark Trail, 10/16/12

In ancient Greek tragedies, hubris is inevitably followed by a generally violent comeuppance. And so too in Mark Trail! Mark and Bill Ellis thought they could party like big shots on Woods and Wildlife’s fabulous corporate yacht (not pictured), sailing down to the Caribbean for a few days’ worth of fishing, but instead they’ve been waylaid by these gun-toting, festively dressed, splendidly mustached foreigners. I suppose they’re going to turn out to be drug smugglers or the like, but given that Mark and Bill seem to have just sailed down there in the yacht and then started a-fishin’, I prefer to believe that they’re customs officials from some extremely relaxed island nation that doesn’t feel a need to spend a lot of money on “uniforms” or “offices” for their government employees. Another possibility, given that Lead Baddie’s exposed chest has suddenly become bright pink in panel three, is that they’re shape-shifting aliens who want to kidnap Mark and Bill to their outer-space probatorium.

Marvin, 10/15/12

Let’s say you’re a person who writes jokes, on the Internet! If that were the case, there would be few things more harrowing than a cartoon dog sitting at a desk, taking a desultory slurp of coffee, and then tapping out some terrible humor-like prose, all while sporting a numb, heavy-lidded facial expression. BRRRRRRR.