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Mark Trail, 6/12/11

Do you hear that, Young People? Mark Trail is on to you, and your inveterate littering. And he has hard data proving that today’s kids are the worst, supplied by independent scientific researchers who were not at all biased by the massive grant that they received from the Foundation For Extolling The Virtues Of The Elderly And Demonizing Anyone Born After 1968. Why, look at that young punk in the final panel, who, following the latest hip youth craze that he got from the Internet or FM radio or whatever, has driven out the forest just so he can dump garbage everywhere. Fortunately for justice, Mark learned from yesterday’s strip how to impale a man with a word balloon, and so that pile of trash will be the last thing this miscreant ever sees.

Beetle Bailey, 6/12/11

The throwaway panels from today’s strip contain material for a cheap “Beetle refuses to submit to Sarge’s advances on the Lord’s Day” joke, but I’m more intrigued by the action in the main sequence of the strip. Sgt. Lugg’s advice that Sarge use “a little humor” has failed spectacularly, mostly because Sarge, inhabiting as he does the laffs-free Beetle Bailey universe, has no idea what “humor” could possibly be like.

Crankshaft, 6/12/11

Oh, look, Crankshaft is an architectural critic now! Note the use of italics: Crankshaft the strip is cracking wise about post-modernist architecture; Crankshaft the character is just sitting sullenly on the couch watching the television trash Frank Gehry. Because much as the strip’s creators might want to criticize Gehry’s work, they realize that Crankshaft having an opinion that couldn’t be expressed as some wildly inappropriate pun would be way too out of character for the readers to handle.

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Mark Trail, 6/11/11

We interrupt this 100 percent laughable police work (“Moccasins, eh? You know who wears moccasins? Weird mountain men! I seen it on the TV!”) to say a few words in memory of this noble mountain goat. He was innocently attempting to leap dramatically from crag to crag, as is the wont of his species, when he was brutally impaled by an errant word balloon and pinned to the sky like a bug in an entomologist’s collection. He deserved a better fate and will be missed.

Mary Worth, 6/11/11

Remember, everyone, Mary thinks that the best way to deal with these sorts of “delicate matters” is to bully the poor lovestruck delusional soul until he or she is driven to suicide, which explain why she’s stroking her chin like a sinister supervillain in panel two.

Family Circus, 6/11/11

Normally I don’t want to see any kind of bodily fluids dripping from any member of the noxious Keane clan, but I have to admit that I’m rather enjoying the sight of sweaty, exhausted Billy. It summons up a vision of him dressed in his fancy tennis clothes and hitting the ball again and again into the net, growing increasingly frustrated and saddened at his own incompetence, which I frankly find hilarious.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/6/11

A recent trip to the mall left me idly contemplating the ways of modern capitalism. Did you know, young whippersnappers, that the corridors of indoor shopping malls used to stretch unbroken from the Foot Locker on the east to the Ann Taylor on the west, with plenty of room to walk and no kiosk in between hawking kibbutz-manufactured facial cream or calendars with cute cats on them or the same cell phones you could buy in two or more of the actual stores in the mall? You see, most shopping malls are owned by publicly traded corporations these days, and investors aren’t just satisfied with retail that makes more than it spends: it has to show an improved profit year after year, which for most older shopping malls means trying to extract more revenue from the same square footage, which in turn means that the broad indoor boulevards where old people used to power-walk are now cluttered with as many little store-shanties as management can cram in there.

In its own way, the mighty pharmaceutical industry is in the same boat. With most Americans now doped up on between two and six prescription medications at any given time, the drug companies need to cast an ever-broader net to find more customers for their wares. And if that means that pharmaceutical reps need to travel to isolated communities where you can still get burned at the stake for selling cures that aren’t root-based poultices, and then seduce lumpy-faced inbred nurses as if they were the villains of a Flannery O’Connor story, then so be it. The demands of the capital markets are remorseless.

Mark Trail, 6/6/11

“You have to return to your loved ones once every six months or so, and make a few days’ worth of awkward small talk! That’s what I do! Don’t worry, you don’t have a wife, so you won’t have to touch lips with anybody.”

Crankshaft, 6/6/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because everyone hates the bus drivers and wants them to quit! Some people are trying to make sure they quit, by threatening violence against them. That … that’s the punchline?