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Mark Trail, 5/14/10

Even I’m not so heartless as to crack wise about sassy getting hit by a car yesterday. However, now that we know Sassy is STILL ALIVE and about to be taken to the vet by this overalled hero, I do want to hold up for derision Mark’s increasingly callous dismissals of Rusty’s wholly justifiable fears. Could this storyline finally reveal Mark as the unfeeling monster that he is? “Relax, Rusty, she’s probably trying to dig that old rabbit out of a hole! Or digging her own grave, because she’s going to die soon, alone and in pain! One of the two. Ha ha, this horse has a soft nose!”

B.C., 5/14/10

This might seem hard to understand in the setting of the strip, but remember that this is caveman times, and the tiny band of eight or so human characters we see in the strip are the only representatives of H. sapiens on the planet. Britain hasn’t even been invented yet, so pretty much all you have to do to create it is write “British pub” on a rock.

Luann, 5/14/10

“Come on, you don’t plan a thing like that! You just push down obsessive, intrusive thoughts about it and swear to yourself and everyone else that you’ll never do it, until you finally just let yourself get carried away in the moment and do it without protection with someone you’re not really comfortable with! It’s like you don’t know anything about how sex works, Tiffany!”

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Mother Goose And Grimm, 5/12/10

So here’s what life’s like, if you’re me: you might find yourself spending a good part of an afternoon trying to figure out exactly what’s most objectionable about this cartoon, which manages to conflate one’s awkward and yet terribly exciting teenage sexual fumblings with both lactation and human-animal contact, to absolutely horrifying effect. I’ve finally decided that the worst part is fairly subtle: it’s the cow’s eyelashes. Exaggerated eyelashes like these are often used to signify that an otherwise gender-indeterminate beast or thing in a cartoon is meant to be a lady, and an attractive one at that. One might have thought that the femaleness of the cow was beyond question, what with it being milked and all, but there they are, driving the point home that this is a bovine with frank sexual needs that this farmer is fulfilling.

On the other hand, the farmer’s look of shock and horror is kind of funny. It’s as if this cow had never actually spoken to him before, and he’s just now realizing that their relationship is very, very different from what he had hitherto imagined.

Mark Trail, 5/12/10

You know, it’s all fun and games when Rusty gets trapped under a car, but even though Sassy is irritating, I would really prefer not to see her get run down in the middle of the road just two panels after Mark cheerfully states that letting the little dog run around unleashed and unfenced is totally cool. I’d say that we’re about to learn a valuable lesson about pet ownership, except that Mark is never ever proven to be wrong in this strip, and our last runaway dog storyline has as its moral not “keep your dog inside or behind a fence” but rather “petnappers love surprises,” so I don’t have high hopes here.

Apartment 3-G, 5/12/10

Tomorrow’s narration box: “Tommie immediately regrets demanding an explanation.” Notice that she’s attempting to casually sidle away from her roommates, keeping her facial expression as neutral as possible.

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Blondie and Crock, 5/10/10

One of the defining features of legacy comic strips is of course their trapped-in-amber quality, which goes beyond just the characters’ archaic motivations and gender roles and goes right down to their homes’ decor. In fact, incidental details are even less likely to change than major points; Blondie might have started a business with much fanfare sometime in the ’90s, but the Bumsteads will apparently only have a single corded phone, sitting atop an early 20th century credenza in some out of-the-way location in the house, forever. (At least it’s a modern push-button model!) It’s such an ingrained part of the Blondie universe that I can’t decide if today’s strip is some kind of knowing wink to it, or just the logical extension of having the layout of chez Bumstead so burned into your brain that its anachronisms seems totally natural to you.

Crock, meanwhile, shockingly manages to be more in touch with modern reality today, in the sense that it acknowledges that phones untethered by wires do, in fact, exist. Of course, the strip artists seem to believe that you can create one merely by detaching the handset of a classic bakelite phone from its base, but hey, baby steps.

Apartment 3-G, 5/10/10

At long last, all distractions will be put aside and we’ll now enjoy unfettered A3G-girl-on-A3G-girl-on-A3G-girl action! Three will enter — how many will leave? I suppose this is supposed to be the first time Tommie has seen Margo since the latter’s spa vacation, but I prefer to believe that our redhead has taken to just groveling before Margo every time they encounter each other, to reduce the frequencies the beatings. “O Margo, our days were like nights without the warm glow of your sun! Please, do not remove your divine presence from us again, for we cannot stand the thought!” Meanwhile, Lu Ann has finally decided to face Margo’s tyranny head-on, the prospect of which fills Tommie with obvious terror. Lu Ann knows there’ll be bloodshed, which is why she’s prepared herself by putting on a butcher’s apron.

Mark Trail, 5/10/10

Sassy’s wide, haunted eyes in panel three don’t say “excited” to me so much as “my God, I’ve seen things no living thing should have to bear, and which you can’t even begin to imagine.” Oh, but we can imagine them, Sassy! We’ve seen panel two!

Pluggers, 5/10/10

Longtime Pluggers readers know that Reed Hoover is a relentless, unstoppable Pluggers-idea-submitting machine, whose name pops up in this feature with unsettling regularity. Thus, it comes as no real surprise that the Chief Plugger has just given up and gone on vacation for a week and handed the strip over to some classic Hooverisms. Reed is no doubt celebrating pretty mightily down there in Dallas, presumably by hiking his pants all the way up to his nipples.