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Mary Worth, 5/19/05

Mark Trail, 5/19/05

It’s like they’re trying to taunt me. I mean, these two strips routinely move at the speed of a glacier; but somehow, in what seems like it should be a contradiction of all known laws of time and space, in the past few weeks or so they’ve become even slower. Seemingly every twist in this Mark Trail plot that might result in some drama gets nipped in the bud; meanwhile, Mary and Jeff are out at sea, cut off from all external stimuli, with the rest of the world fading out into the background: it’s like Waiting for Godot, except instead of the two of them engaging in absurdist philosophical banter, Mary is just reeling off platitude after platitude while Jeff looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, possible with a gun at his temple.

So, because the comics are being recalcitrant today, I offer a few funny sentences that I’ve thought up here and there and have been trying to figure out how to wedge into a blog post. I hope you enjoy them in this noncontextualized form.

• It’s not like it’s the most the subtle movie in the world, you know? I mean, I was only seven, but still, I was thinking, “Mom, the guy dressed in black leather and the mask that looks like a skull who keeps strangling people with his mind? Not a good guy.”
• It’s the sort of place that looks like it would sell CDs with names like This Is How We Do It, Volume 6: Best of Flemish 160 BPM DJs, 1997-1999.
• So we’ve seen Margo with her hair up, and with her hair down, but you notice we never see her putting it up? That’s because it would take about an hour, which would translate to about seven dozen strips, not counting hairpins.

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Mark Trail, 5/12/05

It’s fun, in a self-psycho-analysis kind of way, to watch delusions of grandeur slowly transform into paranoia. For instance, now that I know that at least one comics writer reads my blog, I’ve come to assume that all comics creators do. This means that just about anything that happens in any comic could be a reaction to things said here!

Take Mark Trail, for instance. Jack Elrod has long come under sustained and savage attacks, both by me and my commentors, for his inability to draw human beings and corresponding tendency to throw into random panels adorable wildlife animals rendered freakishly huge by problems with perspective. But today’s strip is fauna-free, and instead features a disturbing closeup on the wizened, crumpled visage of Mike, the lovable alcoholic hermit. When considered along with last month’s zombie sherriff, it’s almost as if Elrod is saying, “You want strips with drawings of people? I’ll give you drawings of people! I’ll give you drawings of people until you can’t take it any more! You’ll be glad for me to go back to beavers, moose, pelicans, and sea turtles once I’ve shown you what an ugly, awful creature Homo sapiens is.” And then he laughs and laughs, one of those awful laughs that gets raspier and raspier until it degenerates into hacking coughs that raise up blood-tinged phlegm.

At least, that’s how it happens in my mind.

Well, I for one say: enough already! Bring on the beasts! Not least because the human-interaction angle of this story is possibly the dullest Mark Trail plotline on record. An insurance investigation has made for entertaining narrative exactly once in human history — in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — and there was at least sex involved there. Jack Elrod can draw a mean sea turtle, but he’s no Billy Wilder.

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Mark Trail, 4/23/05

Be careful, insurance investigator guy whose name I can’t be bothered to look up! You may think you’re having a productive, professional chat with a respected member of the local law enforcement team, but you’re actually standing mere feet away from a bloodthirsty zombie who’s lulling you into a false sense of complacency so he can crack open your skull and eat your brains!

Admittedly, it can hard to tell the difference between a small-town sheriff and the walking undead. Here’s a few “warning signs” that may indicate a corpse reanimated through foul magic:

• Chalk-white skin
• Eyes with orange pupils
• Protruding cheekbones giving the face the appearance of a skull
• Deep shadows cast over one side of the face, seemingly at odds with the actual lighting in the room
• A thousand-mile stare that seems to wistfully harken back to a pre-death-and-unspeakably-evil-reanimation existence

If you think you might be talking to a zombie, run for higher ground! It’s a well-known fact that a zombie’s main mode of locomotion is an awkward shuffle, so they have some difficulty with inclines. In case of mass zombie takeover of your town, be sure to tune in to NOAA radio. If the usual weather report has been replaced by a guttural voice moaning “BRAINS … BRAINS!” over and over, you’re pretty much screwed.

Incidentally, it almost seems like Sherriff Zombie’s directions — “you can find him at Lost Forest” — are some kind of snide joke, but it’s commonly known that zombies have no sense of humor.