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Shoe, 9/18/19

So many Shoe punchlines are met by goggle eyes of horror, and honestly there’s plenty of justification for that, but I really like the expression Roz is wearing here, which is sort of a grim, sly smile. “That’s right,” she’s thinking. “Marci went to Las Vegas with her man and they totally had sex. Procreative sex.”

Gasoline Alley, 9/18/19

In a development somehow even more baffling than the weeks and weeks and weeks Gasoline Alley spent on scrapbooking, Gasoline Alley has decided to spend God knows how many weeks discussing the very real and fascinating condition of synesthesia by focusing on a new character, a physician’s assistant who claims his synesthesia allows him to feel his patients’ ailments, which isn’t even close to being a real thing. Still, if it’s an avenue for this strip to get into some “the HUMAN MIND is the ultimate trip, baby” visual territory like it is today, I’m willing to forgive a lot.

Mark Trail, 9/18/19

“Kathmandu isn’t the primitive, out-of-date city the world thinks it is! Is it still a little naive? Possibly. Has the mayor been convinced to pay a substantial portion of the annual budget to promote the city’s modernity in what he’s been assured is a widely read and universally beloved American comic strip? Well, yes. But ‘primitive’? Definitely not!”

Pluggers, 9/18/19

The primary facts you need to know about a plugger’s family members in order to keep abreast of their lives are the various ways in which their aged and ill-treated bodies are falling apart.

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Mark Trail, 9/14/19

“Shh, Cherry, shhh, everything will be OK … I promise you,” Mark said, gently but firmly removing the Cherry-unit’s head so her system would deactivate and he could safely store her. “No need to worry her,” he thought. “I’ll just reassemble her when I get back from Nepal and she’ll never even realize I was gone.”

Dustin, 9/14/19

Hot tip for dude cartoonists: if you ever have the urge to do a strip about how “ha ha, women sure sometimes just SLATHER ON THE MAKEUP, amiright”, just be sure your lady characters are the ones doing the talking! Then it’ll all be on the up and up. We all know how catty women are, right? Mrr-ow!

The Phantom, 9/14/19

Hey, if you’ve been reading The Phantom for a while and you ever wondered “Hmm, would someone raised from birth to be a gun-toting warrior who goes on to suffer incredible physical and psychological trauma on mission after mission end up with, like, PTSD, maybe,” today’s dream sequence has some answers for you!

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/19

Hey, everyone, did you catch the fun comics news in the Grey Lady yesterday? It turns out that this week’s strips, in which a CTE-addled Bull obsessively washes the family laundry over and over again, isn’t just another round of the usual CTE-addled laffs that we’ve come to expect. Nope, according to a big, spoilers-heavy article in the New York Times, it’s just the setup for a month-long storyline that climaxes with … (wait for it) … (stop reading now if you don’t want to learn the extremely predictable denouement to all this, I guess) … Bull’s suicide! Did you worry that Lisa’s demise, being brought about more or less by random chance, wasn’t bad enough??? Well, good news, the character deaths in Funky Winkerbean are just going to get more grim from here on in, and will continue until all the demands are met.

Mark Trail, 9/10/19

Fortunately Mark Trail is a tragedy-free zone, which means that Mark probably isn’t going to be eaten by a yeti. I do enjoy that Doc has stood up in the background between panels; perhaps he assumed that, having managed to survive a desert flash flood, he’d proven his mettle and would now be Mark’s permanent companion on adventures. His facial expression in panel two indicates that he’s terribly disappointed to be displaced by some kind of freakish camel-scientist hybrid.

Shoe, 9/10/19

Shoe of course is a leader on the funny pages among strips that telegraph to us how little any of the characters want to be there or to be participating in the “jokes” or “wordplay” therein. We’re all familiar with the Patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror, but I’m fond of today’s more subtle offering, in which the Perfesser leans away from Roz between panels, as if to get as far away from this “punchline” as possible without actually getting up.

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/19

The Gasoline Alley characters, meanwhile, are proud of their punchlines! So proud they need to explain them to one another, at great length, to make sure that everyone is on the same page.