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Mark Trail, 7/2/24

You can make your old-school soap-opera comic character as hip and bestubblèd and “nu-look” as you want, but you will never be able to avoid the twin questions (which inevitably overlap, but do not necessarily have matching answers) of “How old is this person supposed to be?” and “What generational cohort is this person supposed to belong to?” The current Mark Trail involves Mark and Rusty encountering a group of ne’er-do wells-who are polluting Lost Forest by taking old electronic equipment like fax machines out into the woods and busting it up with baseball bats, for fun. They call themselves “The Grungey Boys,” and the fact that neither Mark nor the aforementioned Boys recognize that this is itself a perfectly serviceable insult (certainly more cutting than “scummy”) just tells us that they’re Gen Xer with fond memories of “grunge music,” which Rusty would only know about from the Nirvana t-shirts his little friends buy at Hot Topic. (I suppose the Grungey Boys are also inspired in their whole deal by Office Space, another Gen X touchstone about how having a job is bad and it’s fun to destroy electronic equipment, two sentiments that, as a Gen Xer myself, I agree with.)

Gil Thorp, 7/2/24

Oh, Gil, it wasn’t you holding her back. It was her job as Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp, guiding the Lady Mudlarks to mediocre results just like you did for the boys, and once she ditched out on that it was smooth sailing to golf glory for Ex-Coach Coach Thorp’s Ex! She’s apparently gone back to her maiden name now, and I think it’s funny that the local print newspaper got that piece of information so late in the layout process that when they switched the name in the headline they accidentally put it in the wrong font and didn’t have time to fix it.

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Mark Trail, 4/25/24

Mark, I don’t know if I’d trust a horse with my life in this scenario. Have you ever seen a horse race? They’re just running in circles, for our amusement! Do you think they know how to get out of the racetrack? Because they sure don’t act like it! They just keep running in circles!

Gearhead Gertie, 4/25/24

Speaking of racing around in circles for the amusement of others, these NASCAR drivers are especially brave, in my opinion. There’s a crazed blimpjacker on the loose! Probably she’s going to use that blimp for terrorism purposes! Has nobody here read or seen Black Sunday?

Mary Worth, 4/25/24

OK, sorry I ever thought we were in for some kind of Redemption of Wilbur Weston because of the way he accidentally saved a child. No, something much more morally complex is happening, as today in a similarly absent-minded state Wilbur accidentally manhandles an old man into the street. In a way, isn’t each and every one of us an anarchic, half-conscious presence in the world, doing good and ill by turns in ways that often barely register on us?

Shoe, 4/25/24

“Ariana Grande is 30 years old and her first album came out in 2013. What kind of idiot doesn’t know this?” you’re probably asking. The answer is: newspaper comics readers. They don’t know who she is and think her name sounds dumb! This strip is a public service.

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Gasoline Alley, 4/12/24

It’s not news exactly that conflict is the engine of good stories, but I have to say that Gasoline Alley feels like it’s rediscovering this for the first time in years. When it was just Walt and Sheezix on a quixotic quest to stop Electric Acres from happening? Snoozeville. But now that I know it’s turning brother against brother, and fiancé against fianceée? This is it. I’m all in. I hope it devolves very quickly into graphic and gratuitous violence, while Walt wanders around shouting “What’d you say? What’d she say?” until a hurled piece of debris finally puts him out of his misery. It’ll be the sort of thing where Rod Serling steps out of the shadows and explains that this world may be more like ours than we care to admit, until he too is killed in mid-sentence by a hurled piece of debris.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/12/24

And yeah, sure, that sounds like it would be a lot to process, emotionally, but don’t worry, if the anxiety gets too much you can always turn to Rex Morgan, M.D., which just started a storyline about little kids making brownies. It will be extremely uneventful and last six to fifteen weeks.

Mark Trail, 4/12/24

I don’t know, this doesn’t seem like it requires some kind of big investigation. Horses are big and pretty off-putting — they run fast, they have razor-sharp feet, their teeth are real nightmarish if you look too closely at them, and so forth. They’re nice to watch run around, I admit, but I don’t trust them, so why would I want them near my company? And why would it be bad to ask the Bureau of Land Management to help clear them out? The horses are on the dang land that they’re supposed to manage! What do I pay taxes for?