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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.

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Six Chix, 9/2/19

I am not comfortable with the whimsical, knowing look the lady on the right is giving us in this panel. Combined with her weirdly phrased dialogue, it makes the whole thing fairly sinister, to be honest! “Hee hee, our picnic has been [a odd chittering undertone, almost impossible to hear, is in her voice for the following word] selected by the marching ants! Will they march us into their underground city? Will their tiny chitinous legs sweep over our naked bodies, down there in the dark, until we no longer feel them individually, until they just feel like a swift, running stream? Will eventually our minds, our very selves, be dissolved into their collective consciousness erasing us but somehow making us something greater than we could’ve ever imagined? Who knows how our picnic will be [voice suddenly drops five octaves] TRANSFORMED”

Mary Worth, 9/2/19

Oh my God, has anxious Dawn postponed the “what are we doing with this relationship” conversation with Hugo to the drive to the airport? This is simultaneously absolutely hilarious and also so relatable to me personally that it makes my stomach hurt, almost as much as Dawn’s stomach is hurting right now.

Mark Trail, 9/2/19

Wow, looks like the private equity fund that bought Woods and Wildlife after its corporate parent went bankrupt has come up with a new strategy to juice pageviews, and it’s “Find (and, if possible, kill) animals that don’t actually exist.” Now, most people are reading this strip and thinking “HOLY COW MARK TRAIL IS GONNA PUNCH THE BEARD OFF A HIMALAYAN CRYPTID” but I’m much more interested in Dr. Camel. He’s a camel with a Ph.D.!!!!