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Rex Morgan, M.D., and Mark Trail, 8/2/19

Have the soaps gone soft on us? Here we are with a couple of certified villains, and now we’re being asked to, like, sympathize with their motivations, which aren’t abstract evil but rather arise from the socio-economic superstructure in which they — like us — find themselves embedded. Oh, boo hoo, credentialing institutions dangle the prospect of fulfilling and renumerative careers that they can’t deliver, leaving thousands of idealistic young people burdened with debt! Waaaah, small businesses in this country are finding it harder and harder to compete in the marketplace and end up in a downward spiral of indebtedness that they can’t ever escape from! At least Mark, Doc, and Leola are watching JJ’s meltdown with rightful suspicion. Don’t come literally crying to us because you blew all your money on vehicles with an unusual number of wheels, JJ!

Mary Worth, 8/2/19

Somehow, the sight of JJ blubbering about his small business loan isn’t the funniest thing in the soap opera comics today. No, that honor goes to Dawn and Hugo’s date at the Bum Boat, where the strained, manic quality of their “flirting” reads as if each of them is wearing a wire and has been told to keep the other talking long enough that they eventually say something incriminating. Anyway, do you think Hugo knows about Billy Big Mouth Bass? Pretty sure this is Dawn’s big opportunity to finally impress this irritating euro-splainer with something America has that France doesn’t. We can’t deliver universal health care, but if you want easy access to an animatronic mounted fish that sings, the United States is the country for you!

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Mark Trail, 8/1/19

A while back, I asked whether Mark Trail, the comic strip, knew how mines work. Today we can see that the “blame game” has already started and the other characters are making Doc in particular feel bad about not knowing how mines work, despite the fact that obviously nobody involved knows how mines work. “It was probably confusing!” says Mark. “An hour ago, when I said ‘Good job, Doc — you led us right to it!‘ by ‘it’ I meant ‘a small cave, definitely not a mine, those are definitely two different things and I can easily distinguish between them!’ God, what a dope you are, Doc.”

Mary Worth, 8/1/19

Is this whole relationship going to revolve around quickly entering bodies of water together? I was going to make fun, but, you know, people can and have done a lot worse.

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Mark Trail, 7/27/19

Oh, hey, here’s what the real story with the gold mine turned out to be: some bad guys robbed a dude at the Tucson Gem Show and took his gold nuggets, but then two of the three bad guys died in a shootout with the cops, and so the last bad guy hid the nuggets way out in the desert somewhere, and then, five years later, picked up some impressionable young wrangers/vet students and lured them out to the desert with nonsense talk about a magic wandering gold mine so he could “find” the stolen nuggets in the “magic mine,” which has to be the most convoluted method of laundering stolen money I can possibly think of. Then he left behind a framed newspaper article with the context necessary to figure all this out in a treasure chest! It almost hurts my head, how much sense this all makes.

The Lockhorns, 7/27/19

I’m really enjoying Leroy’s glum facial expression as he stands far away from his wife, talking to nobody at this party. In a way, doesn’t he represent all of us? Isolated and alone at a social gathering, floating in some weird void, while our supposed loved ones talk shit to someone else?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/27/19

“It’s as if they’ve lost any agency of their own and exist only to be rewards for us! Rewards we definitely haven’t earned!”