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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!”

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Pluggers, 7/24/19

If I were to make a joke about exurban American old people obsessively watching Matlock, it would be rude, but since Pluggers is a feature by and for exurban American old people, they can say it, and I respect that. Anyway, my guess is that what the dog-man plugger is attempting to convey is less “I use the syndicated rebroadcasts of classic TV shows in the pre-local-news programming block to tell the time, just as my ancestors used the position of the sun and the stars” and more “woman, please hold your tongue and do not interrupt me during my favorite stories, it makes it hard to focus and solve the mystery, we discussed this.”

Mark Trail, 7/24/19

I always knew Mark Trail was in the tank for the Fourth Estate, but who knew that the payoff of this story would be that good local journalism was the real treasure all along — more valuable than gold?

Mary Worth, 7/24/19

Dawn has spent most of this date using factoids from the “Trivia” section of Wikipedia articles she got to from clicking names in the “List of French people” at random as conversational prompts, and somehow it’s still going better than the last one did.

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Mark Trail, 7/22/19

Wow, hmm, Mark Trail sure has some … interesting and nuanced ideas about property rights! Like, it’s bad to hold people at gunpoint in order to get access to gold mines, but it’s totally ok to plunder treasure chests despite the presence of locks that clearly indicate that those chests are private? Anyway, I think it’s particularly cruel of Mark to theatrically break open this lock with a stone and then tell Doc “this is your show.”

Shoe, 7/22/19

There’s definitely an argument to be made that, especially in an age of extremely focused and specific streaming platforms, Saturday Night Live has become bland, middle-of-the-road entertainment. I’m just not sure that message is best delivered by [checks note] the legacy newspaper comic strip Shoe.