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Mark Trail, 6/1/19

Many years ago, Mark Trail provided us with a perfect, beautiful sentence: “You stole a friend of mine’s pet bear!” Today, we have what I think is a new contender in the contest to be the “cellar door” of America’s #1 outdoors adventure comic: “By the way, Mark, wasn’t it you who urged caution before we got too excited about the possibility of finding the vanishing mine!?” Feel free to use this sentence yourself in an appropriate scenario — for instance, when one of your friends or acquaintances gets real enthusiastic over some exciting possibility (the discovery of a vanishing mine, say) that relatively recently they had been skeptical about, perhaps even urging others not to get to excited about the prospect.

Mary Worth, 6/1/19

We last checked in with the sad tale of Estelle eleven days ago, and, uh, I regret to inform you that literally nothing has happened since, other than Terry Bryson turning Estelle on to some dumb federal cybercrime website that will definitely, 100%, not help Estelle get her $10,000 or her ability to trust back. The rhythms of this strip being what they are, if this plot were going to wrap up this week we’d be getting some kind of closure today, but apparently not! Apparently this is just going to keep happening. And it’s possible that something interesting will transpire next week, but it’s also possible that Mary Worth just stalled, and we’re just going to keep seeing Estelle sad and Libby and Mary comforting her, forever. Has … has anyone tried turning Mary Worth off and turning it back on?

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Family Circus, 5/17/19

God, I honestly love Big Daddy Keane’s whole deal here. He looks beaten down by life, his facial expression numb and his tie just a little loose and disheveled, and mostly what he wants to do is take that spoon he’s holding delicately in his big, meaty mitt and just go to town on that enormous bowl of chocolate pudding. Look at all that pudding! That’s like a soup bowl’s worth of pudding! And it’s his due, as the family breadwinner. Jeffy sticking his grubby face into his peripheral vision is just pissing him off. Let the man eat his pudding in peace, Jeffy.

Six Chix, 5/17/19

I also enjoy today’s Six Chix, because based on the dialogue you’d expect the speaker to be sort of heavy-lidded and languorous, just dully shoving cookie after cookie into her mouth and barely tasting them, but in fact she’s staring at a half-eaten cookie wide-eyed with anxiety, as if she can’t fully articulate what mania is causing her to keep eating them. Her boyfriend is asleep, or maybe dead.

Mark Trail, 5/17/19

“Boy, am I glad we found Skull Mountain!” is the sort of thing a guy says, ironically, right before he gets killed by a bunch of spooky, evil skeletons.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/13/19

“Yeah, Summer! Remember Summer, my daughter, your stepdaughter, who’s also best friends with your daughter? I get how I threw you by looking at the calendar so you’d think I was talking about summer the season. Also, it’s easy to forget about Summer my daughter because she’s not in the strip much anymore. She only seems to call me late in the semester, probably because she really doesn’t like talking to me, and, honestly, can you blame her?”

Slylock Fox, 5/13/19

Slylock has apparently solved all the Forest Realm’s mysteries, because now he’s putting his patented powers of ratiocination to use on solving puzzles like “who dumped trash on the side of the road?” The mess he and Max are making in the process actually offers a good glimpse into how his legalistic mind operates: for Slylock, once he’s spotted a crime, he must immediately work to find the perpetrator by any means necessary, even if those means actively make the litter problem, and the lives of the citizens whom he’s ostensibly working to protect, demonstrably worse.

Mary Worth, 5/13/19

I honestly really respect that Mary is keeping her eyes on the prize here, and that prize is not Estelle’s tender heart or her future ability to trust others or whatever, but is rather the ten large that she Venmo’d to @artherzero7. Hearts heal on their own, with time, but bank accounts do not, and that’s why we’re gonna get Interpol involved in this damn thing!

Mark Trail, 5/13/19

That is going to leave a mark, Mark: A Mark-shaped mark! Ha ha, get it? Anyway, Mark just shattered his pelvis.