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Mark Trail, 1/11/19

Oh, right, the human traffickers! We all remember the human traffickers, right? The ones … Mark encountered … and can remember instantly … shoot, you guys I don’t remember the human traffickers at all. Were they … were they part of this cave adventure? Anyway, you’d think Mark would be proud of these guys for working their way down the Ladder of Evil and only threatening cultural patrimony rather than live human beings, but in his Manichaean worldview, there are good people (who don’t get punched) and bad people (who do). At any rate, please enjoy Mark swelling up in righteous anger as he lays down the punchery, making every bit of his rippling physique extremely visible through is formerly loose-fitting shirt and jeans.

Mary Worth, 1/11/19

Ha ha, Mary is transparently not wondering about her friends at all, but is instead enjoying dinner alone and a book from the steamy Outlander series, presumably because she decided to stop thinking about Ian and instead seek out a story about a Scot who is an actually plausible object of erotic desire.

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Gil Thorp, 1/10/19

AHH AHH AHH BOBBY HOWREY! You might remember Bobby from one of the greatest ever Gil Thorp plots, when he was the sweater-vest-clad megalomaniac student manager who hooked up one of the Mudlarks with Adderall but it was OK because it was actually just baby aspirin, but Gil was too square and didn’t think it was OK and so Bobby ended up coaching literal children down at the rec center. Now, four years later, he’s all grown up, with the much more grown-up name “Robby” and an actual website, so he’s ready to destroy Gil and his regime of mediocrity, in which you’re not allowed to give fake performance-enhancing drugs to players even if it helps you win!

Because we all become exactly what we hate most, I make fun of the newspaper comics for being helplessly mired in nostalgia but absolutely love the Gil Thorp plots where wronged players from years past reappear to blame Gil for their problems, like when Steve Luhm, who was a social justice warrior before it was cool, came back as a disgruntled janitor, or when Marty DeJong stalked Gil with baseballs because Gil’s inadequate coaching ruined Marty’s arm and his life. I’m definitely looking forward to learning how B/Robby’s exile to the Milford Recreation Center failed to teach him any kind of lesson at all, but rather left him a twisted, broken soul intent on billboard-delivered vengeance.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/10/19

We all knew as soon as we saw that Brayden wore his baseball cap backwards that he didn’t play by society’s rules — the brim is supposed to go foreward, to shield your face from the sun, but he just doesn’t care! So it should’t come as a surprise that he’s tearing the mask off society’s polite fictions before this plane’s even left the gate. The air marshals are helpless: there’s nothing in FAA regulations that authorizes them to stop someone from dropping truth bombs.

Mark Trail, 1/10/19

“You!?” Mark bellows with total conviction, having recognized our culprit as, uh … this dude? Does anyone know who he’s supposed to be? I’m so tired, you guys.

Family Circus, 1/10/19

Big Daddy Keane’s little smile is the expression of a man who’s just found a loophole. “She said ‘four children’ … but she didn’t say which four children, now did she?”

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Mark Trail, 1/6/19

Mark is kind of oblique in panel one about the change in public sentiment on big game trophy hunting, but what he’s really hinting at is that Mark himself was at the forefront of opposition to canned hunts long before it was fashionable! True Trailheads remember the delightful story from 2010 (summarized here) where Mark’s neighbor set up a fenced private hunting preserve as part of a plan to get elected governor (really), and the man’s own stepdaughter’s pet deer (YES REALLY), named Lucky (I KNOW), almost became a victim! But were there #SaveLucky campaigns? Was there an online petition site at https://www.thepetitionsite.com/383/290/338/save-lucky-the-normal-colored-deer/? There was not. There wasn’t even an internet back then, as far as Mark knew, because he still writes his stories on a manual typerwriter and only had a flip phone until 2016, so Mark just had to punch the dude in the face instead.

Judge Parker, 1/6/19

Remember when Sophie was obsessed with collecting data and learning about the nuances of modern third-world conflicts. Well, now she’s getting her news from Yahoo! Yahoo! This is just sad.

Dick Tracy, 1/6/19

There’s a guest writer filling in for a two-week “Minit Mystery” in Dick Tracy, and given the overall current vibe of the strip, it’s pretty bold to hinge the whole plot on nostalgia being literally toxic.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/6/19

PANEL AFTER PANEL OF RED-HOT GOING-TO-THE-AIRPORT-BUT-NOT-ACTUALLY-GETTING-ON-A-PLANE ACTION!!!!!