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Mark Trail, 4/14/18

OK, fine, Jim isn’t dead, but he did have a good chunk of his shirt just completely ripped off, and is now standing around awkwardly, nipple exposed to the forest breezes. If this circus storyline has taught us one thing, it’s that the woods are full of dangers that can rip your sleeve clean off, leaving your muscular upper arms sexily visible.

Marvin, 4/14/18

Marvin is a strip that, infuriatingly, bounces back and forth between its infant characters’ speech being presented in thought bubbles or straight up word balloons, and it’s a small thing I’m willing to overlook, except in cases like today, where the distinction between actual, literal speech and, like, psychic baby communication is important! Marvin has more than a five-word vocabulary! He says seven words in the first panel of this comic strip! I swear to god, they plant these just so I’ll say “No, really, go back to the jokes about shitting.”

Family Circus, 4/14/18

Ha ha, look how angry Jeffy is as Dolly embellishes on the sacred word! Looks like he’s found the heretic!

Gasoline Alley, 4/14/18

Guys, who … who does Gasoline Alley think Paris Hilton is

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Gil Thorp, 4/12/18

Hey, guys, remember Aaron Aagard, the hero of last year’s basketball season storyline, who was inconsistent not because he was on drugs but because his mom was, and then he ended up living in a teammate’s basement? Well, he’s playing on the team again this year, it seems. I guess we’ll never know the details, since all media coverage of the Mudlarks has now ceased, which should hopefully break the spell the various high school teams have over Milford in short order and everyone else will get hobbies and Coach Thorp’s budget will get reassigned to the music department and Coach Kaz will have to mortgage his dojo.

Mark Trail, 4/12/18

Based on Mark’s grim facial expression in the final panel, I assume he knows that Jim was crushed to death under the jeep, and is going to allow Marlin to mourn in private. If there’s one thing Mark doesn’t like being around, it’s emotions.

Mary Worth, 4/12/18

I’m not sure what sort of stuff Rick’s sells, exactly, but I’m certainly hoping that Iris and Zak are here to buy, say, a hammock, talking loudly all through their shopping experience about how it’ll easily be converted into a makeshift sex swing.

Crankshaft, 4/12/18

Fun fact: True Crime Addict is a real book, and James Renner is a real person who’s been rendered here relatively faithfully, presumably because he owes someone a terrible debt, or perhaps because he lost a contest.

Spider-Man, 4/12/18

That quote is from the Bible, so in attributing the inerrant word of YHWH to some unspecified “they,” JJJ is proving himself a darn polytheist on top of everything else!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/9/18

Boy, our POV sure is lingering kind of ominously on that paper cup of water in the last panel, and you know what would be extremely funny, to me? If, after we spent all this time learning that Justin’s reluctance to seek medical attention for what was obviously a serious health problem had its origins in his mother’s own irrational fears, Rex hands Justin that water and he drinks it and then the water just leaks out everywhere because the terrible, substandard surgery performed on him at the bottom-tier hospital where Rex has admitting privileges has left the poor boy’s digestive tract full of holes. “My mother … was right!” Justin would gasp out, right before he dies from all his organs becoming unmoored from the places where they’re supposed to be.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/9/18

I believe I’ve shared on this blog before the fact that in sixth grade I accidentally spilled a pot of boiling Lipton’s Giggle Noodle Soup onto my foot. This was an extremely silly-sounding injury that earned me the derisive nickname “Noodlefoot” for the remainder of the school year, but it was also an extremely painful second-degree burn that I had to keep dressed in a bandage for months! I still have visible scars, more than thirty years later! My point is that while Hagar and Lucky Eddie are yucking it up there on the battlements of whatever castle they’ve managed to seize by brutal force to use as a temporary base for yet another plundering expedition, the men below are screaming in pain as their flesh sizzles and sloughs from their bones.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because, even in moments of quotidian happiness, Cindy is obsessed with with her age and the decline of her good looks! Cindy, you might recall, was the pretty cheerleader character from the high-school-days origins of Funky Winkerbean, and the strip has never stopped punishing her for it, having her fired from her newscasting job for getting old, after which she didn’t file the obvious lawsuit, but instead started both working and sleeping with young people so she would always be reminded of her encroaching cronedom. The Funkyverse is all about generalized anxiety over mortality, of course, but you have to love the way Cindy’s been saddled with a particularly gendered version of this where she’s constantly convinced that she’ll be unattractive and unloveable any day now, and by “have to love” I mean “you don’t have to love it at all, feel free to get pretty upset about it, actually.”

Mark Trail, 4/9/18

I’m pretty sure that Marlin and Jim drove up in that jeep, so, unlike what happened with a couple of boats we could mention, this is one hilariously awesome vehicle wreck that won’t go on Woods and Wildlife’s tab!