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Gil Thorp, 4/27/18

Finally, our basketball heroes have solved racism forever, so now we’re ready to launch into our spring storyline, which is centering on … Barry Bader! Barry is a tremendous asshole who really leaned in to being a heel even before his father, a travelling salesman and amiable drunk, got a DUI and was sent to jail by the judge-mom of one of his teammates, then got drunk again and was involved in accident that killed a Milford student. This made Barry even more of an asshole and everyone ended up rejecting him socially, which is I think where we left it, like two years ago? I don’t remember any Barry action since, so I assumed he graduated or quietly transferred to another school where none of the students were friends with anyone his dad killed, but it seems the Bader family is being brought back for a very special plotline involving a Mudlark looking to make pen pals with a hot prison DILF.

Spider-Man, 4/27/18

I feel like I need to go back earlier in this storyline to when Spider-Man’s hitherto unheralded jumping powers became an important means of locomotion for the characters, because the whole point of it was that (a) it was a fast way to get a desperately injured man to the hospital while avoiding Miami’s notoriously congested freeways, and (b) it at least involved jumping unnaturally long distances, which is a kind of superpower, even if it’s an extremely dorky one. Now that we’re in the swamp and nobody’s in a big rush, you’d think everyone could just, you know, walk out on their own power, but hilariously “Spider-Man needs to carry Dr. Connors to the hospital while leaping” has morphed into “some characters are going to carry other characters while strolling through the Everglades.” Meanwhile, MJ has arrived on a jet ski, which means an end to this hilarious nonsense but the beginning of even more hilarious nonsense as we watch five people trying to balance precariously on a jet ski.

Mark Trail, 4/27/18

Ha ha, Rusty, you can’t remember the names of ancient Mexican structures or of the various cultures that built them! You just got … mesoamerisplained.

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Mark Trail, 4/26/18

Rusty had to get the sign-off from his teacher to go on this trip to Mexico, so I guess that he attends school, not that you’d know from the strip, where he always seems to be hanging around the isolated forest cabin he shares with his family. But presumably this is a tiny one-room schoolhouse that he shares with a few other stunted forest youths who are kept equally safe from “big city ideas” or the wider culture generally. That’s one explanation for Rusty’s laughable misunderstanding of the economics of civil aviation. The size of an airport isn’t related to the distance flown by any individual scheduled flight departing from that airport, you foolish boy! It instead depends on the population and economic output of the region it serves, so the real question you should be asking yourself is why the backwoods Lost Forest zone merits a sizable international airport. (It’s also possible that this is a tiny two-gate terminal and yet it’s still the largest building Rusty’s ever been inside.)

Dennis the Menace, 4/26/18

“Get it? It rhymes, you see! Anyway, it sounds like your eight-year-old son’s wandered off and you have no idea where he is, so good luck with that.”

Mary Worth, 4/26/18

Ha ha, remember when Dawn was overwhelmed with memories of her ex, while she stared at one of the greatest works of art in the Western canon? Well, you know what Marx said: “All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

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Spider-Man, 4/19/18

I’m trying to figure out how exactly Spider-Man and et al. can stop JJJ from publishing his huge Lizard scoop, and I can’t, so consider dramatic tension successfully established! My only idea was that Peter Parker would try to unionize the Bugle and seize control of its editorial processes from the business side of the paper, but that requires a degree of interest in the conditions of his fellow employees that he’s never demonstrated, plus it would take a lot of effort.

Mark Trail, 4/19/18

To Serve Man … it’s a cookbook … OH MY GOD DIRTY IS PLANNING TO EAT MARK TRAIL