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Mark Trail, 3/22/18

Nope, still haven’t changed my mind about how weirdly villainous Marlin Creed seems. Remember the last guy in this strip who was named “Marlin”? He was illegally harvesting sea turtle eggs, just putting that out there. Anyway, the fact that Marlin has introduced himself by his full name and yet refers to his assistant only as “Jim” is telling. The real question is: who is Jim? Is he famed hijacker DB Cooper?

Or is he the notorious Zodiac Killer?

Either way, we’re in for a rollicking elephant-cage adventure to come!

Hi and Lois, 3/22/18

Be careful there, Dot: throw around talk like that and your mom is going to think that someone in the house is leaking information about the Flagston family’s criminal activities to the Feds, and that someone might end up gettin’ wacked.

The Phantom, 3/22/18

When you pay for International First Class, you’re of course paying for lie-flat beds, semi-private mini-suites, and lots of attention from the flight crew; but you’re also paying for the shrieking to be kept to a minimum. Looks like Bangalla Air is going to be getting some angry letters from representatives of the country’s overlapping government and business elites!

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Mary Worth, 3/21/18

Good lord, I love how angry Wilbur looks in the second panel of this strip. How dare anyone write into his advice column complaining about loneliness when he, Ask Wendy himself, is the lonely one? The loneliest one? Let me ask you this, Ask Wendy advice seeker: were you grifted and betrayed by your hot Colombian lover, only to come home to discover that your ex, who you had dumped for said hot Colombian and who you assumed was eagerly waiting for you to come back to her, had instead gotten together with some hot dude who’s twenty years younger than you and also fabulously wealthy? Were you abandoned by your daughter, who’s leaving to spend months in Italy with some non-tenure-track academic who she isn’t even fucking? You’ve got a lot of nerve thinking you have problems worthy of America’s greatest part-time syndicated (?) advice columnist!

Dick Tracy, 3/21/18

It’s not luck that Dick Tracy survived his brutal dragging, doc; it just wasn’t his time. Call it fate, call it divine intervention, call it what you will: the point is that God wants a lot more violent deaths, and Dick Tracy is His instrument, carrying them out without remorse and with the full force of the state behind him.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/21/18

Naturally, Chester the Chiseler’s agenda for Darin and Mopey Pete is that he wants them to head up the new comic book company he wants to launch with his comics-collecting riches, and naturally they’re a little bit reluctant to do so, though the fact that they left the tenuous, low-paying world of print comics for big-budget superhero movie riches weirdly never comes up. I like this strip because the second and third panels illustrate the Funkyverse pessimism spiral perfectly. First, Pete points out, quite reasonably, that launching an entirely new franchise of comic books is a risky proposition, especially as the new company won’t have established beloved characters it can use to provide baseline revenue. But then Darin starts yammering about how everything is doomed to failure from the moment of creation and my god man we’re walking corpses, each and every one of us

Hi and Lois, 3/21/18

I had a whole post ready to go about how it’s weird that Hi and Lois wouldn’t even tell the twins about a gift from their grandparents, and that maybe Hi’s parents are estranged from the Flagstons and send a card every year to their grandchildren, trying to maintain that relationship, but Hi and Lois never show it to kids and have told them that they’re dead, but then I got to the second panel, where Trixie is contemplating the economic structure that the terrifying society of crows lurking on the front yard employs and I realized the family has much bigger problems.

Mark Trail, 3/21/18

I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely getting a villanous vibe from Mr. Marlin Creed from the Eden Gardens Zoo for some reason. What do you think his angle is? Do you think he’s going to try to eat that elephant? Is the “Eden Gardens Zoo” just what he calls his restaurant, where serves up delicious elephant meat to his discreet and well-heeled clientele?

Gil Thorp, 3/21/18

So the Social Justice Teens are planning on providing their own coverage of Milford basketball games that will serve as an alternative to Marty Moon’s racist on-air banter. The only flaw in the plan is that they … don’t know anything about sports? CHECKMATE LIBERALS

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Mark Trail, 3/14/18

Wow, these guys went through a lot of trouble to set up a camp in conjunction with the zoo to capture lost, terrified circus animals, and yet they seem pretty mad that one of said circus animals is, uh, lost, terrified, and acting pretty much like you’d expect? Whatever, we all know that this strip has an unaccountable bias against our elephant friends, who it’s described as vicious, murderous yam thieves, so I’m not surprised Mark and company are referring to this poor creature as a “beast” and apparently preparing to take it on in hand- and stick-to-tusk combat.

Dick Tracy, 3/14/18

Hey, so, there was a Dick Tracy plot a couple months ago that I didn’t even cover because it happened so fast where Dick was kidnapped and left to die out in the snow but then almost immediately rescued by … I want to say Gravel Gertie, I think? Anyway, it didn’t really have much of an arc to it, if you follow me, and the same can be said for this plot, which practically sprinted from “Dude incurs Ghost Pepper’s wrath by trying to buy his restaurant” to “Ghost Pepper is dead from massive head trauma” in only a month, which in soap opera strip terms is like one of those extremely brief periods of time that you only need to even think about when discussing the decay of subatomic particles. Maybe the point is to accelerate the crime-adventure-dead criminal cycle, and if we’re not going to see villains eaten alive by rats anymore, at least what we lose in the baroque nature of their deaths we’ll make up for in sheer quantity.