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Mark Trail, 1/23/18

Immediately after his giraffe encounter, Rusty ran home to tell his adoptive parents about it, only to be berated at length that you’d have to be a crazy person to say you saw a giraffe in the forest and you must be dreaming or hallucinating like that time with the dinosaurs, so you should stop insisting you saw giraffes or you’re going to have to go live in the crawl space again. Of course, we know that there’s a whole dang circus loose out there, and so I sincerely hope that Mark, maintaining that smug, know-it-all facial expression, steps outside to prove to Rusty that Lost Forest is giraffe-free and is then immediately mauled by a lion.

Mary Worth, 1/23/18

Ha ha, is 2004 Democratic Party presidential nominee and former Secretary of State John Kerry Ted Miller going to steal Mary away from his old friend Dr. Jeff, right in front him? Notice that Mary is sure to welcome Ted “to my home,” emphasizing that she has long refused to marry, move in with, or commit to Dr. Jeff in any way.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/23/18

Rex is scowling in panel one, but thoughtfully, indicating that he might be open to allowing this Maoist self-criticism session to mollify him. Unfortunately, the Marches have made the decision to deploy youth slang, which he’s not going to appreciate at all.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/23/18

One of the things I’ve resigned myself to kind of enjoying is that printed matter that appears in Snuffy Smith is spelled in the same eye dialect used in the word balloons. Still, today’s strip is horrifying because it prompted me, unbidden, to imagine a context in which one of the characters might say the world “ballz.” Like, “Lukey, th’ next time we’re int’mite, I’m gonna ask Loweezy t’ tickle my ballz!” If I have to think it, you have to read it, which is, I suppose, this blog’s mission statement.

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Mark Trail, 1/19/18

Welp, looks like those giraffes Rusty spotted last week are actually part of a whole herd of exotic animals freely roaming around Lost Forest, presumably because after the Tingling Bros. Circus farewell tour the circus’s creditors ordered the entire menagerie to be simply released into the woods rather than making an expensive attempt to find new homes for the beasts. You’re probably thinking that this uniformed monkey is in charge of all these creatures, but in fact he’s a mere lieutenant for their true king, the Great Wilhelm, who’s holed up in an inaccessible forest lair screaming out his orders.

Shoe, 1/19/18

Roz runs what I believe is one of the of the only dining establishments in Treetops (is there also a fancy white-tablecloth French restaurant with snooty bird-waiters? I’m pretty sure there is, but I’m not going to bother to check) but one of the jokes of the strip is that she is actually pretty bad at cooking. Nevertheless, all of the characters continue coming to her diner to order food, either because of their aforementioned lack of other options (but why doesn’t the invisible hand wing of the free market push someone else into starting a rival with more palatable fare?) or because they all love cruelly taunting Roz, and the gastic side-effects of eating her food is a small price to pay for the opportunity to do so. Anyway, what I’m saying is, I guess the joke in today’s strip is supposed to be that, like Roz’s burnt cooking, Roz’s cookbook (but how could someone mainly known for making unappetizing food score a coveted publishing deal?) managed to set off some smoke alarms, but the facial expressions on display here (Shoe all heavy-lidded menace, Roz bug-eyed with rage) imply that maybe Shoe just led a book-burning, right there in the middle of Barnes & Noble.

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Mary Worth, 1/12/18

Aww, isn’t this nice? Father and daughter are really relating to each other as adults and supporting each other emotionally! Say, also, unless I missed something, Dawn has neglected to mention to her dad that she made out with a married dude at her summer job, just like Wilbur never brought up the fact that he was grifted by a statuesque beauty in Colombia right before he came home. Just a happy father-daughter pair keeping deep secrets from one another and chowing down on some muffins, in other words!

Hagar the Horrible, 1/12/18

I have several questions about what’s going on here. The first is about the tattoo on this bar lady’s hand. That definitely looks like a prison tattoo font. Did she get that tattoo in prison? Was she in the least bad-ass prison ever, where that would be considered a cool prison tattoo? Did the fact that the tattoo is on the palm of her hand, a very sensitive part of the body and therefore an extremely painful one to get a tattoo on, make it seem slightly more bad-ass?

Perhaps more relevant: how exactly did Lucky Eddy come by his extremely non-specific knowledge of this lady’s tattooed status? Hagar’s smirk implies that he was the one who set up this little farce, but I’m not sure that really works with his canonical illiteracy.

Mark Trail, 1/12/18

One giraffe in Lost Forest is a bizarre, inexplicable freak of nature. But two? Two means that the forest land should be opened to responsible hunting by outdoorspersons who want to harvest delicious giraffe meat and keep local populations in check and avoid the tragedies of “nuisance giraffes.” This will be a profitable year for Doc’s side business selling individual pancakes off his cabin’s front porch!