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Mark Trail, 1/31/24

Having helped a bunch of guys get in touch with their emotions via fishing, Mark is now being dispatched on a much more dangerous mission: finding out what exactly the local authorities in Utah are doing with those wild horses they’ve been rounding up. Are they sending them to run and play at a farm upstate? No, that’s how we got into this problem in the first place. Anyway, this plotline better end with Mark punching Justin Shirley, director of the Division of Wildlife of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, while shouting “Soylent Horse is made of horses! You’ve got to believe me!”

Mary Worth, 1/31/24

Say, let’s go see what’s happening in Mary Wo–no. Gross. Absolutely not. I’d rather read about the horse murder.

Pluggers, 1/31/24

Pluggers are dying, do you hear me? Why am I the only one brave enough to say it? They’re dying! They’re all dying!

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Mary Worth, 1/27/24

Remember when Keith first showed up in this strip as a closed-off, taciturn man who tried to get through his interactions with Mary with as few words as possible? And now here he is waxing rhapsodic about all the new feelings he’s been experiencing or whatever. I have to imagine that if you went back in time and showed the Keith of late September what he’s become that he’d be a million times more embarrassed than if he’d “gone woke” and just enjoyed a vegan burger or something.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/27/24

“Jimmy — is that you? My old friend, who came up with the ‘Jimmy Seminar,’ a self-improvement method that I blatantly ripped off to create the Ollman Technique? And who I spotted just a few days ago, panicked, and then ran over with my car? That Jimmy?”

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Shoe, 1/19/24

I was going to go on a long rant here about how comics gag writers so frequently come up with a joke and then work backwards from it even if it doesn’t make sense in the strip’s established universe of characters, and why would the Perfesser be interested in a cruise like this when he doesn’t even have kids, but then, ha ha, I realized I had forgotten about his nephew-ward Skyler. In my defense, I think the Perfesser also forgets about his nephew-ward Skyler on the regular. Anyway, there’s absolutely no chance he’s going to take this child on a cruise with him. He won’t even buy a second piece of living room furniture so they can eat in front of the TV together.

Hi and Lois, 1/19/24

I feel like I come across on this blog as some kind of hardass for comedic structure but I’m really not! Take this Hi and Lois, for instance: I honestly enjoyed it even though it contains literally nothing that you could call a “joke” per se. Hi’s contorted body language on the coach is great, but the punctuation mark-less “AAAEEUGH” is what really seals the deal for me. Sometimes comics can just be vibes and that’s OK!

Mary Worth, 1/19/24

“Used to be you could just skip town and move to California and change your name to an obviously fake one and that was that! Nobody would blink an eye! You could start over! Then came Mr. Science sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. And that’s when you have to start poisoning people with muffins.”