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Mark Trail, 9/12/13

I am completely in love with conversation between Mark and Senator Mason because it’s like a conversation between an environmental activist and a pro-oil senator two or three parallel universes over, where the issues are pretty much the same but the ossified political vocabulary consists of an entirely different set of signifiers. “Beautiful areas!” “Outdoor people!” I sincerely hope that every senator from now on starts referring to those supporting environmental protection as an “outdoor people” and those supporting increased exploitation of fossil fuels as “indoor people,” kind of like the difference between indoor and outdoor cats. Of course, this whole surveying business may just be part of the senator’s plan to enclose most of America’s population under vast domes; the few remaining “outdoor people” will be left to fend for themselves, presumably eventually accepting the absolute rule of Mark as their Outdoorsman-in-Chief.

Gil Thorp, 9/12/13

So this year’s Gil Thorp football plots appear set: the A plot involves a hulking behemoth who refuses to speak to anyone and therefore can’t shore up Milford’s sorry offensive line, and the B plot involves Tip the gymnast, who is deigning to grace the cheerleading squad with his nimble presence. Tip’s first order of business: hurling a cheerleader into the flaming maw of the fall Milford bonfire, a sacrifice to the Gods of Football. The Mudlarks have a bonfire every single year, not that it helps much. Have they considered that maybe they’re worshipping a false pantheon, and that Gil is a fraudulent messiah?

Family Circus, 9/12/13

Oh dear, it looks like Mommy’s mind has been annihilated! Hopefully we’ll find out if this was caused by powerful prescription tranquilizers, a nefarious CIA hypnosis scheme, or just her daughter’s irritating and relentless voice.

Momma, 9/12/13

Let’s ignore the joke in today’s Momma (not hard!) and contemplate Thomas’s pants for a minute. Is he supposed to be wearing camo pants? Camo pants and a polo shirt and, like, a kepi? This is a guy who shows up for dinner at his mother’s in a suit and straw boater, but now he appears to be going horribly, horribly casual without any guidance or sense of decency.

Apartment 3-G, 9/12/13

I try to avoid contact with teens as much as I can, but I think I know a little bit about how they think, and I’m pretty sure a bad girl with asymmetrical hair would ever describe a melty-faced middle-aged man with a flattop as “super-hot.” Also, Marty, Lu Ann may be super dumb but she still has sex thoughts! You’ve got a lot to learn about how horny stupid people can get!

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Mark Trail, 9/3/13

Oh, man, this Mark Trail plotline is just getting started — it involves a mysteriously dead elk Mark found on Lost Forest property — and already there’s punching! Panel two is a true classic of the Trailian punching genre, with hat and gun flying in opposite directions as Mark interprets “turn around, mister … slowly” as “turn around mister … very quickly and then punch me in the face as hard as you can.” I guess it’s a little bit awkward that Mark ended up punching his friend Dusty, but that’s just the price you pay when you punch first and verify identities later! Everyone’s all smiles and there appears to be no permanent harm done, unless that parabola emanating from Dusty’s mouth in panel two is meant to be a trail of spittle following behind a dislodged tooth, which it almost certainly is.

Shoe, 9/3/13

I grudgingly respect the fact that Shoe follows the logic of at least one aspect of a society of bird-men to its logical conclusion and has a bird that feasts on the dead as the town undertaker. I do wonder how many casual Shoe readers know that Mort is a mortician-bird-man, which I’m pretty sure is a key piece of information for this joke. Not that it makes much sense anyway? Ha ha, did you enjoy your time at the opera … in a coffin? Because you’re a mortician-bird-man, and opera is a dying genre? Eh? Eh? Death?

Momma, 9/3/13

Well, it looks like I was right yesterday, and we are going to get a multi-day plot in Momma, a strip that never, ever does multi-day plots. So since we’re going into uncharted territory, I guess why not take a head-first leap into howling madness, with MaryLou walking up the aisle of an airplane, shoving big steaming spoonfuls of glop into the mouths of the weirdly compliant and passive passengers? I look forward to further airborne insanity over the rest of the week!

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Slylock Fox, 9/2/13

Despite his unnatural skin tone, I’ve more or less accepted Count Weirdly as one of Planet Slylock’s few remaining humans. But his “cousin” Creepy seems significantly genetically divergent, and not just in superficial areas like coloring. Was Weirdly performing illegal genetic experiments not just on the animals that ended up rising up to seize control of the planet, but on his own kin? Or does he grow mutated clones of himself in rows of ghastly tanks, deep beneath his castle-lair? Creepy might suffer from physical abnormalities, but his unnaturally large head and today’s little drama implies that he may actually benefit from enhanced intelligence: he’s already packed and ready to get out of town before yet another classically pointless Weirdly caper ends in failure. “High five, cuz, we did it! I, uh, gotta go.”

Luann, 9/2/13

The huge majority of comic strips exist in “comic strip time,” in which their characters all remain the same age relative to each other for years or decades and unmoored in absolute time, which gives rise to unsettling results like Ted Forth being the same age as my dad when I was a kid but then wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt several decades later. You also have strips like Doonesbury and pre-time-freeze For Better Or For Worse in which characters would age a year for every calendar year of real time.

Then you have the strips that go through a sort of comics punctuated equilibrium, with long periods of stasis and then sudden leaps forwards. The most famous example of this is of course Funky Winkerbean and its various time jumps, but Luann seems to be in this boat as well. Luann was in junior high for the first 14 years or so of the strip’s existence, then was suddenly aged into high school in 1999. Now, another 14 years later, we learn that she’s actually starting her senior year. The question is: are we ready for a world where Luann is in college? Am I? Are you? Is she? I’m not sure any of us are.

Momma, 9/2/13

Meanwhile, one strip that has zero continuity or aging or narrative advancement for its characters is Momma, which is why today’s installment is especially bizarre, seeing as it contains a major life change for one of its characters and nothing that could be even vaguely construed as a “joke.” Will Momma suddenly be transformed into MaryLou, That Dizzy Dame Of The Skies, now that strip management has finally looked at the results of the 1973 focus group showing that flight attendants are more appealing to audiences than controlling, passive-aggressive mothers and their unlikeable children?