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Mark Trail, 2/18/17

So this week’s Mark Trail has been a lot of boring blah blah between some white lady and some African dude in an airport in Africa about how dumb liberals don’t get how hunting majestic African wildlife is a good thing for everyone concerned, but then we got to the end of the week and HOLY COW, GUYS, IT’S THE RETURN OF CHRIS “DIRTY” DYER, STAR OF ONE OF THE GREATEST MARK TRAIL PANELS OF ALL TIME:

See, Mark headed over to Africa on a big rhino poaching story, hooked up with a safari group that “Dirty” and his love-object Lori were part of, and had to assure “Dirty” that he did not want get together with Lori to “do the dirty” (this is literally what Mark calls sex, but he uses a child’s voice when he says it, not a crude bro’s voice). Later it turned out that “Dirty” was in fact the rhino poacher, and the angry rhinos ran his car off the road in revenge, and that after that he died. OR DID HE????? Well, no, he didn’t, because he’s right here, in today’s strip, only slightly worse for wear, if you consider having an eye gouged out “only slightly worse for wear.” Anyway, I look forward to discovering what shenanigans “Dirty” is up to (probably more poaching???), and why it is that he went to the trouble of faking his death but then still goes around introducing himself by his actual name.

Pluggers, 2/18/17

For a long time, the Top Two Most Depressing Pluggers Ever were clearly “Rhino-Man Hocks His TV” and “Kangaroo Lady Approaches Her Emotional Breaking Point”, but I think we may have a new contender today? Ha ha, it’s funny because … she wants to get out of the house and do something, anything, with her husband, but he just wants to point his bleary eyes in the vague direction of the television and let the beer annihilate anything resembling an emotion that attempts to pass through his brain!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/18/17

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that right before Buck’s Comic-Con adventure got underway, he had a meet-cute with a nice lady at the gym that Rex made him go to. Laid up in his hospital bed, and having failed to emotionally connect with his son, he figures now’s the time to take that relationship to the next level, phone-sex wise! “Hey, Mindy … yeah, I have some more privacy now … damn, girl, just thinking of you is making me dizzy … or maybe that’s the dehydration from carrying around too many comic books for hours … anyway — hello? hello?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/18/17

Oh sure, these fellas are all tongue-lollin’ laffs now, but when Snuffy gets wind of this, he might decide to both boost his revenues from his business as a huntin’ guide and take care of his gambling debts by promising rich flatlanders that lawless, forgotten Hootin’ Holler is the perfect place to pursue “the most dangerous game.”

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Blondie, 2/17/17

I feel like the moment when Dagwood stopped being just a generic white collar worker at Dithers Industries and started being referred to as an “office manager” happened within living memory — like, maybe even since I started doing this blog. And while it’s true that specificity is generally a good thing in jokes, nothing about Dagwood’s intermittently depicted job duties ever matches up with that description; he never seems to be, say, budgeting for office supplies or figuring out who should sit where or designing filing systems. Instead, he prepares “reports” about “accounts” and deals with “clients,” all of which seems outward-facing and outside his job duties. Perhaps today’s strip explains all that, though, if “office manager” is just code for “person who services our clients, sexually, then prepares detailed reports that we use for blackmail purposes.”

Slylock Fox, 2/17/17

Obviously that’s supposed to be a fan tail at the bottom of our mysteriously four-limbed lobster’s torso here, but for the life of me it looks like pleated material of a skirt. Basically, that’s what I’m going to imagine it is, shielding the dangling lobster junk from our field of vision.

Pluggers, 2/17/17

Pluggers also realized why many texting conversations didn’t go as expected when informed that “FML” does not stand for “friend: make love?”

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Slylock Fox, 2/13/17

I can’t remember where I read it now, but there’s a line in a review of Rogue One that I liked, discussing Darth Vader’s appearance. This is the first film where David Prowse didn’t play the body of the character, and the reviewer said that in the new movie Spencer Wilding, the new actor, looked and moved differently, so “he just looked to me like a guy in a Darth Vader costume, which, I suppose, is what he was.” Don’t we all, in essence, play-act the roles in life we aim to inhabit, uncertain of when the moment will come when we finally make them our own? And isn’t this made more difficult when someone else is so strongly associated with the job? It might’ve been the dogs, with nostalgia for their now vanquished nemeses, who explained to the other animals the utility of the postal service after the beasts took over; and, like all the creatures trying to ape the infrastructure of human society, this mailbear is doing the best he can. But it’s his hesitancy, his sense that he’s not really a postal worker, that he’s just a bear wearing an XXL uniform torn off a long-ago-eviscerated H. sapiens letter carrier, that Shady Shrew is exploiting here. Who’s to say that he isn’t in disguise, after all? Who’s to say that they aren’t all going through a vaguely absurd pantomime of their vanquished betters, with their bowler caps and trench coats and magnifying glasses?

Dick Tracy, 2/13/17

Meanwhile, over at Dick Tracy’s heist plot, the Brush, a man with a freakish shock of hair coming down from his forehead and completely covering his face, is about to change out of his landscaper’s uniform and into a security guard’s uniform, two disguises that will definitely let him blend in undetectably and not draw any attention to himself whatsoever.

Dennis the Menace, 2/13/17

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Mr. Wilson is planning to murder Dennis — he’s old, he’s lived a long life and there isn’t much left to it, prison and the electric chair don’t scare him, etc. — but it’s pretty shocking to see him admit it so openly to his wife.

Marvin, 2/13/17

I spend a lot of time grappling with the horror of Marvin’ endless poop jokes, but it’s only with today’s strip that I feel like I get the rationale behind them: apparently they’re part of some misguided Freudian belief that we’d all be better adjusted if we didn’t have to obey society’s oppressive rules about going to the bathroom in a toilet and just, like, shat whenever, man, you’re not the boss of me and my gastrointestinal tract.

Pluggers, 2/13/17

Pluggers’ dreams of a sex-robot companion became a lot more attainable once they realized that due to their age and general physical decrepitude they had lost interest in sex a long time ago.