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Mark Trail, 7/22/20

Let me tell you all a story from the misty prehistory of this blog. When I moved in Baltimore in the now-ancient fall of 2002, the local print newspaper, to which I subscribed, still had four glorious pages of comics, including all the soap opera strips that I had heard of but never actually encountered in the wild. In Mary Worth, I arrived right in the middle of a long dinner conversation between Mary, Jeff, and Smitty Smedlap, a former chef who hated new-fangled cooking and particularly didn’t care for fish (or, as he called it, “feesh”), showing open contempt for Mary’s beloved Bum Boat. In classic soap opera strip pacing fashion, Smedlap’s monologue went on uninterrupted for days and days and I was completely fascinated by it. He was clearly an asshole, but did the other characters think he was? Were they ever going to talk and break the tension? What was going on? By the end, when Mary replied to him passive-aggressively and decided he wasn’t her kind of people, I was hooked on the strip, and on the soaps as a form, which led directly to the advent of this very website just a couple years later.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I am absolutely furious that we jumped directly from yesterday’s invitation to today’s aftermath and didn’t get to see Jeremy Cartwright talking shit about homemade LoFo cuisine while Mark openly seethed and Cherry, as usual, pushed all her emotions deep down inside. How boorishly ungrateful was he? Did the man insult flapjacks? Mark Trail readers want to know, damn it.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/22/20

Have you ever wondered how exactly Vikings relieved themselves during the long journeys of exploration, raiding, and commerce they made in narrow, open longship? Or, perhaps more accurately, have you always kind of assumed that they just peed and pooped over the sides into the ocean, but wanted confirmation from a trained historian, or at least from a newspaper comic strip about Vikings? Well, today’s your lucky day, my friend.

Plugger, 7/22/20

To a plugger, the prospect of a moment of blessed unconsciousness, no matter how brief, carries more erotic charge than any sexual encounter possibly could.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/20/20

Ha ha, I assumed this lady was a well-known hospital volunteer or something, but it turns out she’s just a mysterious stranger who’s berating Rex about his romantic ineptitude while he just has to sit there and squirm. Can anyone else even see her? Hey, wait — this is still June’s version of the story — is this her fantasy of why Rex finally gave in and admitted his love for her? The psychosexual dynamics of their marriage are more twisted than even I imagined.

Mark Trail, 7/20/20

Oh ho, it looks like Cherry is about to suggest that this entertainment industry power couple, who are used to five-star accommodations wherever they go, should stay at the Trail family’s rustic cabin! This can only be a prelude to her asking them to swing, which for Cherry means cornering them when Mark is isn’t paying attention and asking them, in an intense whisper, what sex is like. They’re “Hollywood people,” so they’ve probably done sex, right? Anyway, they’re both visibly cringing away from Cherry’s question in panel three, for obvious reasons.

Pluggers, 7/20/20

The joke here is that this plugger spends every dinner mournfully eating the meals his wife prepares for him and dreaming of his mother’s superior cooking, and it doesn’t matter what she makes because she’ll never be good enough, but after years of therapy and two near-divorces he knows better than to verbalize this now, right? This is a “Pluggers Classic” and I swear I commented on it before but I couldn’t find it in my archives, so this may be a repeat joke, but my search wasn’t totally wasted because I found more evidence of the mommy issues that are tearing this mismatched bear-kangaroo couple apart.

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Mark Trail, 7/14/20

Oh, say, it looks like Hollywood Bad Boy Jeremy Cartwright is going to get more than he bargained for in his ridealong with Mark Trail, because instead of seeing Mark natter on about nature or whatever, which he’d snicker about in between bouts of surreptitiously doing lines of cocaine, he’s gonna get to see Mark punch out some evil bighorn poachers, which he’ll deeply respect because the only people he’s ever punched out have been his fellow actors under the careful guidance of an on-set fight choreographer and a paparazzo that one time, when he was on a lot of cocaine. I don’t think the guy in the first panel is meant to be against the highly illegal bighorn sheep trade, by the way; I’m pretty sure he loves crimes and his face just looks like that.

Dennis the Menace, 7/14/20

The real menace here is not how dumb Dennis is, how painfully dumb he is, just dumb as a box of rocks, but rather that the library, knowing that today’s youth is shallow and obsessed with celebrities, has a book called Famous People that they hand out to the little shits to keep them quiet. It didn’t work in this particular case, but you should see what a mess it’d be there without it.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/14/20

If just seeing an actress in a Lisa wig has sent Les into a state of catatonia, then seeing Mason wearing a Les 1.0 hair prosthesis will kill him, just strike him dead where he stands. I honestly would like to think that this was the plan all along. They’ll all finally be free of him.

Pluggers, 7/14/20

The “you” in this caption really sent a chill down my spine. You think pluggers don’t affect your life? Wrong. You’re trapped here with them, and their screwups are your problem and there’s nothing you can do about it, so get ready to chow down.