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Mark Trail, 4/1/13

“On behalf of tournament officials, we’d like to apologize to you, Mark … apologize that your beloved ward was kidnapped and almost killed by one of our contestants! Ha ha, just kidding, we don’t feel responsible for that at all, and it doesn’t seem like you were that worried about it anyway, so why should we care? We do feel bad about the cheating, though, as that will make us look bad to your readers, who don’t give a rat’s ass about children but are passionate about the integrity of fishing tournaments.”

“Don’t worry, you do a good job … most of the contestants are honest fishermen — guys like Rod are the exception! When it comes to cheating at fishing, I mean. Rod’s pretty typical when it comes to kidnapping little kids. I don’t know what it is, but fisherman just can’t get enough of luring children into their vans. ‘Landfish,’ they call them. And Rusty wonders why I don’t take him fishing more often! Ha ha!”

Crankshaft, 4/1/13

As sad as “Crankshaft replies angrily to the punning TV newscaster” makes me, I think that “Crankshaft sullenly gets in on the punning TV newscaster’s pun-theme” is much, much worse.

Shoe, 4/1/13

“Get it, because burnt food gets all black and crispy? No, but seriously, Roz sells burned and expired food to the poor and desperately hungry, in defiance of local health department regulations and consumer safety laws.”

Family Circus, 4/1/13

Boy, Billy sure is angry at a pagan nature spirit! Nyaaah, where’s your omnipotent patriarchal creator deity now, Billy?

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Shoe and B.C., 3/26/13

Elementary school test questions as setups to jokes in comic strips: most played out cliché on the comics page, or mostest played out cliché on the comics page? I guess I shouldn’t complain about accuracy when the students being tested are anthropomorphic bird-people and/or sentient ants, but I do question the quality of instruction in the bird and ant educational systems. In Shoe, Skyler’s cynical, heavy-lidded expression in panel two shows that he understands what a bizarrely open-ended and unanswerable question he’s been presented with, presumably by whatever over-eager art teacher also thought that art puns based on a catchphrase from a 17-year-old movie would get elementary school kids enthusiastic about learning. The ant-child, meanwhile, in an act of defiance over what appears to be a test of his knowledge of old sayings that are actively incorrect, fills in the blanks with a plea for death. Frankly, these questions are both making a good case for a uniform, standardized testing regime with questions developed by government bureaucrats, if these are the locally-directed alternatives.

Mark Trail, 3/26/13

Maybe Mark does love Rusty after all? In order to perpetrate his completely misguided rescue scheme, he’s been forced to not verbalize a sentence he’s formed in his mind and confine it to a thought balloon instead, in what must be a superhuman effort on his part.

Spider-Man, 3/26/13

DAREDEVIL: “And that’s where attorney Matt Murdock comes in!”

SPIDER-MAN: “Wow! This I gotta see!”

[SEVEN HOURS AND HUNDREDS OF LEXISNEXIS SEARCHES LATER]

SPIDER-MAN: “Oh, man, was I ever wrong about this.”

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Shoe, 3/24/13

By all rights, the Perfesser drunkenly stumbling into the mysteriously open town mortuary in the middle of the night ought to be the set up for one of two things: A tale of spine-tingling horror, or a very specific genre of slash fiction. And yet we get neither! At least we should get corpses. Mort is standing there with elbow-length rubber gloves, for rooting around inside corpses! And there are open coffins everywhere. Why are there no corpses?

Spider-Man, 3/24/13

Among Daredevil’s amazing powers: superhuman tact! “So, Peter, in addition to being a costumed crime-fighter, I’m also a successful, highly paid lawyer! What do you do for a living?” “I’m a freelance photographer for a print newspaper!” “Okay! Then let’s, uh, let’s talk about superhero stuff.”

Panel from Slylock Fox, 3/24/13

um also you guys he’s right over there behind the tree BEHIND YOU YOU CAN LIKE TOTALLY SEE HIM