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Mark Trail, 3/9/13

OK, fine, I’ve been ignoring it all week, but yes, Rusty was snooping around Rod Bassy’s van and saw the cheating-at-fishing equipment and got caught and now has been tied up, and, I mean, it’s hilarious and all but it’s not exactly a surprise, is it? The best part here is that Rod Bassy is reacting to the fact that his friend/accomplice Catfish has, you know, forcibly kidnapped a child with irritation that this will complicate his plan to rig the outcome of yet another bass fishing tournament, rather than with mounting panic and despair a là William H. Macy in Fargo. I mean, really, the tied-up little boy is in a van with Rod’s name painted in enormous letters on the side! You know, there’s a reason child kidnappers usually use vehicles without distinguishing marks.

Mary Worth, 3/9/13

Carlos Alora is the Charterstone groundskeeper and he hasn’t been seen in years, like, not since I started reading this strip in 2002 or thereabouts. Now they’re misspelling his name, which is more insulting than just dropping him down the memory hole. JUSTICE FOR CARLOS! WE CAN HEAR THE DOUBLE L WHEN YOU PRONOUNCE IT, MARY!

Shoe, 3/9/13

Man, can you believe it’s been four years since the rebooted Star Trek movie came out? Which means it’s probably been about three and a half years that Shoe’s been sitting on this joke, but now at last it’s relevant! Wasn’t it worth the wait? (No, no it wasn’t.)

Six Chix, 3/9/13

“Good lord, that was a filthy fuckfest, in every sense of the word! I had sex with a lot of men that weekend, but your father was the only one whose name I learned. Of course, that was only after we had done it five or six times. Hey, where are you going?”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/7/13

I feel like I’m not lavishing as much attention on the story of the Party House With A Heart Of Gold and the Possibly Suicidal Cancer-Stricken Stripper in Rex Morgan as I should, but it turns out that tales of uninsured possibly suicidal cancer-stricken people are … actually kind of depressing? Still, my heart is buoyed by Rex’s palpable scheming in panel three. A magical pregnancy-predicting cancer-stricken stripper, eh? This sounds like something Rex can monetize for his clinic!

Funky Winkerbean, 2/7/13

Speaking of depressing stories about cancer, remember back in 2007 (side note: ugh, I am old) when Lisa was dying of cancer in Funky Winkerbean, and one of the questions was whether Darrin, the son she gave up for adoption, would meet his biological mother before she died, but also Darrin was courting Jessica, and she looked an awful lot like him, there were certain suspicions that they may have shared some biological parentage? Well, that turned out to be not the case, but even though this lady is actually his half-sister, not his stepsister, and is related to him via his adopted parents so there’s no genetic overlap, I still admit to being 100% squicked out that she put her hand on his knee in panel two.

Archie, 2/7/13

As is true for a lot of everyman viewpoint characters, Archie’s personality is actually not all that fleshed out, but if I had to describe it I guess I’d say he’s kind of feckless and oversexed. I certainly don’t think of him as being a fanatical athlete of any sort, nor as someone willing to risk exacerbating an injury when he could be hanging out at the ski lodge hitting on girls. Perhaps this is part of his class anxiety vis-a-vis Veronica’s family? Or perhaps the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000, in attempting to parse the human humor genre known as “slapstick,” has decided that if we’ll laugh at the antics of the Three Stooges or Looney Tunes characters, surely we’ll enjoy the thought of a teen boy flying down the slopes, teeth gritted in pain as his tendons tear horribly beyond repair.

Crankshaft, 2/7/13

Speaking of slapstick, some years ago Crankshaft introduced some loathsome yuppie neighbors who were even less likable than the strip’s title character, presumably so we’d laugh when Crankshaft attempted to physically assault them.

Shoe, 2/7/13

THEY’RE BIRDS ALL THESE CHARACTERS ARE BIRDS AND THEY’RE CRACKING WISE ABOUT A COMPANY THAT SLAUGHTERS BIRDS AND PROCESSES THEM INTO FOODSTUFF

THIS IS MONSTROUS BEYOND DESCRIPTION

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Shoe, 1/29/13

I originally saw this strip a sort of sad commentary on aging. The surface joke prompts us to imagine notorious outlaw Billy the Kid — whose very name marks him as one of those figures who will remain forever young by virtue of an early death — as a stooped, doddering old man. Similarly, it must be the case that the Perfesser was, at one point in his life, young and vital, and yet now he slouches in his easy chair, his failing eyesight forcing him to sit far too close to the television, his living room strewn with garbage. But then I thought: maybe all the newspapers on the floor are somehow related to his bird-man nature? You know, because humans line the floor of birdcages with newspaper? For birds to poop on? Screw meditations on old age, I just want the strip to acknowledge that its characters are birds, just once, just once.

Crankshaft, 1/29/13

Speaking of old people, here’s Crankshaft shitting on his friend’s hobby, just to be a jerk.