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Mark Trail, 11/12/12

It seemed so natural, right from the start. The kindly old man who taught him the island’s secrets. The boy, normally proportioned, pre-orphaned and adoption-ready — who made no demands and cared nothing for fishing, content to play in the sand. The young widow, Ava, fit and eager like Cherry when they were new in love, a spark of interest in her soft eyes smoldering slowly into something more. And Andy, his rock. No place could be home without Andy. But this place — this could be home. Had always been his home.

Cherry filled her days making coffee and pancakes. Bill’s calls, full of wild excuses about a ransom no one ever expected to be paid, slowed and then stopped, to their mutual relief. But she watched in growing horror as Rusty huddled dead-eyed in the shack he built near the rotting pier, tying ever more garish and disturbing trout flies that he never used, wouldn’t sell, and finally grew too ashamed even to show her.

They met again, once — even touched. Mark on a supply run from the small island, Cherry on a desperate vacation from Doc’s endless gibbering and Rusty’s nightlong howls, their hands brushed reaching for the store’s last box of Bisquick. Cherry gasped as the caress of ruined, sinew-knotted knuckles resurrected longings she thought had been buried years before. Their eyes met, but Mark’s saw only an old woman, face frozen into a mask of bitterness and resignation. He let her keep the box out of pity, and never thought of her again.

The boy tried to run Otto’s kidnapping operation but had no head for the business side. The small island filled with unclaimed hostages, taxing the feeble aquifer — and the ocean only rose. At last one day, when the typhoid had claimed Ava and the boy sat in jail from a ransom sting, Mark brought Andy to the remaining boat and set sail for the mainland. He would keep them alive by fishing — surely a Man of Nature could remember how.

Dick Tracy, 11/12/12

Walt Wallet is at least one hundred and twelve years old, but despite a failed attempt to send him to the Old Comics Home in 2006, Gasoline Alley just can’t seem to pull the trigger on the old coot. So they’re outsourcing the job to Dick Tracy, the most efficient killing machine on Planet Earth. ‘Bye, Walt.

Slylock Fox, 11/12/12

With Mark on extended leave, the King brings in a couple temps to manage poacher-catching. Since Slylock knows only one human, expect Slick Smitty to be hauled off to jail any minute on some far-fetched pretext: “There are no taxis to Liberty Island!” “You ate the vegetables while standing in the garden!” “Only the real mouse has a tail!” “Anteaters don’t have teeth!” “Your earrings are cold!”

Is anybody else troubled by what “poaching” might mean in a kingdom populated exclusively by animals? I believe the rhino has given the matter some thought.

Say, I don’t see a ring on King Dandy Lion’s fingertoe — could he and Princess Pussycat be planning a merger of the realms once Slylock has exterminated the remaining humans? I hear wedding bells! Oh, wait — those are death knells. Catchy tune, though.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Slylock Fox, 11/8/12

How much do I love this creepy Six Differences scene? A lot! A lot is how much I love it! I particularly love the contrast in facial expressions — the cake-hog is sporting a manic grin, as if he’s incredibly happy that this wedding’s serve-yourself policy has allowed him to get a big enough piece of cake to meet his needs, at long last. Meanwhile, everyone else there (except the children, too young to understand) are staring at his retreating back with numb horror, and, I assume, in icy silence. Social norms have been violated so egregiously that it’s hard to know what might come next, but I think it’s safe to say that the prominent placement of that terrifyingly large knife is no accident.

Archie, 11/8/12

So I guess we can now peg the date of these Archie reruns to the fall of 1991, since that was when the first crew entered Biosphere 2 and probably was the last time anyone bothered to make any kind of joke about it, unless you count jokes about the 1996 Pauly Shore vehicle Bio-Dome, which, frankly, I don’t. (NEVER FORGET that the Biosphere thingie in Arizona was “Biosphere 2,” a reference to Biosphere 1, which was of course our Earth.) But more important is Mr. Lodge’s expression of implacable evil in the final panel. One would think that a man willing to scurry into an artificially sealed environment just to get away from his daughter’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend would be feeling more sheepish than sinister. Thus, we must assume that Mr. Lodge wants to enter Biosphere 2 not to escape Archie, but to escape the deadly poison gas his scientists have developed that will soon kill Archie and, as a regrettable but unavoidable side effect, all other human life.

Dick Tracy, 11/8/12

Oh, Dick Tracy! Are you trying to win my heart by having a desperate, injured criminal start eating pain patches so he can make one last desperate run at the cops who are closing in on him? Because it’s working pretty well!

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/15/12

“Maybe I shouldn’t have spent the night before I led my men into a brutal, hand-to-hand combat, during which they must either kill or be killed, filling their heads with tales of damned souls, wandering the earth as dim spectres, mere shadows of their former selves. Which thought do you think is more likely to jump into their heads unbidden it the midst of this violent melee: that they themselves will be felled in battle and their shade will live on, with the wounds and terror they feel now continuing for eternity? Or that, for the rest of their lives, every time they feel a prickling on the back of their neck or an unseasonably icy wind across their face, they’ll suspect that it’s the vengeful spirit of a man they cut down, haunting them until they succumb to madness and terror?”

Hi and Lois, 10/15/12

Ha, and if Hi’s face is any indication, he sure has earned the right to use the word “boring”! If Hi’s face is any indication, today was the day when his capacity to feel joy or pain or anything at all really was finally snuffed out by the intense ennui of mindless, soulless corporate dronery. Get used to that face, kids, it’s the only one he can make now!

Slylock Fox, 10/15/12

In order for the Slylockian world anthropomorphic animals to exist, there must be some kind of apocalyptic event in our future and their past, during which the lower beasts achieved sentience and most of the human population was wiped out, presumably violently. Normally I don’t take this personally, but something about today’s strip, in which we learn that these horror-monsters are riding our subway to our Brooklyn, makes me angry. You didn’t build that, hippo-thing! Neither did you, shirt-wearing cat! The thought of the Museum of Natural History, presumably now retooled and dedicated to the animals’ triumph over the now exterminated human race, particularly sickens me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/15/12

Oh my goodness, I sure hope that “the party business” is the euphemism for prostitution that the writer of Rex Morgan and King Features Syndicate agreed on after several tortuous weeks of negotiations! Junior knows, and so does that cheery looking couple sitting on the bench. “That Junior, he runs the best brothel in San Diego County, doesn’t he, Martha?” “You can say that again, dear!”

B.C., 10/15/12

Hey! I just flew Southwest yesterday, and as usual the flight and service were excellent, and not once did anyone attempt to feed me something that they barfed and/or shat out (sorry, I’ve already grossed myself out enough just thinking about this, not going to look up how gizzards actually work, I’m afraid there’ll be pictures).

Spider-Man, 10/15/12

You know, the modern, Internet-savvy newsroom is a high-pressure, 24/7 operation, so it’s nice to see that J. Jonah Jameson still takes time to humiliate his employees with elaborate, improvised, and extremely sarcastic little skits.