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Gil Thorp, 3/24/08

Hooray, the A-Train and his moppet siblings won’t be whisked off to some Dickensian workhouse by Social Services after all! And it’s all thanks to local drunkard Marty Moon, who shook off his unwavering hatred of Milford athletics to heroically perpetrate fraud against the government agency that protects our children from situations just like this. I hope he didn’t smell too much like tequila and those pine-scented car air fresheners that he uses to try to cover up the tequila smell!

I’m a regular Gil Thorp reader, and I too don’t know why Marty Moon might owe Andrew a favor. It’s possible that I missed it in the strip’s usual frenzied storytelling, but I think the key is in Maureen (or whoever)’s rather precise formulation in panel three: not “He owed Andrew a favor” but “I told him he owed Andrew a favor!” Marty probably assumed that he would once again have to follow up on boasts he made during an alcohol-fueled blackout.

Mark Trail, 3/24/08

So, we already knew that the winner of Woods and Wildlife’s Win A Free Puppy From Mark Trail Wearing A Suit contest was “sick,” but we didn’t know that she was suffering from a broken heart (or, as the DSM-IV refers to it, “296.2x: Major Depressive Disorder, Single Episode”) due to her parents’ divorce. Fortunately, she’ll soon be getting just the cure for that: individual and family counseling under the care of a licensed therapist who specializes in working with children a free puppy! She will frolic and play with him all day, and name him “Zoloft.”

Actually, little Madeline has been lying there like that unmoving for the entire duration Mark’s conversation with her mother; her mom, not a trained medical professional, may have mistaken death for sadness (a common error). That would be something that not even a free puppy could cure, but maybe Mark could leave the puppy with Madeline’s mom to cheer her up a little.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/24/08

No matter what the medical crisis or the task force, Rex always volunteers to check out the high school locker rooms first. You can never be too careful!

Slylock Fox, 3/24/08

SCANDAL! Today, we learn that Slylock only maintains his reputation as the greatest detective on the force by reckless use of home-brewed and experimental performance-enhancing drugs. Is this the lesson we want to give our children: that if you want to be the smartest, you’ve got hit the books — and the needle?

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Slylock Fox, 3/23/08

So many good things are going on in Sunday’s Slylock Fox! First of all, it features my new favorite anti-hero Reeky Rat, trying to move up the social ladder but so ignorant that he thinks that stealing a nice suit will make him respectable automatically. As usual for Sunday, the solution to the mystery is too small for me to read; I’m guessing it’s supposed to be something about how the suit would be wet if Reeky had worn it in from outside, but really, the tip-off that he’s lying about it being his suit is that Reeky Rat doesn’t own any God-damned suits. His wardrobe consists entirely of stained t-shirts he shoplifted from the Goodwill.

Also charming are the plight of the Six Differences duck, trapped in the paws of a sleeping bear; a trumpet-playing rabbit thinks that startling the bear awake will free his feathered friend, but it will likely just get both of them eaten. Speaking of ducks, “how to draw” teaches the youth of today to draw a duck in a bucket, because really, why not? I can see that being an important part of any graphic novel you have planned. And, finally, it looks like our unfortunate baseball player is about to be eaten alive by birds in part of the worldwide animal revolt we’ve already seen brewing.

Panel from Judge Parker, 3/23/08

I just wanted to point out to everyone the extent to which Judge Parker is the King Of Not Moving Things Along: Biff Dickens buzzed the horses yesterday? Yesterday was sometime around Thanksgiving. And this is positively breakneck speed for this feature.

Panels from Mary Worth, 3/23/08

Mary’s big flashback continues to be lame and anticlimactic, but this pair of throwaway panels pretty much epitomizes the strip: a baffling and dubious traditional proverb from a random country, and then Mary talking over whatever her interlocutor was trying to get in edgewise to move the conversation back to her.

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Apartment 3-G, 3/15/08

Joe strikes me as the sort who was raised in a more genteel and conservative age, and so I assume that he’s referring to Lu Ann, with “friend” standing in as a euphemism for “that woman you have sex with and yet refuse to marry as the laws of man and God demand.” Sure, it seems weird that Joe would have The View Girl Talk showing on his cafe’s TV at whatever hour Alan is rolling in after a rough night of heroin and whoring, but at least we’ve been warned about her promised appearance in advance. Still, I really hope that, when Alan looks up at the TV, he’ll see the smiling face of the only other person in the strip whom he might consider a friend: Jones the beatnik! Maybe there’s a news story about how he was gunned down by the NYPD in a drug bust gone bad; or, better, maybe he’s the star of a new reality dating show where girls will compete to trade their sweet bodies for his dubious charms.

Mark Trail, 3/15/08

Yay, petnappers! Man, Mark Trail hasn’t seen a good petnapping plot since the delightfully gothic backwoods animal-thievin’ tale that we were privileged to read back in the winter of ’05-’06. These animal-ransoming ne’er-do-wells seem like hardscrabble urban working class types rather than yokels per se, and are significantly less grotesque than the last bunch. Do they plan to steal Woods and Wildlife’s prize puppy before the sick little contest winner can lay her feeble hands on it? Or is this pathetic young dog-lover an entirely fictional construct, cooked up by these thugs to lay their hands on one more innocent little creature that they can sell? And, perhaps the most important question of all: Will some noble soul urge them at some point to “please [not] steal any more pets”?

Momma, 3/15/08

The first two panels of today’s Momma do such a good job of recapitulating the origins of the current housing credit meltdown that it seems petty to point out that “You know what darling? You’re pathetic” doesn’t actually constitute a punchline as such, and that the attempt to draw Momma saying this through gritted teeth has only succeeded in transforming her face into a melting, Dali-esque horror.

Crankshaft, 3/15/08

In Crankshaft, the younger characters have finally decided to kill off the elderly hate-demons who dominate and suck all the joy out of their lives.

Slylock Fox, 3/15/08

And in Slylock Fox, the monkeys have finally decided to rise up against us, as deep down we all knew they someday would.