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Mark Trail, 6/29/17

Oh, I bet you thought that three months ago, when Mark Trail paused to do some jokes about a mysterious incident Mark and Johnny got up to “a long time ago” at the “Water-World Theme Park,” it was all just a silly aside, a wink to those of us who know about how Mark’s various dramas often leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Well, guess what: it’s turned out to be extremely key to this storyline instead, actually! Since Mark rented his car under Lesley’s name (is this something you can … actually do? just rent a car in the name of someone whose ID you do not possess? guess they’re still pretty trusting at the rental facilities in America’s rural heartland), this has led the FBI straight to the Water-World Theme Park, which upgraded its name’s orthography to WaterWorld right around the time they ditched their popular but increasingly controversial “poke a captive orca with a cattle prod” exhibit. Anyway, this will result in Mark being … freed, somehow? Probably because Lesley Joyce has dealt with his car-destroying antics before, giving her an uncanny ability to figure out his next move, as Mark well knows. The Water-World Incident took place years ago, when Lesley was just a simple Customer Experience Enhancement Agent in charge of cleaning up the dolphin poop; now she’s climbed the corporate ladder all the way to Vice President of Octopus and Squid, but an encounter with Mark Trail is something you never forget.

Slylock Fox, 6/29/17

You know, maybe I’ve got it all wrong about how the Animals seized control of the world of Slylock Fox. Maybe there was no violent revolution, no singular Event when the beasts achieved sapience all at once. Maybe humanity mostly died out in a series of great pandemics, started when pseudoscientific beliefs convinced people to abandon immunization and other techniques that had kept the microbes at bay. Here we see the opening stages of the Great Die-Off, when affected household are required, under the emergency authority granted to the Plaguemaster General, to identify the diseases present inside. The dog just sits and watches, waiting for a new ecological niche to open.

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Crankshaft, 6/4/17

Earlier this week we got treated to yet another hint that Crankshaft is trapped in temporal amber, always on the verge of death but never quite getting there. That’s really something for comics obsessives like me and the readers of this blog to contemplate, though. Today’s strip gets back to the simple, core message the Funkyverse has for casual readers turning to the funny pages for a wistful smile and a little escapism: all of us are going to die, and some of us sooner than others.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/4/17

Solution — Count Weirdly still has a pre-animalpocalypse mindset. He clings to the old ways, where there was a hierarchy of species, with his own, of course, on top. “Max?” he thinks, typing various combinations into the password field with no effect. “Is Max his pet?” Sly and Max smile at him with mingled pity and contempt. This is the new age. The standings of various species have been dramatically leveled, and Slylock chose that outdated password hint to remind him of the social order he now serves. His password is “NO GODS NO MASTERS”.

Panel from The Family Circus, 6/4/17

“There, I just summarized the whole long boring sermon for you! Now let’s go to the dog track. Don’t tell your parents.”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/4/17

Well, let’s just see what these adorable bunnies are up to in this whimsical comic strip and AAAUGH AAUGH AAAUGH THEY’VE AMPUTATED THEIR OWN LEGS IN ORDER TO IMPROVE THEIR FORTUNE AND NOW THEY’RE HAVING REGRETS ABOUT IT, WHAT HELL-NIGHTMARE IS THIS

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I’m back, everybody! Huge thanks to all who contributed to the fundraiser, and huge thanks to Uncle Lumpy for his as always hilarious fill-in and fundraising work! I’ll be writing personal thank-yous to all contributors (and, of course, to Uncle Lumpy) this week. But now, on to comics! Say, did any beloved legacy strips take a sharp left turn into explicit vomit fetishism while I was gone?

Hagar the Horrible, 5/8/17

Ha ha! Well, I have to say the year 2017 is exactly as depraved and horrifying as we might’ve all hoped!

Six Chix, 5/8/17

Speaking of the dystopian future, these ladies look like primitive huntresses but I suppose based on their dialogue we’re supposed to imagine this incident as taking place after a worldwide collapse of the interconnected global civilization that made things like “online shopping” and “shopping” and “online” possible. The ladies look perky enough, but the bleak, utterly barren landscape is bad news. I’m not sure if the cataclysm was a climate-change-driven ecological collapse or a global war that scoured the Earth bare with atomic fire, but it’s clear that our heroines are just scavenging for whatever critters are left that haven’t themselves succumbed to starvation, and cannibalism is the logical next and final step.

Slylock Fox, 5/8/17

I was about to brag about the fact that I remembered this strip from when it first ran more than a decade ago, but I was horrified to discover that back then I couldn’t even remember the name of beloved rodent sidekick Max Mouse! For shame! Anyway, I’m still horrified by this story of a grandmother whose response to some low grade cookie theft on the part of her grandchildren is to literally call in the police to browbeat a confession out of them, but I will say that the larger comics images I have access to today definitely let me see how very smug the grandkid on the left is. Smug enough to make this brutal introduction to the police state good grandparenting? No. But you can begin to see the motivation, at least.