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Hi and Lois, 11/8/17

One of the true underrated tormented souls in the comics is Trixie, who has a fully adult mind but has been trapped for more than half a century in an infant’s body, unable even to vocalize her thoughts and communicate with others. So it shouldn’t be surprising that she’s had decades to contemplate the nature of her tiny, awful flesh-prison and go down some very dark paths. What if a person had two mouths? What if they had no mouths? What if mouths weren’t a right, but a privilege granted based on good behavior? We would recognize the vile as they walked the earth with a smooth, unbroken face, and the virtuous for their multiplicity of mouths, all yawning and babbling independently of one another.

Mark Trail, 11/8/17

Hey, kids, were you looking forward to Sideburns Sherriff pumping hot lead into the bald bank robber? Well, too bad, his precious gun glitched! I guess this shows the benefits of using normal, modern firearms of the sort typically issued to law enforcement officers rather than theatrically old-timey rifles. Anyhoo, Pilot Ponytail is now parachuting conveniently into position behind the sheriff, so it looks like evil’s about to triumph.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 11/8/17

Say what you will about Marvin’s solid decade-plus of doing almost nothing but jokes about peeing and pooing, but I’m pretty sure that strip’s never actually depicted a turd before. Congrats (?) to Mother Goose and Grimm for being the innovator!

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Six Chix, 11/7/17

Each of the titular six chix only gets a comic in one day a week in this strip. So, I can see how frustrating it would be if your assigned day was Tuesday, but you came up with a joke about Daylight Savings Time that’s so side-splittingly hilarious but also poignant, timely, and not at all baffling or opaque that it seems a crime not to publish it a few days later! Thank goodness King Features decided to treat this whole week as “Daylight Savings Week” and allow continued time-laffs through at least Saturday so we could enjoy this strip.

Mary Worth, 11/7/17

Technically, Wilbur isn’t an explorer at all, since he’s travelling to countries with long-established populations that are well-connected to our global civilization. Iris, on the other hand, is an explorer, as she’s going to explore her long-neglected erotic sensibilities — which, again, is in contrast with Wilbur, whose signature sex move is to remain absolutely still until the danger passes.

Mark Trail, 11/7/17

As an LA resident, I personally find this Mark Trail very relatable. Driving all the way to LAX is a huge pain in the ass, and there are a variety of easy transit and ridesharing options you can take without too much expense or hassle. If you pick someone up at the airport, they had better be the perfect guest, in my opinion!

Beetle Bailey, 11/7/17

I know Major Greenbrass’s line in panel one is phrased so unnaturally in order to set up the punchline, but I’d like to imagine that he’s careful to avoid big technical words that General Halftrack doesn’t understand, like “electricity.”

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Slylock Fox, 11/6/17

I’m pretty sure this is the first ever case of Slylock adjudicating a human-on-human crime? Admittedly, he’s mostly intervening to stop a fellow canid from being falsely accused, because otherwise he’d probably be happy to let the hairless two-legs finish each other off in whatever walled ghettos the remnants our once-proud species have been forced to live in. Also, if you’re like me your first though on reading the solution was “Wait a minute, can foxes see red?” According to this website with some extremely 1999-era web design, they can’t, which totally makes sense in context here. “Wait, red jellybeans? I don’t even know what that means. Smitty, you’re under arrest.”

Marvin, 11/6/17

If you’re going to do a strip where sapient dogs and cats exist in a world pretty much like our own, you’re going to have to grapple with some narrative difficulties. For instance, the fact that cats have natural instincts to bury their waste that dogs don’t share has to be recast as cats being “allowed” to potty indoors in a way that dogs are not, despite the fact that they want to. After all, a dog that can think in complete sentences could figure out how to use a litter box, ha ha! Anyway, there are some ways around this difficulty, such as, just for example, not doing so many jokes that revolve around pissing and shitting, for the love of Christ, though I recognize that sadly that technique is unavailable to the Marvin creative team, who have to write poo poo and pee pee jokes constantly, possibly because they lost a bet or are under a curse.