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Mark Trail, 4/10/17

Welp, looks like Mark’s very self-important reveal of his employer has gone right over the bald head of his kidnapper. Sorry, Mark! Usually when you tell people that you write articles for America’s #1 glossy lifestyle magazine for the aspirational outdoorsperson, they show some respect. Not so when you deal with illiterates and ruffians, it seems. And yet … who’s this gentleman in panel two? Is he the real power behind this criminal gang, one or two steps up the Bald Guy Hierarchy? He’s wearing a suit and tie and has a neatly folded pocket square, which means he no doubt appreciates long articles about, like, new kinds of tents or whatever the hell it is Woods and Wildlife publishes. Anyway, I’m not sure if this guy is really involved in our story, or if he’s just some fellow passing through Rapid City Airport, or if he’s the Kingpin, heralding a crossover event that will establish Mark Trail as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but his little smile shows that he knows what’s up.

Dick Tracy, 4/10/17

I had to laugh at the “YELLOW MASK” label in the final panel, an explanatory box of the sort usually reserved in Dick Tracy for tiny gadgets or whatever. Then I remembered that, in theory, anyway, the primary venue for Dick Tray comic strips is the daily paper, where they’re published in black-and-white, so the need to label the visual joke makes slightly more sense. “Look, it’s, uh, it’s a mask, that matches his coat, which you also can’t see the color of but we assume if you’re reading this you know it’s yellow? Just a mask, for his eyes. We know it’s a little confusing. He’s not supposed to stick his dick in it or anything.”

Spider-Man, 4/10/17

One thing that comics are good for is creating new Homeric epithets out of whole cloth and just pretending they’re things that normal people would say in real life, like “badge-boys!” I also like Spider-Man acknowledging that while being a police officer is a full-time job, being Spider-Man is just kind of a hobby he indulges whenever he feels like it, because with great power comes great responsibility so long as there’s nothing good on TV.

Dennis the Menace, 4/10/17

I’m pretty sure that a young child putting his most treasured possessions in the collection plate at church is … about as non-menacing as you can get? Unless he’s trying to bribe God! That’s fairly menacing, theologically speaking.

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Crankshaft, 4/9/17

So, today’s Crankshaft only makes sense to people who understand all the weird nooks and crannies of the Funkyverse’s decades-long chrono-disjunctive narrative arcs, and, due to my many sins, I am one of those people, and as a punishment I guess I’m going to explain it to you? See, this takes place a decade in the past compared to Funky Winkerbean, and so Les is still hawking Fallen Star, his book about the murder of John Darling, who was the father of his soon-to-be-in-this-timeframe-dead wife’s biological son’s future wife. He spent years researching this book, which revealed that John Darling was killed by Plantman, as depicted in the final installment of the failed Funkyverse strip John Darling. The book was a financial failure! But Lillian, who has gone to this seminar on how to write a book only to encounter an author so unaccomplished that he held a book signing in the illegal bookstore she runs in her attic, is full of reassuring sentiments. Don’t worry, she says to Les: someday you’ll write something special, once your wife dies of cancer — like, I don’t know, the very book that appears in the first panel??? Anyway, the lesson here is that if you want literary success, you can’t write about just anyone dying, it has to be about someone you really love.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/17

Meanwhile, in the Funkypresent, it turns out Les is spending the energy he’s supposed to be channeling into yet another book about Lisa into primate-terminology-banter with his current, alive wife. C’mon, Les, the misery porn’s not going to write itself!

Mary Worth, 4/9/17

You know, the thought of going on a cruise has never really appealed to me, but the first couple panels here show me some of the charm. Who hasn’t wanted to yell at Florida from a safe distance away? “FUCK YOU, FLORIDA,” is what I’d shout. “YOU FUCKIN’ SUCK.”

Meanwhile, Toby is getting awful philosophical in the last panel. It’s true that you never know what tomorrow may bring! Maybe it’ll bring some guy out of his mind on nicotine withdrawal, just stabbing everyone who gets in his way on the no-cigs hell-cruise that destroyed his will to live! Who can say!

Shoe, 4/9/17

It turns out Roz, a major character in the long-running syndicated comic strip Shoe, is bisexual! This is an intriguing revelation, but it’s not an excuse for running a strip without a punchline of any sort?

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Blondie, 4/8/17

So, confession: usually when I make a joke about being an old person who doesn’t understand the apps the young people like, I joke about Yik Yak, which has a dumb name and also hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, but what really makes me panic is Snapchat, a wildly popular app/messaging service (?)/content consumption platform (???) that I honestly could not even begin to tell you how it works or what using it is like. Still, I’m one step ahead of the folks who make Blondie, since I was already pretty sure that it works only on phones, not computers, which a quick visit to their baffling and terrifying website seems to confirm.

Having said all that, I don’t want to neglect the powerful and chilling core message of this strip, which is: this generation is so enamored with the idea of information being ephemeral that they’ve lost touch with the visceral world of matter. Dagwood destroys. Dagwood consumes. What once was, Dagwood makes not. If you’re not terrified, you should be.

Mark Trail, 4/8/17

One thing I definitely like in a kidnapper is that he takes an interest in the people he kidnaps. Like mostly they just throw you in the trunk of a car and hold you for ransom, but not this fellow! He wants to know Mark’s whole deal! What’s your name? What brings you to Rapid City, the city famous for people getting rapidly kidnapped at the airport the minute you get off the plane? It’s the final panel that really does it for me, though. “Oh, you’re going to the Indian reservation? Why? Are you some kind of writer or something? Just another white guy with a journalism degree looking to indulge your stereotype of a noble, vanishing people and write a 6,000 word pseudo-literary feature for some Condé Nast publication, where your kill fee is higher than the average annual income on the rez? You people make me sick.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/8/17

“I’m only going to say this one: We’re sending Sarah to public school because it’ll be better for her, OK? Not because we’re poor. Got it? Don’t you dare even think that.”