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Mark Trail, 11/29/17

Oh my God, it was just yesterday when it seemed like the tornado bank robber storyline had at least until Friday before it limped to its conclusion, but then today, mid-week, BAM, we’re suddenly re-introduced to Chris “Dirty” Dyer, a rhino poacher who died as a result of Mark’s rhino-poaching-busting actions, but then later wasn’t dead at all and in fact planned to come home to America after years living in Africa for the purposes of “sport”, which we all assumed was a euphemism for “hunting and killing Mark Trail, his sworn enemy.” That last linked strip was way back in February and we hadn’t heard from him since, so it’s a true Christmas miracle to see him pop up here in glamorous Miami, thousands of miles away from where Mark is busy foiling the dumbest bank robbery/hostage scheme known to man. I’m very excited for The Hunt to finally begin, but I have to admit that it’d be pretty funny if every eight or nine months or so we just got a day or two of Dirty’s largely uneventful life after his return to the States. Today, for instance, he’s briefly mildly surprised after spotting a newspaper box, since all the US media he read online during his life as an expat in Africa led him to believe that print was dead.

Dennis the Menace, 11/29/17

We get all sorts of menacing in this strip, from the subtle to the overt, but Dennis cheerfully offering to rearrange some poor woman’s face with a rake crosses the line into an outright threat.

Pluggers, 11/29/17

I guess the way I know I’m a coastal elitist and not a plugger is that I have my cat on a pretty strict mealtime schedule and whenever I eat a snack and she’s looking at me accusingly, instead of feeding her I defensively yell “I’M A HUMAN … A HUMAN” through a mouthful of Cheez-Its.

Blondie, 11/29/17

WELCOME TO YOUR NIGHTMARES EVERYBODY

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Dick Tracy, 11/28/17

Dick Tracy is starting a new storyline this week, as usual bringing back beloved grotesqueries from the strip’s long history, and, you know, can you imagine how awkward it must be to have to make small talk in Mr. Bribery’s waiting room. “Sooooooooooo … your mom was called ‘Ugly Christine,’ huh? I guess there’s no real chance that was, like, ironic or anything, huh? Ha ha, obviously not. I mean, I’m the only black character in this strip and my name is ‘Lee Ebony.’”

Shoe, 11/28/17

Parallel evolution is an amazing process! It’s how animals as distantly related as the shark and the dolphin have come to look so much alike, and why the civilization of sapient birds in Shoe functions so much like our own. They have clothes, and corrective lenses, and even corporate media mouthpieces that cover for the crimes of the capital-holding class!

Family Circus, 11/28/17

Billy is definitely going to jail, right?

Mark Trail, 11/28/17

The sheriff is definitely going to feed all these people to the bear, right?

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Family Circus, 11/27/17

It’s hard for me to really conceptualize how old and how far along on the path to adulthood the Keane Kids are supposed to be, partly because they have to be a little unrealistically precocious to do all the darndest-things-saying, partly because they’ve been around for longer than I’ve been alive — and also, let’s be real, partly because I’m not a parent and have a hard time keeping track of how kids at particular ages are supposed to act or look like! Like, I have a friend who has a six-month-old baby and she was talking with another mom about how much her son weighed and the other mom was like “Oooh, wow” so I knew it was unusual but in which direction??? Turns out he’s a big old baby, but the point is, sometimes I forget that Jeffy is, I guess, a toddler. Right? Like, he’s too young to school but he’s old enough to walk around and talk? Is that a toddler? I assume that there’s a stage you go through in toddlerhood where your sense of self really gels and asserting your identity becomes very important, which is why Jeffy is furious at being called Mo and also is wearing a shirt with his name on it, which he can’t read but probably he’s been assured it says “Jeffy.” Either that or Jeffy knows full well that the “Mo’s” are abandoned at the bus station, and the t-shirt is there to tell whoever collects him what his name is. Why aren’t any of the other kids wearing name t-shirts? Because Mommy knows where to start “eeny”-ing in order to “mo” on Jeffy. She’s not dumb. Not like Jeffy.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/27/17

The Alps were one of the few parts of Europe that were unscathed by Norse raids, and the League of the Three Forest Cantons that would eventually become the nucleus of the Swiss Confederacy wasn’t established until 1291, long after the Viking Age had ended. Still, shoutout to the artist here for accurately setting the scene with a Swiss flag fluttering above the parapets, with newspaper readers being free to imagine it in its accurate white-cross-on-red coloring. And further shoutout to the syndicate colorist, who instead created a green cross on a white background, which in California at least is universally recognized as the symbol of a medical marijuana dispensary. It explains a lot about the way comics get colored, anyway.