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Mark Trail, 8/25/17

It appears that the time for trick riding is done. It has its place, of course, like when you need to trick a particularly dim kidnapper who can’t be bothered to look down a cliff to see if you’re dead at the bottom of it, or if it’s really a cliff at all and not just a gentle slope. But now it’s the draft horses’ time to shine. They’re calm, and they’re strong. That’s the attitude you want a horse to have when you send it to fight a bear in a cave. Horse vs. bear, deep beneath the earth’s crust: the greatest spectacle nature has to offer. I for one am ready.

Mary Worth, 8/25/17

As predicted, Dr. Ned has been off smooching with Dawn (and presumably every other comely young temp in the hospital) despite the fact that he’s still married, to his wife, from whom he earlier claimed to be divorced! And now Jared is about to stumble upon this shocking fact, which there was really no reason for Dr. Ned to ever lie to him about, but whatever. Will Jared able to warn Dawn in time???? He might have an easier time convincing her of his good intentions, if he weren’t such an off-putting dweeb who’s been blatantly trying to get in her pants since day one!

Marvin, 8/25/17

You know, I get the conceit of Marvin. I really do! I get that it’s funny to imagine that preverbal infants and toddlers might have fully formed adult thoughts and personalities inside their little heads, and that it’s funny to extrapolate how adult thought processes would map on to a baby’s everyday concerns. You follow that train of logic and then, sure, you get to a point where you realize you could get a laugh out of someone using grown-up language to complain that his parents don’t want him to shit himself anymore! Then you do that joke at least once a week for 35 years.

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Mary Worth, 8/24/17

When I was a little kid, I read Peanuts anthologies obsessively, which is a great way to learn about melancholy. Peanuts characters notoriously sigh audibly all the time, and like lots of children acquiring language competency, I quickly came to understand how sighs were supposed to be deployed, even if I didn’t get that the word “sigh” in these word balloons was supposed to signify the nonverbal sound we call a sigh and not the actual word “sigh.” The upshot is that I would say the word “sigh” as a kid when it was appropriate to sigh, and no adult told me not to do this for years, presumably because it was hilarious.

Anyway, this is a long way to say that I love Mary Worth’s tendency to put nonverbal signifiers, like “groan!” and “sheesh.” and, today, “sigh!”, in thought balloons. Can you really think a paralinguistic utterance like a sigh? Sure you can! Eight-year-old Josh was there to prove it!

Dennis the Menace, 8/24/17

Wait, so Henry and Alice’s entire wedding/honeymoon album is only six pages long? I can’t decide if this means that Dennis is right and Disneyland would’ve been an improvement on whatever they did, or if they spent their entire honeymoon and much of the wedding reception having vigorous marital relations, and the real menace is the fact that Dennis was simultaneously the product and the end of a pastime for which they once had great enthusiasm.

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Dick Tracy, 8/23/17

Hey, uh, so remember the Nitrates, a brother-sister grifter team in Dick Tracy whose whole thing was that they mocked up fake version of lost classic film reels and sold them to unwary collectors, and this was an extremely lucrative scam niche, somehow? Pretty sure I only mentioned them once during their last plotline three years ago, to point out that the sister (named Silver, or possibly Sprocket) is also a hippie who goes barefoot all the time. Now they’ve got a new con going, pretending they have a long-rumored early recording of Abraham Lincoln’s voice.

Anyway, if you’re like me, you’ve had a hard time working up much enthusiasm for these characters, but you’ve also occasionally thought to yourself “am I gross or is there a vaguely incest-y vibe to these two?” And today’s strip lets us know that it’s not just you, or at least that the vibe you’ve been getting from them isn’t technically incest-y. It’s still not that exciting, though, and Dick’s distracted “They aren’t?” as he works through the paperwork on yet another police-involved shooting where he was the police who was involved is well justified. “Ugh, who cares about their relationship,” he’s thinking. “Do I get to police-involved shoot them or what?”

Mark Trail, 8/23/17

In case you were worried: yes, this Mark Trail plot is in fact going to climax as our heroes and villains shelter from tornados in the bear-infested tunnels under a Great Plains ghost town! That old bear is named Samson, and he’s ready for some tunnel-mauling.