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Mark Trail, 6/13/16

Our long national cave-nightmare may finally be over: Mark, Gabe, and Carina have found what appears to be an underwater passage out, and Mark is going to attempt to swim to daylight, and then come back, somehow. If he doesn’t come back, well, he can’t tell them what choices to make. Should they draw straws to see who gets eaten during the inevitable turn to cannibalism? Should they live in the cave forever, eventually breeding a race of blind, cave-adapted mole-people? Mark is not here to judge. Mark knows they have to do what’s right for them, alone in that cave.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/13/16

Well, it seems that this was a way for the cast and crew of the current Starbuck Jones reboot to assemble all the old men who used to be fanboys back in the day, to attempt to cheer up bitter old former Starbuck Jones actor Cliff Anger (and also presumably build positive media buzz and word of mouth for said reboot among said fanboys). Cliff was briefly thrilled, but it’s good to see that when faced with actual people who enjoyed his work, he’s retreating back into heavy-lidded contempt.

Dennis the Menace, 6/13/16

How much do I love the expression on Henry’s face here? “That’s … that’s what you’ve got? That’s the most menacing thing you have to say to me this morning? Christ, it’s gonna be a long week.”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/12/16

Guys, I spent a lot more time than I’m comfortable with trying to figure out what exactly in God’s name is going on here. It took me a while to make the leap from the anti-union propaganda in the throwaway panels to the Clampetts, who I had forgotten were the titular oil-rich Beverly Hillbillies. While I’ve never actually seen an episode of the show (side note: there are 274 of them), I understand from the theme song lyrics that Jed Clampett became a petro-millionaire after he stumbled upon oil seeping out of the ground while he was “shootin’ at some food.” Snuffy and Lukey seem to be engaged in some cargo cult oil exploration, unaware that the mineral rights to everything under Hootin’ Holler were sold to a Halliburton subsidiary years ago.

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/12/16

I take it back, OK? I take back what I said about the new writer stopping the nonstop flow of cash into the Morgans’ bank accounts/sock drawers/comical burlap sacks with dollar signs on the side of them. That kind of thing does happen (to the Morgans), and it’s going to keep on happening, forever.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 6/12/16

Check it out: Shady’s down there looking for his lost jewels without the fancy underwater breathing apparatus Slylock and Max have. That’s why he always stays one step ahead, even when they foil his plots: he works harder and does more with less. You’ll never take him alive, coppers! Probably because he’s about to drown.

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The Phantom, 6/11/16

The Phantom is of course the 21st in a sequence of Walkers who’ve dished out vigilante justice to southern Africa from their cave HQ over the past 480 years. Over that time, he and his forebears have had to adjust to certain social and technological changes in order to keep up. For instance, at some point some Phantom traded in his flintlock for the modern-day pistol he now carres. The Internet is a recent enough development that I assume that it was the current Phantom who somehow got hundreds of miles of cable laid from the nearest city all the way into his Animal Head Room over at the Skull Cave, then erased the technicians’ minds with “Bandar medicine” so they could never reveal his location. As a modern superhero, he knows that he can’t do without the Internet’s research capabilities; but as a man of action, he’s got to resent that he’s now starring in scenes like this, where he’s sitting in front of his computer and then flashes back to an earlier point in time when he was also sitting in front of his computer, only back then he was wearing his skin-tight purple costume for some reason.

Crankshaft, 6/11/16

I admit to never having actually watched the Gotham TV show, but I do like the idea of an “origins” series, where you see the world we live in bit by bit become a well-known exaggerated, cartoonish fictional universe. So while Crankshaft remains in general the sunnier of the two Funkyverse strips, I enjoy it when you can see hints of the dystopian horror that lies 10 years off in Funky Winkerbean, like when stone-faced cops forced terrified children up against their squad cars.