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Gil Thorp, 1/12/15

There’s been a definite and sad decline in the number of Marty Moon plotlines in Gil Thorp lately, which is really too bad because he’s an amazing character who’s engaged in lots of fun hijinks over the years. Like the time he got grifted at golf by a Ben Franklin lookalike and ended up passing out drunk in his car, or when he had a public access TV show dedicated entirely to talking smack about Gil but then his bosses got tired of his routine and replaced him with a pair of dumb teens. He even once pretended to be a kid’s dad, in order to trick Social Services into believing that kid had a stable home life! But lately he’s been reduced to asking Gil occasional pointed questions and doing his play-by-play from a inside a wooden packing crate. So I’m excited about Gil warning his naive young player about Marty’s unscrupulous journalistic practices, because hopefully that means we’re going to be treated to some actual unscrupulous journalistic practices, or at least Gil rousting himself from his usual ennui to yell at Marty Moon for perceived transgressions.

Mark Trail, 1/12/15

Just based on this strip you might think this alligator attacking Bald Ponytail False Flag Ecoterrorist is some kind of coincidence, but in fact Mark spent most of last week carefully luring this villain to an “alligator mound,” which I guess is a mound that … alligators … live … in or near, or something, and as someone who gets most of his nature info from Mark Trail, I’m going to go ahead and believe this is a Real Thing. Anyhoo, I’m a little disappointed that our baddie has turned into a stiff, expressionless Ken doll at the moment the beautiful and violent alligator lunges at him, but I am quite charmed by the evocative final panel, as his useless pistol falls to the earth while he’s presumably being devoured off-panel.

Apartment 3-G, 1/12/15

There was a point, early in this blog, where I used to do some jokes about how Margo loves cocaine. It never really became that much of a running bit, but, just for the record, she still really loves cocaine.

Heathcliff, 1/12/15

If being rolled up into a giant Wicker Man-style effigy made out of snow and worshipped like a god by mice is wrong, then Heathcliff doesn’t want to be right.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/11/15

You know, all week I’ve sort of felt the urge to feature Apartment 3-G to update you on the doings therein, but no individual strip has struck me as interesting enough to feature on the blog. Fortunately, the strip has a longstanding policy where they spend Sunday rehashing the week’s developments! So, it’s like this: Sam told Margo at lunch that Margo’s mom is under the sway of some psychic lady who is interfering with wedding plans, and then Margo left lunch and almost fell in front of a car, but then some mysterious gentleman stranger who somehow knows her name saved her! Is he part of the league of psychics who have their claws in Gabriella? Is this some indication that Margo really is the center of the universe and her whole reality is an elaborately constructed Truman Show-style simulacrum? Probably not, and the actual answer will be a million times more boring than either of these possibilities, but the last storyline in this strip involved Tommie and some other lady talking to each other endlessly about a usually off-panel baby deer and an even more usually off-panel emotionally withholding large-animal vet, so it can’t possibly be duller than that.

Mark Trail, 1/11/15

You know what’s not dull at all is today’s Mark Trail Teaches You About Nature installment. Horrible cannibal fishes distract each other so they can eat each other’s babies! You drag each and every one of these monsters out of the water and leave the lake to good-hearted, God-fearing organisms like kelp, Rusty.

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Marvin, 1/10/15

You know, sometimes, when it comes to Marvin, I feel like something of a scold. I mean, the poop joke has a long and honorable tradition across cultures. I like poop jokes. I make poop jokes. So why does the constant steaming stream of poop jokes in Marvin make me react with such humorless horror? I think today’s strip answers that question pretty well, which is that they’re not funny, and are actually pretty revolting above and beyond the whole poopiness aspect of it. Like, does anyone anywhere enjoy the image of a baby gleefully shoving brown (brown!) food down his maw while thought-balloon-boasting that he’s shitting at the same time? Do grandmas chuckle and cut out this strip and hang it on their refrigerator, because they like the image of organic matter going into one end of a human and coming out the other in a sort of awful continuous flow? No. I’m guessing no. I’m hoping no. Please, please, let the answer be no.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/15

“Haw haw! No, but seriously: we’re going to keep on murderin’ each other for no good reason, just like the biblical patriarchs.”

Pluggers, 1/10/15

I have a hearing aid, and one of the best things about it is the ability to turn it off. I’m not deaf and this doesn’t envelop me in a cone of silence or anything, but in public situations when I’m hearing conversations I don’t want to hear, it just kind of takes the edge off, you know? Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that having hearing deficits is no picnic, but you always have to look on the bright side, and having an excuse to willfully misconstrue sexual advances from pluggers is a very, very bright side.