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Apartment 3-G, 10/30/14

Oh, goody, you know I love an Apartment 3-G flashback! I’m guessing that this giant 4 x 6 photo at which Margo is lovingly gazing (she keeps it in her purse, for convenient loving gazing action) is neither of long-ago love FBI Pete (even though she went ahead and had a captioned beach-frolicking photo of the two of them framed for some reason) nor of Trey, the sexy bescarfèd architect who redesigned the Mills Gallery for free in a doomed attempt to win Margo’s heart. No, I think we all know that the closest Margo ever came to true love was Mills Gallery founder Eric Mills, who knew that Margo valued power over mewling, pathetic artists more than a wedding ring. Unfortunately, the two of them could never be together because he was only sexually attracted to gas grills. Ha ha, just kidding! He actually died in an avalanche trying to sneak the Panchen Lama out of Tibet, which I swear I’m not making up.

Mary Worth, 10/30/14

“Ladies, plural? Ha ha ha young man, no, you don’t understand, only one of us needs to be confined to this caring, fun-filled elder-containment facility. I myself have fantastic vision and a very important job as manager of a condominium complex and can’t possibly–” “ALRIGHT JOE GET THE STRAIGHTJACKET AND THE TASER, WE’VE GOT A LIVE ONE”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/30/14

Good lord, Sarah, it’s like you don’t even know the first rule of working with mobsters, which, obviously, is “don’t be a snitch.”

Pluggers, 10/30/14

Pluggers, sadly, know exactly how much their time is worth.

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/29/14

In the middle ages, even the armies of states and large feudal territories tended to avoid risky pitched battles; most wars were fought via sieges and raids on undefended towns and estates. Small raiding bands like the Vikings were even less likely to attempt to fight through serious resistance, since there were plenty of places that could be profitably plundered without having to deal with trained soldiers of any sort. Today’s Hagar the Horrible is entirely historically accurate, in other words.

Mark Trail, 10/29/14

Yeah, Doc, we just … told you about the mine a minute ago? Oh no, is Mark Trail going to rip off Mary Worth and do the Mark Trail storyline equivalent of putting an old person in a home? (The Mark Trail storyline equivalent of putting an old person in a home is putting an old person on an ice floe.)

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Mark Trail, 10/28/14

So here’s a little mystery for you: last week when Bill proposed to send Mark and his family into the Great Dismal Swamp, the nefarious chemical company involved was called “Petroxx Chemical,” which name I worked into a joke I was a little too inordinately proud of. But not long after the post went up, an anonymous commenter pointed out that in version online the company’s name had changed to “Riverway Chemical”; this is the name they seem to be going with now, and Mark is going out of his way to point out that this Riverway Chemical outfit is totally one of the good industrial mining concerns. Did just the name “Petroxx Chemical” offend some powerful interests? Is this storyline just going to become increasingly neutered, with any evidence that Mark cares at all about the environment vanished down some Stalinist memory hole? When we look at the strips from these dates three weeks from now, will Mark and Doc be talking about how titanium dioxide keeps a fish’s scales soft and supple?

Rusty, meanwhile, doesn’t care about any of this fancy tree-hugger talk. Mostly he wants to know: is this swamp full of dangerous reptiles that will kill and eat him? Will his pointless existence finally be snuffed out by blessed oblivion? Will he at last be able to contribute something to the world, as food in a gator’s belly?

Beetle Bailey, 10/28/14

It may sound like Miss Buxley is just babbling nonsense in panel three, but she’s probably just killing time so that the undercover EEOC agent at the next table can gather enough corroborating evidence about this mandatory lunch date with her boss, during which he’s already ordered that work matters not be discussed.