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Mark Trail, 1/21/14

WHOA, you guys, Mark is actually taking Rusty fishing, again. Do you think he might actually … like him, or something? Not if today’s strip is any indication! Remember, kids, Mark Trail knows all sorts of useful nature facts, which is why you should follow his lead and just feed pelicans by hand when they fly into your boat, even though they’re aggressive hypercarnivores with huge, powerful wings. Clearly the only reason Mark is doing this is because he’s hoping the pelican will mistake Rusty for a tasty fish and eat him, or because an hour on a boat with his misshapen ward has sapped him of his will to live and he figures an agonizing death in a pelican’s gullet is preferable to this.

But our pelican friend subbornly refuses to kill, so Mark just decides to violate all the rules of space and time by casually grabbing onto the pelican’s ankle desite the fact that the pelican is clearly like six or seven feet away from him. “Jessica Canupp, pelican point … hmm, interesting! I hear they’re doing top-secret experiments on faster-than-light travel there! Come on, Rusty, let’s follow this pelican through the wormhole that brought him here, since the laws of physics are clearly collapsing in this region and our very molecules will collapse into subatomic goo if whe stay much longer!”

Herb and Jamaal, 1/21/13

Honestly, if you told me that this strip was going to start focusing less on playful banter down at the Heart and Soul restaurant and more on Herb’s forbidden erotic fantasies, the kind he can’t tell anybody about, I’d have been cautiously open to it. But if this is the sort of thing that’s in store for us, then no thanks.

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Family Circus, 1/20/13

It occurs to me that, despite frequent appearances by grandparents and evidence that both Keane parents come from fecund stock, we never really see aunts and uncles or cousins come visit the Keane Kompound, so I guess I always assumed they were both only children? If these mysterious grown-ups in the living room were siblings and/or siblings-in-law of some sort, you’d think their adorable li’l nephews and nieces would be given free reign to leap and drool all over them, rather than be ordered to watch sullenly from thirty feet away. Thus, I’m forced to assume that these are just a couple of random adults, and Dolly and Jeffy are occupying their non-parent-annoying time with nonsensical and vaguely sexually weird idle chit-chat.

Apartment 3-G, 1/20/13

Wow, that clergyman looks awful smug in panel one, doesn’t he? “Ha ha, I love it when a couple gets all sassy and goes off script during a wedding! I’m pretty sure my 45-minute sermon created a ‘safe space’ for this kind of creativity.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/20/13

Snuffy’s been seeing maniacally grinning demons with his own face for days now, presumably because of the corn likker and/or meth.

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Archie, 1/19/14

Today’s Archie is a fascinating look at the ways in which our lives are structured by the financial and emotional transactions we conduct with one another. Archie and Veronica both recognize the significance of his offer to perform unpaid labor on her behalf — even though, in her case, the only people who are being helped in practice by his gallantry are the Lodge family retainers, who presumably draw their salary no matter how much work they do on any given day. And yet generous and specific gestures aren’t the only components of an intimate life; there’s also the intangible qualities of just spending time together, as Reggie understands, to his benefit. In fact, this scenario immediately made me curious: does Reggie have the upper hand in reading this situation because he, like Veronica, is part of Riverdale’s leisured class? A quick search on Google proved that I wasn’t the only one wondering:

According to Comic Vine, Reggie is “medium rich,” a formulation that I find refreshingly frank. Reggie’s family probably refers to themselves as “upper middle class.” Let’s all support Comic Vine in its quest to establish a new, more honest vocabulary for America’s economic structure!

Judge Parker, 1/19/14

Speaking of rich people, here’s Judge Parker Senior fooling around with a deadly boa constrictor. “Ha ha, I’m a best-selling author, pillar of the community, and multimillionaire! This snake wouldn’t dare strangle me!”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/19/14

I can’t remember the details at the moment, but that park bench has Special Significance to Les and Dead Lisa — I think he proposed there, or she told him she had cancer there, or all of the above? It’s depressing, whatever it is, obviously. The question: is the bench Les’s permanent phone background wallpaper, which would explain why Cayla looks so emotionally numb in panel four, or does it just appear when Summer calls, which would explain why she’s so full of rage and frustration that she can’t fully explain?