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Apartment 3-G, 8/14/13

Hi everybody! I’m back from scenic Canada, and as always am appreciative for Uncle Lumpy’s fine comics-mocking skills and your pleasant behavior. Just to show you how dedicated I am to vacationing: I found out that Mark finally took Rusty fishing just like you did: on joshreads dot com, your #1 source for Mark Trail news. It was an interesting feeling and it made me think: what if I treated my relationship with the comics like the normals do, and didn’t bother to read the ones that I missed while I was away? This idea lasted roughly five seconds, because Apartment 3-G left me floundering in confusion, because wait why is Peter kissing Margo oh wait that’s Zoey what the hell did she always look exactly like Margo only with short hair? Turns out no, she used to look more like Margo’s mother Gabriella, but expecting Apartment 3-G characters to maintain stable facial configurations for more than a week or two is pretty much asking for disappointment, so whatever.

Mary Worth, 8/14/13

I also went back to see what was happening (for certain extremely limited definitions of “happening”) in Mary Worth, but I kind of regret that now. Wouldn’t it have been better to take in today’s strip without any buttressing narrative structure and just appreciate it for what it is: a guy with a mustache angrily complaining about his terribly disappointing life to the vaguely sympathetic members of a “talk group”?

Funky Winkerbean, 8/14/13

I actually deliberately stopped myself from going back and reading previous Funky Winkerbeans. I don’t want any context for this. I don’t even want the context supplied by the first panel. I just want the image of Harry Dinkle, smiling beatifically as he imagines a freakishly huge version of his younger head vomiting out a marching band. Where is the band coming from? What horrible non-Euclidean hell-dimension lies inside the Dinklemaw? I want this image and only this image, forever.

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B.C., 8/13/13

Prehistoric or not, it’s time to catch up when Prince Valiant beats you to a technology joke by two years.

Crankshaft, 8/13/13

“And by ‘great practice’ we mean ‘pointless and expensive truck rolls that put us at risk, endanger the public safety, and have had no effect on the frequency or recklessness of your life-threatening behavior.'”

“As part of your award, your family and the Montgomery County Court have arranged a special honorary bunk for you at, um, ‘Firehouse Manor’, where you’ll be on special honorary permanent assignment under the “Honorary Heroes” program, Ohio Revised Code (ORC) 5122.01(B). Your new Captain will give you additional orders on your arrival. Be sure to take all the vitamins she gives you so you can perform all your special honorary duties! Been great knowing you, gramps!”

Dick Tracy, 8/13/13

Dick Tracy‘s new creative team has been referencing, recapping, and extending old characters and plots all the way from the strip’s 1930’s origins through the Moon Madness of the 1970’s. Today’s second panel recaps the final episode before the team took over from Dick Locher in 2011: in it, Mordred tries to kill Dick Tracy in an abandoned granary but is eaten alive by rats before he can seal the deal.

So what happens now? Does the strip move forward from the present moment, with new villains to overcome and crimes to solve? Or does it start recapping the recaps themselves in an ever-tightening spiral until Dick Tracy shrinks to a single image, of a solitary rat nibbling on the last morsel of a villain, every day forever?

Heathcliff, 8/13/13

Heathcliff Moves On, Part XLIV: By car, scooter, balloon, elephant, and now by cannon, a cat’s gotta travel.

BOOM, I’m outta here — apparently, I’ve been selected for some sort of honorary program, and I don’t want to be late for my initiation! Josh returns Wednesday morning with more of the rich, savory comic goodness you’ve come to expect from the Comics Curmudgeon. Thanks!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Mark Trail, 8/12/13

No use denying it any longer. Mark Trail has taken Rusty fishing — it says so right there in the strip. A treasured Comics Curmudgeon article of faith — that Mark never, ever takes Rusty fishing; that such an event is not physically possible — lies in dust and ashes. Can you imagine how the Seekers felt when their prophesied flying saucer failed to show up back in December 1954? You can? Well, this is nothing like that — this is how the rest of us would have felt had the saucer arrived right on time, picked up the Seekers, and left us all to die in the flood.

It’s hard to feel too bad about it, though. I mean, look at the little scamp so darn happy there in panel two. You just want to give him a big hug, never mind that he’s hideous, fictional, and holding a fish.

Slylock Fox, 8/12/13

As is widely known, Count Weirdly genetically engineered animals into sapient bipedal monsters in a deranged effort to replace humans lost to an unnamed apocalypse. Here we see the horrific cost of his obsession: the graves of a century of victims from his early, failed experiments. None tears at the heart more than poor Rita Rabbit, doomed by ruined DNA to live her short life backwards, dreaming only of the chance to savage her insane creator/tormentor one time before her teeth recede into their gums and she is deconceived forever.

Beetle Bailey, 8/12/13

Sarge deadpans a perfectly symmetric, perfectly ambiguous punchline: at once, the pillow is insufficiently firm to meet Army regulations and Army regulations insufficiently rigorous to ban the pillow. From the depths of his forbidden/permitted pillow, Beetle grins directly at his audience: See? We can do irony as well as the next guy — but as hardened warriors, we just don’t go in for all that postmodern self-referential bullshit ;-)

–Uncle Lumpy