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Mark Trail, 7/25/12

Rusty and his suddenly piercing blue eyes seem to have gone through some kind of handsomification (or at least de-hideousification) process, but don’t worry, he’s still alone in his room muttering furiously about “sheep killers” and “dead animals.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/25/12

I’ve always assumed that Hootin’ Holler was a socially conservative enclave, but it appears to actually be a polyamorous commune.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/25/12

Hagar the Horrible, the protagonist of a beloved nationally syndicated comic strip, is a thug who always takes what he wants with violence and threats of violence.

Pluggers, 7/25/12

Even before the Internet, pluggers could only make “friends” with people who lived far, far away from them.

Spider-Man, 7/25/12

“Let’s stare at them as he casually saunters away!”

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Blondie, 7/24/12

I had always thought that, in the category of “Blondie gags that use fast-food ordering systems built into injection-molded plastic heads to demonstrate the workings of post-industrial capitalism,” we would never be able to beat “Say — then pay!” But you have to admire the pathos of the Buckaroo Burger mascot in panel two, spewing out corporate-approved and no doubt heavily focus-grouped cowboy lingo to nobody. Is there a real Buckaroo Burger employee somewhere in the bowels of this exurban fast food hellscape, being paid minimum wage to bark ahistorical nonsense into a microphone until he loses his mind? Or is it all just a recording, a computerized voice sailing unheard into the open air, raising tree-falls-in-the-forest philosophical questions?

Archie, 7/23/12

Teen couples have been watching scary movies so as to excuse fear-based snuggling since the beginning of cinema. The real question Betty ought to be asking Archie is why he was so cheap and/or dumb to rent a mockbuster rather than the actual Wes Craven classic.

Apartment 3-G, 7/23/12

“I’m totally going to be hitting on dudes with heavily pregnant wives all the time now! The ladies forgive everyone in a wash of post-partum hormones, and the gents go off and be a dad right when they would otherwise start getting clingy and I’d need to figure out a way to let them down easy. It’s a win-win!”

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Last week for pre-orders of my novel, everybody! Now that I’ve reached my Kickstarter goal, the thing will be produced, so you can always hold out for the finished product. But Kickstarter supporters will be the only ones who can get the hardback edition, or an e-book version sold outside of the DRM’d major distributors. So if those thing are of interest to you, check out the Kickstarter project page!

Slylock Fox, 7/23/12

You know, if I had a time machine, I’d probably do a lot of prep research before voyaging into the past, getting down all the details I could to make sure I go to just the right time and see the most awesome and interesting things … at least, for my first few trips. After that I imagine I’d get kind of sloppy, as one tends to do when things become old hat. Instead of going down to the library and spending hours figuring out the exact place and time where I could, say, catch Napoleon alone to have a few moment’s intimate conversation with him, I’d just hit Wikipedia real fast to make sure I have the date right and head off into history. I mean, whatever, everyone today just knows the Wright Brothers as “the Wright Brothers” and I just want to go sit out on the dunes with a cooler full of beer and watch them fly that crazy plane. I don’t really give a shit which one was at the controls, you know? It’s not like I’m going to get close enough to talk to them and, oh, I don’t know, alter the course of history and disrupt the timeline, Slylock.

Meanwhile, speaking of disruptions, why exactly is Slylock hanging out on the lawn of Count Weirdly’s mountaintop castle-lair with a bunch of kids and some tie-wearing duck? Were they planning on sneaking through Weirdly’s labs while the Count was away, forgetting that time travelers can always just return to the present moments after they left? Clearly Slylock has been caught off guard and decided to pull this “Loser can’t tell his Wright brothers apart” dick move to distract from his own misconduct.

Beetle Bailey, 7/22/12

“Puritanical” is not a word I usually associate with Private Bailey, but here he is, worrying about the coarsening effects of the Internet on our language, right as he’s getting punched in the throat.