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Mark Trail, 9/24/12

I had almost forgotten that Rusty had blabbed to Cherry and Doc about the sheep-killing miscreants, which I think is understandable because it’s natural to assume that even Rusty’s adopted family would want to keep interactions with him to a minimum. But anyway, this explains my initial confusion at Cherry calling the men stealing away her ward as “poachers” rather than, say, “kidnappers.”

Though considering the Trails’ wildlife focus and their apparent refusal to legally adopt Rusty or send him off to school or anything one normally does with a child, perhaps poaching is a good word for what Cherry thinks is happening here. “Oh, no, those poachers have got the Rusty! It’s a particularly ugly specimen so it’s not much of a trophy, but its pelt and gallbladder could probably sell for good money on the black market.”

Gil Thorp, 9/24/12

Whoah, you guys, it turns out that Irish people don’t just call cookies “biscuits”; they also have different parenting styles! I see some cross-cultural misunderstanding hijinks in the making here. Is the lesson of this fall plot going to be “American teens have their souls crushed because their parents don’t want them to die” or “foreigners don’t love their children enough to smother them”? Or will we lose interest three quarters of the way through the season when the Mudlarks make a half-assed run at the playdowns?

Marmaduke, 9/24/12

I have to admit, I’ve been reading Marmaduke for years and never knew that the next-door neighbor guy’s name was “Snyder.” Do you think that’s always been the case or that the cartoonist finally decided to give him a distinct identity within the strip? Oh, also, the dark light of a thousand demons is about to start radiating out of Marmaduke’s skull, so all humans need to cower indoors if they want to survive.

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Mary Worth, 9/23/12

One of the things we’re getting to know about Dawn’s armless new friend is that he’s kind of into one-upmanship. Like, oh, Dawn, did you experience a harrowing ripped-from-the-headlines boat accident that suspiciously resembles the Costa Concordia disaster? Well, Jim experienced a harrowing ripped-from-the-headlines ferry accident that suspiciously resembles the Staten Island Ferry disaster from 2003, during the course of which he lost a limb. And Dawn, did you almost see your father die during your nautical crisis? Well, if today’s thought balloon is any indication, Jim actually lost his father during his! Give it up now, Dawn, he’ll be doing this to you forever if you fall in love!

Rex Morgan, M.D. 9/23/12

Uh oh, looks like the apartment where Rex and June are supposed to be staying while they check up on a patient’s San Diego investment property is occupied — by a hot naked lady! Wasn’t … wasn’t there a Rex Morgan story where some semi-naked lady was in the Morgans’ house, by surprise? I’m really pretty sure of this, but I find the prospect of trying to suss it out of my archives strangely exhausting.

Crankshaft, 9/23/12

You guys, Crankshaft’s irritating malapropisms aren’t just the detritus of a mind slowly slipping away into dementia! They can also help distract other family members when they threaten to wallow in unbearably moralistic nostalgia for a world that never existed.

Panel from Apartment 3-G, 9/23/12

As usual, Sunday’s Apartment 3-G just rehashes the previous week’s plot, but we do get this bonus shot of Evan making fart noises with his hands.

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Beetle Bailey, 9/22/12

I know it doesn’t pay to overthink Beetle Bailey (though I do, constantly; “Overthinking Beetle Bailey” will be the name of my autobiography), but one sign that your strip isn’t very good is that there’s really no coherent background that could explain the action we see in the first panel. Have the men of Camp Swampy been sent on a Bigfoot hunt by meddling government scientists who have somehow got the ear of top Pentagon brass? General Halftrack may not have a PhD in cryptozoology, but he still feels that he knows how likely it is that various sites might have Bigfoot infestations!

The easiest explanation is, as ever, total madness, which is to say that the most likely thing is that Halftrack is barking incoherent complaints into a bar of soap to nobody and is about to be waylaid by the weird, underimagined hallucination we see in panel two. But that’s undermined by the fact that the flat black rectangle he’s pressing to his face is a shockingly accurate depiction of a 2012-era smartphone. I mean, usually in Beetle Bailey you’d expect him to be talking into something with a huge antenna or maybe a curly phone cord trailing off to nowhere at the bottom of the panel. The presence of a recognizable piece of modern technology in this strip ought to shake you to your very core. On the other hand, it’s possible that the cellphone industry’s industrial designers have finally created objects so simple and minimalist that even Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC can draw them.

Slylock Fox, 9/22/12

That’s right, kids, don’t worry about the horrifying, violent fights between your parents, the ones that always attract the attention of the police, the ones that are literally tearing your house apart. Just focus on the Six Differences. Find the Six Differences and it’ll be OK.