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Judge Parker, 5/11/12

Whoops, Avery Blackstone isn’t some WASPy villain bringing danger and intrigue into our heroes’ lives! No, he’s going to inconvenience them, by bringing them money. People showing up unannounced to hand sizable checks to Judge Parker protagonists that they did nothing to earn are honestly one of the primary drivers of drama in this strip.

Dennis the Menace, 5/11/12

Mr. Wilson likes his nap time because that brief moment of obliteration of consciousness reminds him that someday he’ll finally enjoy death’s sweet embrace, and he enjoys Dennis’s because it reminds him that Dennis too will someday die.

Mark Trail, 5/11/12

Aw, now that Rusty knows that he’s been abandoned, again, he’s not even bothering trying to look halfway nonhideous anymore, but just going straight out with the “demonically possessed ventriloquist dummy” look, complete with hair stained red with the blood of his victims. Later, Mark goes and confers with an honest lawman whose job is to put people in prison if all the evidence is against them, unless they’re friends of Mark Trail, in which case he’ll just violate any and all confidentiality rules and spill his guts about everything!

Gasoline Alley, 5/11/12

Speaking of demons, what started out as a vaguely cute Gasoline Alley story about Slim and Clovia taking in a mischievous orphaned kitten has turned into a harrowing fable about good and evil and free will, with the cat being tormented by a sinister feline devil who is constantly forcing him to do awful things. Today, the cat begs to be absolved for the evil it’s done. But is the demon-cat a supernatural outside force, or just the representation of his own untrammeled id?

Marmaduke, 5/11/12

Speaking of demons, Marmaduke’s war against God isn’t going well.

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Marvin, 5/10/12

Some people probably think I’m little harsh on poor li’l Marvin, repeatedly calling him the “world’s worst baby,” just because he isn’t potty trained, and glories in not being potty trained, and poops and pees in his pants constantly, for fun. Nothing the kid won’t grow out of, right? Well, it may concern you to learn that once he does finally learn to do his business in a toilet, like an adult, he plans to become a brutal dictator who will starve his own people if they refuse to support him politically. (Also, once he has obtained absolute power, he’ll probably just start crapping himself again, because who’s to stop him? You? Do you want your entire family sentenced to work in His Lordship’s diaper-processing plants?)

Mark Trail, 5/10/12

Uh-oh, you guys, Mark Trail’s gotta clear a guy on murder charges, so it looks like his fishing trip with Rusty has to be postponed, forever. Sure, a man had to die and another man had to languish in prison for a crime he didn’t commit to keep the horrible notion of Rusty-Mark bonding at bay, but I think everyone would agree that the sacrifices were worth it.

Judge Parker, 5/10/12

Hmm, since one of the main things we know about April is that she is extremely capable with firearms, perhaps Sam’s “I’m afraid April will have something to say about that” presages a full-on shotgun battle for control of Randy’s wedding. But that will have to wait until the strip cycles around to this plot again, sometime in 2014! Right now we have to worry about the mysterious Avery Blackstone. Something WASPy this way comes!

Mary Worth, 5/10/12

I’m sorry, the notion that this wedding reception would involve demure, well-dressed women applauding Mary’s meddling prowess has pushed it completely beyond the realm of believability for me, even by this strip’s rather lax standards. I’m now convinced that Mary never left California at all, and that this is just one of her masturbatory fantasies.

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Mark Trail, 5/9/12

There is a famous rule of the Internet, and that’s Rule 34, and it goes like this: If it exists, there is porn of it — no exceptions. That means that somewhere out there someone has created a porn version of Mark Trail, by the use of advanced pornographing equipment that can break through the brittle shield of asexuality that surrounds the strip at all times. I’ve never had the intestinal fortitude to seek any such material out, but for two and a half panels I thought I was getting the setup to some canon in-strip Mark Trail erotica today. The mysterious call from the past on Mark’s bakelite handset that isn’t connected to anything in particular, the gratuitous use of “honey,” the sexy-for-Mark-Trail name “Trish,” the easy banter … and then bam, your arousal is crushed because this is about a young girl’s sick father, you pervert. And this is how that brittle shield of asexuality is kept in place.

Gil Thorp, 5/9/12

OK, let me preface the following by saying that I am fully aware that I am now someone who complains about the “good old days” of Gil Thorp, and that therefore I have become everything that I most despise. That having been said, remember the good old days of Gil Thorp, when they had a homeless kid playing on the team, and crowds at rival schools taunted him by dressing up like hobos, and it was amazing? That’s a pretty high bar when it comes to Important Social Issues-based taunting, and it looks like the Goshen girls aren’t going to reach it. “Hey, Darby, how many kids you got now? Because we heard you know how to have sex, and that’s how kids are made. Sex-having kid-maker! Go back to the obstetrics ward!”

Archie, 5/9/12

I don’t want to exaggerate too much, but I’m reasonably sure this is the greatest Archie ever made? See, Miss Grundy knocked the kids out of their thoughtless world of casual socializing, and just forcing them to change locations has caused them to re-evaluate everything they know about the world and each other, and now they’re just standing there, staring silently into the middle distance, terrified.

Crankshaft, 5/9/12

“Plus you know there’s nothing I loathe so much as buying gifts or otherwise bringing joy to others. My mind is so resistant to the idea that I always forget about it.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/9/12

“Haw, Lurleen, that is an amusin’ bit o’ wordplay! But still, you know the penalty for talkin’ to menfolk from other clans is death by stonin’.”