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Mark Trail, 8/8/11

You guys, Mark Trail is on the case of this crazy biblical goose mystery, if by “on the case” you mean “heading down to the local U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service branch office to shoot the breeze for an hour or four”. More proof of government waste! How do these people have the time to jaw with random weirdos about geese or whatever when they should focusing on which wild animals can be most profitable harvested for their lovely coats? Anyway, this US&FWSer doesn’t just have an incredibly awkward/sexy way of sitting on a desk; he also has a decent memory for strange combinations of God and waterfowl. “Yeah, I heard about this sort of thing years ago, so I put a little pushpin in this map, right here near the Canadian border, just in case it ever happened again. They all laughed at me. ‘C’mon, Bob, take the pushpin out of the map,’ they said. Now I can put a second one in! Who’s laughing now?”

Hagar the Horrible, 8/8/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because murder and theft are very profitable!

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/7/11

You really need to read the solution and think about its implications to this realize how gross today’s Slylock Fox is. That suitcase is full of stolen money and mammal milk, implicating the bear lady. (I wonder what will become of her cub when she’s sent to the slammer? Will it be sent to Ursine Foster Care, i.e., left in the forest to fend for itself?) Since we now know that a bird can’t be expected to have a milk bottle in her suitcase, we’re left to figure out for ourselves just how she’s going to feed her little chick en route. Is there hidden in that unopened suitcase a bottle full of fish guts that she vomited up? Or will she just be puking a portion of her airline-provided meal directly into her child’s mouth, disgusting all of her fellow passengers?

As a side note, the criminal bear’s bottle has not been placed in a ziplock bag and put through the x-ray separately from the rest of her luggage. I sure hope that’s what triggered the search of her suitcase, because it would be depressing to me if our human universe TSA’s regulations are even more pointlessly stringent than those in the world of Slylock Fox, which is a notorious police state.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/7/11

Parson Tuttle is a notorious grifter and fraud with little or no theological training, so it’s not that surprising that he’s desperately hitting up one of his community’s elders for some pearls of spiritual wisdom that he can drop into his Sunday sermons. I do love how incredibly put out he looks when Grampy finally gets to the point. “I can’t wait for my enemies to die, that’ll take forever! And killin’ ’em all just sounds like work.”

Crankshaft, 8/7/11

I’m not sure if either Abbot and Costello or The Who have really been victimized particularly badly here, but if Crankshaft wants to start apologizing for its terrible punchlines, I’m certainly not going stand in its way.

(Also, as faithful reader David Willis points out, today’s Crankshaft probably takes place a decade before today’s Funky Winkerbean, meaning that Crankshaft is dead, maybe! Hooray!)

Panel from Crock, 8/7/11

This right here pretty much says all you need to know about Crock.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/6/11

Oh, man, did I almost somehow manage to not comment on an entire week of Les grousing and moaning about the fine print on the contract he was forced to sign because sinister Hollywood wants to turn Lisa’s Story into a wacky comedy called Cancer Movie? Here’s the climax of the entire sullen festival of entitlement, in which our hero complains of having been sucked dry by the entertainment industry vampires, who have given him literally nothing in return. Yes, of course a tidy check counts as “nothing.” I’m sure Les barely even cashed it. Are you seriously trying to put a price tag on art? Are you not aware that Lisa died, of cancer?

Anyway, Les, if this is like most Hollywood book options, it was approved by some mid-level studio exec trying to improve his reputation by getting a middlebrow tearjerker out for awards season three years from now, but said exec will be outmaneuvered by other players within the company who have optioned other books, books that can be turned into movies that people might actually pay money to see, so you really don’t have to worry about anything terrible happening to your precious book. If you’re really lucky, when your option is about to expire two years from now, someone at the studio will notice, think, “Huh, who the hell approved this? Enh, better re-up in case it was somebody important,” and send you another check. That should be about the extent of your hopes in this matter.

Judge Parker, 8/6/11

Oh, were you worried that there might be a minor ancillary character in Judge Parker who wasn’t going to be rewarded for their non-efforts with six figures? Well, you can relax.