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Mark Trail, 7/15/10

Not since Rusty claimed that he “just put a new memory card” into his 1953 Leica camera has there been a Mark Trail that more hilariously mashes together decades-old repurposed art and writing with the vague sense that the existence of so-called “modern technology” should probably acknowledged. For the love of God, Mark, why are you paying $2.99 a minute or whatever madness the local Motel 6 is going to charge for use of their in-room telephone when you’re talking on a cell phone right now — a cell phone that, if it’s like every other cell phone sold in the last eight years, has a built-in caller ID feature? Is he one of those paranoids who doesn’t give out his cell number to strangers, because that would allow them to steal his precious bodily fluids? Does Mark’s Junior Illegal Wiretapping And Phone-Call Tracing Kit only work with landlines?

Gil Thorp, 7/15/10

Well, I guess we all owe Coach Thorp an apology, because it turns out his “Let’s run six miles around the golf course!” idea from yesterday was a joke, just a joke, heh heh heh, no, obviously I know how to coach golf, OK? Why else would they be paying me? They are paying me, right? Anyway, it appears that this summer’s dramatic conflict will come from the thought-ballooned antics of this surly teen golf prodigy, and honestly I can’t even imagine four more boring words in the English language than “surly teen golf prodigy,” I almost fell asleep just typing them.

Pluggers, 7/15/10

Most of the people I know are not pluggers, and none of them enjoy actually being tickled. Thus, I’m going to assume that “front tickle” is a plugger euphemism for sex, putting this one firmly in the Pluggers “there are a whole lot of things pluggers would rather do than be sexually intimate with their spouses” file, which is depressingly large.

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Gil Thorp, 7/14/10

Hey, Gil Thorp! We waded through like six months of baseball season because we were all psyched for summer, and you know why? Because summer is when awesome things happen in Gil Thorp! Awesome things like Kaz kicking ass and Marty Moon getting grifted and Milford students saving grown-up ladies from stalkers and and little girls getting into fistfights and Kaz chillin’ in his dojo! What we specifically don’t want is the same stuff we get during the school year, namely Gil doing a half-assed job of coaching today’s youth in some sport or other, which appears to be what we’re getting. Still, it’s kind of amusing to see how limited his set of coaching techniques is. “So, let’s do some laps to build up your endurance!” “But coach, this is golf, and…” “I SAID LET’S DO SOME LAPS!”

Mary Worth, 7/14/10

At last, the drama in this Mary Worth plot has been revealed! It’s been a week since Jenna and Mike got high on the beach, and he apparently hasn’t returned her calls or emails or texts or whatever other forms of misspelled communication she’s been bombarding him with. Tonight it’s time for her to mourn, alone with her circa-2003 Danger Hiptop and her bottle of fortified ketchup wine; tomorrow she seeks out and destroys the person responsible for her emotional devastation (Mary).

Funky Winkerbean, 7/14/10

One of the striking features about Funky Winkerbean over the decades has been that its title character had receded in importance in favor of Les Moore, who bore the brunt of the strip’s grimness but still, despite terrible psychological damage, managed to remain mildly optimistic (if creepy). But since the most recent time jump, it seems to me that Funky’s narrative focus has come back more often than not to Funky. And why not? He’s an angry, bitter recovering alcoholic on the verge of relapse, who’s managed to screw over or alienate his son, his mentor, and at least one wife. This time travel storyline actually started out sort of whimsical and interesting — I’ve had a lot of people writing me to say that they can’t believe that they’re looking forward to seeing how it turns out — but naturally it’s quickly come to this, a prematurely old man wandering about his own past, raving like a crazy person about Elvis’s corpse, and unleashing a string of metaphors whose incoherence (his issues are baseball-playing sharks on a road?) can’t mask his essential awful self-loathing. The sad thing is that in his current state he’s probably still happier than he’ll be if he wakes up in the present.

Apartment 3-G, 7/14/10

Oh, how convenient of Kat and Kitty to list all the people who helped further the humiliation of our gals, right here on TV! It will make it easier for police to link what might otherwise seem like an unconnected series of brutal stranglings committed by an unknown assailant’s ultra-powerful “quoting fingers.”

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Archie, 7/13/10

Archie takes a break today from typical teenage whimsy to explore Riverdale’s grim economics. Lazy layabout Jughead can’t maintain the income necessary to fund his burger habit; Archie, who is marginally more employable and may be writing himself checks from the checkbook stolen from Mr. Lodge’s desk, has agreed to float his friend enough cash to keep him fed, but at significant interest rates — and now those debts are coming due. Terrified at Archie’s suddenly revealed violent side (he’s holding a gun in his left hand in panel three, just out of our field of vision), Jughead seeks out “Pop,” his substitute father figure, coming up with some feeble excuse to try to beg for shelter and protection without Archie noticing. But we can see from his rage in panel two that, if Jughead can’t afford his greasy diner food, Pop wants nothing to do with him, and in panel three he shows that he wants no part of this scene. Jughead will be lucky to escape Archie’s implacable wrath with only a missing thumb or two.

(Seriously, though, if someone could explain to me what’s actually supposed to be happening here, I’d sure appreciate it.)

Apartment 3-G, 7/13/10

Speaking of sudden turns to grimness, I Dressed In The Dark is beginning to look less like What Not To Wear and more like a reality-show version of 24, with the sadistic Mama Kat taking the role of the chief torturer. The girls will submit to her aesthetic demands, no matter how many beatings she has to dish out. But the once bickering roommates will come together now that they’re literally under attack from outsiders; naturally, Margo has taken a leadership role, and she’s demonstrating exactly why, for all her faults, you want her on your side in times of trouble. I look forward to this battle of implacable wills!

Mark Trail, 7/13/10

You might think that Mark Trail owning a cell phone is terribly anachronistic for this strip. The police officer certainly does, based on his puzzled expression in the final panel (“Hey, my uniform indicates that I just arrived here from 1965, and this freak is talking into some tiny sci-fi gadget!”). Still, you have to admit that a mobile phone really allows Mark to ignore the feelings of the people around him, as is his wont. “Excuse me while I take this call … Hi, honey, what’s up? No, I’m not busy, there’s just some old lady here weeping about how they’re going to take away the only things that make her life worth living, some crap like that, I dunno.” Cherry’s glad to be able to get a hold of Mark now, but she’ll regret it when she realizes that with his new phone he doesn’t even have to return home from a romantic horseback ride to get a call from his editor Bill Ellis that will take him out of range of her clumsy seduction attempts.

Dennis the Menace, 7/13/10

Dennis the Menace the character may no longer be menacing, but today’s Dennis the Menace the cartoon panel was apparently menacing to the colorists, who decided that trying to render the vibrating Mitchells in color using the Photoshop tools at their disposal wasn’t worth the effort. This in no way makes up for the fact that the whole “joke” here is that Dennis belched forth a punny malapropism. That’s the sort of thing that Jeffy Keane does, Dennis. Do you want to be like Jeffy Keane?

Cathy, 7/13/10

We interrupt our usual studied ignorance of Cathy to note that today’s “punchline” contains the phrase “poop bags.” We now return you to our usual refusal to acknowledge Cathy’s existence.