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Mark Trail, 4/17/10

One of my favorite things about Mark Trail is that its plotting seems to demonstrate a complete lack of familiarity with how this country — or any other, for that matter — is actually in practice governed. Usually this ignorance is most obvious when it comes to law enforcement, which in this strip mostly consists of forest rangers who lead off ne’er-do-wells who Mark has punched into submission; but things tend to get extra hilarious when the plot’s focus moves to actual government bodies. Longtime readers will remember the exciting eminent domain plotline, in which a zoning hearing that would in real life have taken place in the course of some deathly dull meeting of the county legislature incomprehensibly took the form of a dramatic jury trial. And today, it looks like we’re going to see two wholly unrelated matters — a zoning proposal to restrict float planes and motorboats on a lake that may or may not be publicly owned, who knows, and a criminal complaint about a vicious gang of backwoods poachers who are holding the north end of said lake under a reign of terror — get resolved by some ill-defined gathering of white dudes in suits in some mahogany-paneled room. Who are these men? What power do they wield? Will they be putty in Mark’s hands once he shows him the shocking photos in that manila folder? One of these questions is easy to answer.

Of course, it’s wholly possible that Jack Elrod deliberately refuses to depict government realistically because he recognizes no political authority other than the NOAA as legitimate.

Archie, 4/17/10

Archie, the comics’ most notorious man-whore, is clearly trying to figure out if even he would fuck a small, disk-shaped robot.

Luann, 4/17/10

OH MY GOD TIFFANY AND GUNTHER ARE TOTALLY GOING TO LOSE THEIR VIRGINITY TO EACH OTHER EVERYBODY! I find this prospect distasteful, not least because their clashing grid-shirts will induce terrible headaches if they get any closer to each other.

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Archie, 4/16/10

The most disturbing thing about this Archie is Mr. Svenson’s lonely workboot, which has been abandonned in mid-hallway along with his tools. Is the comical Scandinavian laborer enjoying his break wearing only a single boot, walking with a weirdly asymmetrical gait according to the dictates of Nordic fashion or sensibilities? Or is this boot just the first in a trail of discarded items, which, if we were to follow it, would include his other boot, his hat, his overalls, and his underpants, until we would eventually find him running around stark naked, shouting mock-Swedish gibberish and horrifying the students?

Actually, now that I think about it, that’s only the second-most disturbing thing about this Archie. The most disturbing thing is the punchline. Ha ha, Archie and Jughead are terrified because they think that Mr. Weatherbee is going to beat them with hammer!

I fully approve of Mr. Weatherbee’s white suit and tie/black shirt ensemble. When that full-on ’80s fashion revival arrives, he will be ready.

Family Circus, 4/16/10

I find today’s Family Circus particularly repulsive for reasons I can’t put my finger on. It may be because I hate broccoli with a fiery passion, and that sometimes I think back to times when I ate it, by accident or under duress, and I too can still taste it, just like Jeffy does, oh my God it never goes away, the broccoli taste. Anyway, I now have something in common with Jeffy, so there’s that to deal with as well.

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Pluggers, 4/15/10

Let us pause here for a moment to talk about Mr. James Todd Smith, aka LL Cool J! Do you know when Radio, LL Cool J’s first full-length album, was released? 1985! For you pluggers who are bad at math, this was 25 years ago. (His first single, “I Need A Beat,” came out a year before that! It sold more than 100,000 copies!) To put that in perspective, in 1985, the year Radio was released, Joan Baez celebrated the 25th anniversary of the release of her first album. Can you imagine some Reagan-era plugger saying “Wait, Joan Baez is some kind of protest singer? I thought she was your aunt’s hairdresser!” They would be laughed at! They would not parade their lack of pop-cultural literacy in a newspaper comic feature!

And don’t try to say that “Oh, it’s OK for someone to have literally never heard of LL Cool J, because he’s one of those hippity-hop artists, with the baggy pants and disrespectful attitudes.” You know, I’m not an aficionado of, for instance, contemporary country music, and could not identify by name or tune a single song by the band Rascal Flatts (a band whose career is a mere 11 years old at this point). But if in the course of casual television watching I happened to encounter the name of this band, I would not say, “Rascal Flats? Isn’t that the salt desert in Utah where they test the rocket cars?” And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t smugly send this anecdote into some sort of Bizarro-world elitist version of Pluggers; instead, I would be reasonably embarrassed about it.

In conclusion: LL Cool J is a 42-year-old man with a fairly high-profile career that is a generation old. He is so integrated into the entertainment mainstream that he now stars in America’s second-highest-rated broadcast TV crime scene investigation franchise (the ultimate origin of this strip, I suppose). You have in fact heard of him. His name is not the name of a ranch in Montana.

As a side note, this is the same plugger couple we saw yesterday in happier times. Clearly the garage cleaning and/or the post-garage cleaning mealtime and/or “garage cleaning” didn’t go so well, and now we find them in their usual position: bear-husband wedged into his recliner, drunk and belligerent, and kangaroo-wife sticking her snout into a magazine, desperately trying to pretend she can’t hear him.

Apartment 3-G, 4/15/10

Disappointed as I am that this Apartment 3-G storyline seems determined to not end in a hail of bullets (as certain other plots we could mention did), I do have to admit to being intrigued by this twist, in which an exasperated Margo has now been tasked with hiding a major piece of evidence from a crime scene, getting her sexy fingerprints all over it in the process. All indications really do point to the idea that Martin and Margo are so long accustomed to Bobbie’s actual diagnosable insanity that they have just learned to accommodate it and no longer see it as unusual or shocking. Threatening us at gunpoint? Ha ha, that’s our Roberta! No, we don’t want the cops nosing around, because they might start asking questions about all the people that she actually shot, whose bodies we helped to hide.

Blondie, 4/15/10

It’s well known that Mr. Dithers runs his company like an Orwellian police state, where employees are encouraged to constantly monitor one another for disloyalty. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that he’s installed spycams in every room of his headquarters. Dagwood’s co-worker, who fears even mentioning the existence of the omnipresent cameras that haunt his every moment, has been reduced to the state of quivering terror expected by his sinister overlord; Dagwood, in contrast, has adopted an air of open defiance, like the true hero of liberty and freedom that he is. We will never forget you, Dagwood, even after you’ve been dragged out back for summary execution!