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Mark Trail, 3/30/09

The tale of Bald Guy And Other Guy, The Dumbest Criminals Around, continues to roll onward in hilarious fashion. Here, Bald Guy, after a failed attempt to buy Rusty’s fancy digital camera and the incriminating photos within, rips the thing out of his hands so vigorously as to send the hapless urchin tumbling backwards. So far so good, but then Bald Guy’s face is mysteriously clouded by terror, and he hurls some cash and what appears to be his wallet at the boy before scampering off on his elevator shoes. It all leads one to wonder what crime this duo might be on the lam for in the first place. Did they rob a bank and then carefully fill out a withdrawal slip?

Gil Thorp, 3/30/09

“Oh, hey,” you almost certainly were not thinking, “Whatever happened with 6-foot-9 Jeff ‘The ’Czak’ Ponczak, and his buddy Matt the Hat, in their new gig running Marty Moon’s old cable access show?” Well, they’re still wearing the exact same stupid clothes and throwing up the exact same stupid fake gang signs as they were five months ago. (Matt appears to have added a stupid vest to his ensemble, but the hat remains his trademark outfit component, which he emphasizes by pointing at it in panel two.) Panel three shows us Coach Thorp and Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp watching their antics and saying coaching-type things in response, which is really too bad, as what we want to see is Marty watching their antics and doing crying-type things in response.

Slylock Fox, 3/30/09

Don’t bother reading the tedious explanatory text, which is just Slylock’s desperate spin after Max caught him changing into his giant rat costume; our favorite detective is actually suiting up for Midwest Furfest ’09, which, when you consider the fact that he’s already an anthropomorphic fox, ought to blow your mind.

The no doubt crotchless fursuits aside, I’m pretty sure that this is the first time we’ve seen Sly in his off-duty clothes. The green plaid jacket, yellow bow tie, and polka-dotted (or possibly just lint-speckled) baby blue slacks make his Sherlock Holmes get-up look positively normal.

Lockhorns, 3/30/09

When I first read this, I thought that this, as backhanded and twisted as it is, might be the first vaguely nice thing I’d ever seen Leroy do for his wife. Then I caught a glimpse of whatever that is in the box, and tried to imagine an item of lingerie that was that particularly barftastic shade of orange. Then I closed my eyes and rested my head on the desk.

I also have my doubts about any store that thinks polo shirts qualify as “lingerie.” At first I thought the puke-green specimen on display behind the counter was some sort of terrible combination of the polo shirt and the belly shirt, but then I realized that it was actually the perfect size for the torso of your typically dwarfish Lockhorns character.

Dick Tracy, 3/30/09

“Worried? Yeah, you might say I’m worried. I’m worried that my chin has sliced open my finger badly enough that I’ll need stitches. I’m worried that your head will soon be so large that your neck won’t be able to hold it up. I’ve got a lot on my mind, Tess.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/29/09

Oh, Funky Winkerbean, with your hilarious bait-and-switchery! Sure, after the week he’s had, it’s natural to assume that the strip’s title character would decide to end it all, and his monomaniacal focus on his business, which has destroyed his family relationships and friendships, makes it unsurprising that he would choose to write his suicide note on company stationery. But it turns out that this is just a bit of macabre whimsy as the restaurant disposes of a technologic relic that nobody will miss. Just like nobody would miss Funky.

Mary Worth, 3/29/09

There comes a moment in every Mary Worth plotline when The Meddling begins. Sometimes, it seems that Mary must observe a meddle-worthy situation for weeks before finally entering the fray in dramatic fashion; and sometimes, she almost seems to stumble on to the secret heart of a scenario, as she does today in her search for the ladies’ room. Mary’s accidental discovery today proves that her unconscious “meddle-sense” is enough to put Spider-Man’s supposed superpowers to shame (not that that’s a particularly difficult task).

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Gil Thorp, 3/28/09

“Hey, Josh,” you’re probably wondering, “How did the winter Gil Thorp story finally play out?” Well, Gil managed to convince the Larkins (who are black) that it would be racist to move back to New York City to take a lucrative job that would help Mr. Larkin get his career back on track, and take the family away from the awful town where the kids are dating juvenile delinquents! Brenda Larkin marked the permanence of her presence in Loserville, USA, by blowing a key shot in the big game, thus keeping the Lady Mudlarks out of the playdowns, again. (The boys’ team’s fate wasn’t even discussed, so presumably they weren’t even in contention.) Then a career criminal, Ted Ex Machina, confessed to the convenience store hold-up that put all this in motion. And today, the one bit of whimsy and joy this plotline has given us — the fact that Ashley got robbed of a case of Nutboys (“It’s Nutty!”) — has been retroactively erased in Orwellian fashion. THEY WERE NUTBOYS, DO YOU HEAR ME? NOT ZAGNUTS! NUTBOYS! Now, for the love of all that’s vaguely wacky, let’s move on to baseball season.

In the final panel, we have confirmed what we’ve known all along: that Milford is a sort of Jerusalem for everyone who’s given up on doing anything with their lives.

Family Circus, 3/29/09

I’m not sure what’s sadder: that the Keanes view representational art as sacrilegious, and thus only decorate their otherwise blank walls with exuberance-restricting commands in terrifying blackletter font, or that said commands are so routinely disobeyed in the Keane Kompound, which is best known for the sounds of morons shrieking malapropisms.

Luann, 3/29/09

“You’ll be making crepes for me. While I wait in bed. Your bed. Which is where I’ll sleep, after I’ve captured and subdued you with my muscular, prehensile head-tail. Even now, it’s curling and uncurling at the tip, in eager anticipation of the moment when it will strike and wrap around you with its anaconda-like strength.”

Apartment 3-G, 3/29/09

“Aunt Carol thinks that being a child of divorce, like pretty much half of everybody in America today, and having a father with a lucrative medical career is the equivalent of growing up in a squalid refugee camp in the middle of a war zone! Aunt Carol has absolutely no God-damned sense of proportion.”