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Crankshaft, 5/18/08

Oh, Funkiverse! You can’t help but be cruel, even when you aren’t trying! I know it’s not your fault, what with the multi-week lead time for Sunday comics, but surely this happy Cleveland-area scene playing out on the funny pages the day the Cavs were eliminated from the playoffs will only rub salt further into the wounds of the team’s fans.

Panel from Mark Trail, 5/18/08

This panel, ostensibly about “sharks,” reads more like a plea for understanding from our unseen narrator. After all, attributing human emotions to Mark Trail is a mistake that many people make. He has no concept of mercy, sportsmanship, or affection towards his spouse. All he knows is punching; punching is what a million years of evolution has designed him to do. Why won’t you let him be?

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Mark Trail, 5/17/08

It’s only now that the full idiocy of Mark’s plan is being brought to light: he uses the strongest obscenity in his vocabulary to express his shock and horror at the utterly unforeseen fact that the dognappers have a motor vehicle. “Goodness gracious, I assumed that they would have sedated Andy and put him in a cart or wagon, or perhaps just carried him on a stretcher, and I could have chased them on foot, using this World War II surplus tracking device! If only I had access to an internal combustion engine-drive vehicle of some sort! Oh well, back to the St. Bernard puppy mill.”

Momma, 5/17/08

It my continual quest to acknowledge it when comics that I usually consider terrible make me laugh, I give you this Momma, which made me laugh. My wife’s grandmother lived for a time in a retirement home that had a restaurant, where men were required to wear jackets to dinner and forbidden to wear shorts at any time, so I understand the oldsters’ insistence on propriety. Still, you’d think that Momma would relax a little about a casual dinner at home, though I can see why she’d be disgusted by Francis’s hairy jeans.

Meanwhile the final panel reveals that Thomas’s jaunty straw boater is considered ludicrously overdone even by Momma’s sartorial standards.

Mary Worth, 5/17/08

Is … is Mary hitting on Ron at his mother’s funeral? I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on here. Dr. Jeff is no doubt thrilled that she’s telling random men that she’s “available.”

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For Better Or For Worse, 5/16/07

Many have pointed out that today’s patented forced FOOBish pun is extra forced, considering that Warren pilots aircraft that don’t have wings. But it actually led me to contemplate the origin of the turn of phrase. After all, it originally referred to a performer in a play, waiting offstage for their moment to come on; though we’re meant to think that every fictional character has a rich backstory when we don’t see them, the truth is that they really only exist when they’re on stage. Perhaps, like the title characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Warren is beginning to dimly realize that he’s just a ancillary character in somebody else’s story, that he exists only to reinforce the Inexplicable Irresistibility Of Liz, and that once he leaves he really will be doing nothing but waiting just off stage until he’s necessary for the story again. The fact that this strip seems to be his valedictory makes things all the more poignant: he knows, at some level, that he’s going to walk off panel and vanish into the narrative ether.

In other news, Warren’s facial expression in panel one is priceless. “Is … is she getting off on rubbing her face on my upper arm? What a weirdo! Gah, let go, woman!”

Beetle Bailey, 5/16/08

“Also, watch out for the horrifying, mutated alien cow-things. Do they eat human flesh? Who knows?”

Dennis the Menace, 5/16/08

America = freedom

Baseball = “America’s pastime”

Dennis hates baseball

Dennis hates freedom?

Dennis is a terrorist and/or communist?

Dennis is menacing?

Good enough. Tee time!