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Mark Trail, 1/27/05

Obviously I couldn’t let yesterday’s jive-talkin’ For Better Or For Worse go unremarked, but it was actually kind of a tough call, as it’s been quite a fascinating week around the serial comics. In Mary Worth, Dr. Brian’s ex-wife announced her intention of effecting a reconciliation with him by any means necessary, possibly involving somehow conniving him into impregnating her. In Apartment 3-G, Margo stormed out of dinner with FBI Pete after he asked her if she had “personal relationship” (that is, whether she had “gone there”) with her evil captor Mr. Eldon. And in Mark Trail, Birdie whacked Mark in the back of the head with a bottle.

I had always sort of thought that the mountain of circumstantial evidence against Birdie and Barracuda would turn out to be not what it seemed: after all, Birdie loves animals, and Barracuda doesn’t have facial hair, which all seems to point to “good” in the Mark Trail universe. And sure, they seem like nice people: after all, they don’t like turning from drug dealing to murder; they only do it when they have no choice. In an earlier strip this week, they talked about dumping “the body” in the bay, and I thought it would be interesting if every Mark Trail strip for the next three years were just three panels of his waterlogged corpse, decaying imperceptibly day by day until eventually there’s nothing left but a barnacle-encrusted skeleton. But the authorial voice here lets us know that Mark is only unconscious, and to be sure we (and Birdie and Barracuda) should have known that it takes more than a single blow to the head to finish off America’s premier nature journalist/adventurer. I mean, he’s been hit in the head before. Often. The only question left in my mind whether or not we’ll get to see him hit a woman.

I like the pelican close-up in panel two. Of course, random foreground animals are one of Mark Trail’s stocks in trade, but this bird seems to be keeping a beady little eye on things. Maybe Mark’s myriad feathered friends will save him, descending on his drug-dealing enemies and pecking them to death. Then, with an army of killer birds at his back, he will march forth and take over the world! He will rule us all as our king, with a harem of dark-haired women dressed in pink polo shirts, which is how he likes them! I mean, that probably won’t happen, but a guy can dream, can’t he?

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For Better Or For Worse, 1/26/05

You mean she’s “screwing,” right?

Just to show you the impact this blog has had on my home life: my fiancée came running into my home office around 8:45 a.m. today as I was enjoying my morning Coca-Cola, practically besides herself with glee at today’s FBOFW. Now, as noted, she’s a sex ed pro, and in fact works with teens for her job, and has never heard any of these euphemisms used by actual adolescents. Maybe it’s because they’re Canadian-specific terms. Can one of our north-of-the-border readers confirm or deny? Anyone? Jim Morrison? Anyone? Whatever the case, I urge all of you to start using these terms in your daily conversation, if only because calling a 14-year-old girl a “gig” or “roadside” is more polite than calling her “a big slut” or “jailbait.”

Non-Canadian-sex-slang observation: In the FBOFW patois, children almost always say “an'” for “and.” This makes a certain sort of sense, though poor Elizabeth is still doing it at age 23 or so.

As a final note, as I was putting the finishing touches on this post, faithful reader Ken emailed me the following note: “Could you please comment on today’s For Better Or For Worse? I am in awe of it.” I think that about sums up my feelings.

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A few weeks after I started out this blog, readers pointed me in the direction of a similar project that I had never seen before: Funny Paper, a hilarious feature that had run on the Web site of my own fair city’s weekly City Paper. Funny Paper’s tagline was “We read the comics so you don’t have to.” This was remarkably similar to the title of my blog, but since Funny Paper seemed to have stopped publishing around six months before I began my own endeavor, I figured the coincidence didn’t matter much. Well, last week I got an email from the writers of Funny Paper, saying that they felt rather proprietary about the phrase, and that their column wasn’t defunct, only “on hiatus.” So, since they were first and all, I have now changed names. Behold, the Comics Curmudgeon! You will now be able to access this blog at comicscurmudgeon.com. Of course, the joshreads.com address will still work, since nobody (myself included) can spell “curmudgeon” consistently.