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The Phantom, 9/26/04

All right, The Phantom, you’re on pretty thin racial-sensitivity ice already, you hear? It’s bad enough to have lovable African sidekick Guran go around topless, wear that primitive necklace and that ludicrous hat, and, well, be named “Guran”; but I defy anyone who was watching TV in the first half of the 1980s to not read Guran’s dialogue in the lower middle panel as a Gary Coleman-style “Say WHAAAT?”

Or maybe it’s just me.

Odd fact about The Phantom: because it’s not carried on Sunday in all papers, there are entirely different storylines going on in the daily and Sunday strips. This can be a bit confusing at first, but it certainly makes for more action than the Mary Worth solution to this problem, which is to spend all day Monday and Tuesday recapping what happened on Sunday.

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Mark Trail, 9/25/04

So we’ve known for some time that Captain Simpson was up to no good. Now at last we’ve found out that the Macguffin for this month’s adventure is … priceless Indian artifacts! You know, just like it was two or three adventures ago, when Mark was left in the desert to die and managed to bring down an airplane with nothing but a chunk of petrified cactus. Does it mean that I’ve been reading Mark Trail for too long when I’m noticing that it repeats itself?

Personally, I was hoping that the fishing expedition was actually a front for drug running. But I guess I have to turn to Mary Worth if I want narcotics action.

I’ve also been wondering over the course of this storyline about Otto, the bizarrely accented cook. He has facial hair, so he must be bad, but he loves his cat, so he must be good! Now that the hirsute ship’s master has swatted the beloved Rosebud, it’s clear that Otto’s one of the good guys. Apparently, mountain man beard trumps Cary Grant mustache in the world of Mark Trail villains. Presumably he’ll help Mark defeat the artifact smugglers — and maybe even get a decent shave.

By the way, if you grow disconsolate between episodes of Mark Trail, the comic strip, you can now groove along to “Mark Trail,” the song, by Scott McKnight. That link takes you directly to the MP3 file, so don’t click on it at work unless you want everyone to know that you like Mark Trail. (The song was highlited (highlit?) by Editrix on the comments page of the Interbridge Weblog — how’s that for blogrolling?)

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For reasons too complex to go into here, faithful reader Sue Trowbridge recently posted on her blog a list of the comics in the Baltimore Sun in 1991. This is in fact my own hometown paper, and the one from which all the strips in IRTCSYDHT are drawn. It’s interesting to see that many of the old favorites are still here, but also interesting that the funny section is so much bigger now. Baltimore, like almost every other city in America, is a one-newspaper town that used to have two newspapers, and the current comics page represents the inheritance of both former papers. So see, whiners like Noam Chomsky are always going on about how media consolidation limits information to the citizenry and puts control in the hands of corporate conglomerates and blah blah BLAH, but they miss the really important thing, which is: better comics pages. So there.

This week’s unsettling search terms, both from Yahoo!: “Paleolithic Age jokes” and “cartoon strips and steroid use”.