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Not that I’m married to factual accuracy or anything, but I just thought I’d correct one misstatement in my Prince Valiant entry of a few days ago: the current author of that strip and managing editor of the Atlantic is named Cullen Murphy, not John Cullen Murphy. John was Cullen’s father, who also worked on Prince Valiant, and he just recently passed away. You can read more about them both here. Thanks to Robin for setting me straight.

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading this little blog over the past few weeks. In what has been a fairly major shock to me, I seem to have attracted a core group of several dozen readers. So now I’m going to probably throw all that away by going on vacation for two weeks. I’ll be in France, and thus away from my computer and the comics section, until Friday, August 27. In theory, I could go to an Internet cafe and post about the comics in the International Herald Tribune every day, but I’m, like, not going to.

For everyone bereft by this news, I have a homework assignment. Those of you who are interested should keep track of one of the soap opera comics discussed here so far (Apartment 3-G, Mary Worth, The Phantom, Rex Morgan, M.D., or Mark Trail) over the next two weeks and send me a summary of plot developments on the 26th. Whoever can sum up two weeks of action most succinctly and amusingly gets their version published here. I’ll bet you can do Mary Worth in a sentence.

Au revoir, y’all!

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The Lockhorns, 8/13/04

One of many things I like about the Lockhorns is the set of visual cues the artists use to indicate that Loretta has been in a car accident (which happens fairly often). The fact that she’s holding the steering wheel is, well, cartoonish, but the rest of it — the purse dragged on the floor as if she’s stumbling around in a daze, the mussed hair, the torn skirt, the falling hose, and, in particular, the black eyes — are just a wee bit too realistic and painful, and thus in total keeping with the mean spirit of the strip. At least she’s smiling in this one.

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Mark Trail, 8/12/04

I’m going to start a new avant-garde performance project called Mark Trail Theater. The actors will perform the works of major playwrights, but they won’t change their facial expressions or use anything but the broadest body language. The only way they’ll be permitted to indicate changes in emotional state will be by shouting. Also, they’ll use contractions much less than a normal person would.

This is potentially the most emotionally charged Mark Trail I’ve ever seen, though that admittedly isn’t saying much. Kelly must be some sort of old flame of Mark’s, and I assume that Cherry is seething with jealousy, but I’m assuming that because of my knowledge of how human beings work, not because of any visual cues in the strip. She just sits there in profile at the left side of the panels, her eyes darkened with — well, what are they darkened with, exactly? Rage? Mascara? An ink smudge? Confusion, because Kelly looks like every other woman in the strip, only with a different hairstyle? We’ll find out. I’m certainly looking forward to some personal animosity expressed Mark Trail-style, which is to say entirely through clumsy dialog.