Post Content

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?)

Post Content

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”.

Post Content

The Lockhorns, 9/24/04

Shame on you, The Lockhorns! You know I depend on you for your savage merry-go-round of marital misanthropy, for the Platonic ideal of a doomed marriage that you embody so well. To that end, you ought to stick with what you do best: the same restricted set of concerns (Leroy’s paycheck, Loretta’s shopping, Leroy’s drinking, Loretta’s cooking, etc.), hashed out over and over again until they’re honed to stiletto sharpness and wielded with cruelty and precision. It’s all as abstract and as repetitively structured as a Beckett play, and when there’s suddenly some attempt to pretend that the Lockhorns live in 2004 and watch popular TV shows, it’s unfortunate.

This panel has great potential, too. There’s the bizarre fact that Loretta is just singing loudly at what appears to be a cocktail party: Why? The internal logic of the strip requires no more reason than that it offers Leroy a chance to make fun of her. I also love the fact that the people in the background are just disembodied floating heads (well, disembodied floating heads wearing dickies, apparently). It adds to the timeless quality of the fight: it’s like Leroy and Loretta are in their own private circle of hell, doomed to fight it out for all eternity, with the ghostly shades of the damned watching them in stony silence. I’m not sure how the guy standing next to Leroy figures into it, but he sure doesn’t look happy to be there.