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Mark Trail, 12/18/24

Mark Trail can of course never be an anti-hunting strip per se, but it has always adhered to a strict moral code when it comes to the sport: for instance, it’s highly dishonorable to stage a canned hunt of a little girl’s pet deer (which is named “Lucky”) as part of an ill-conceived plan to run for governor, or to buy a rare white lion specifically to hunt it. But this is Nu-Look Mark Trail and we need to move on to modern hunting crimes, like hunting a deer that’s famous on TikTok specifically to gain clout on TikTok. They don’t say TikTok, but people definitely mean TikTok when they say “social media” generically right now, the same way everyone who said “social media” generically in 2011 meant Facebook and everyone who said it in 2018 meant Twitter. Anyway, will vengeful TikTok teens punch Cherry’s sister’s bad boyfriend out before Mark can get to him? More on this story as it develops.

Curtis, 12/18/24

The Elon Musk-related punchline to this strip is neither here nor there, but I actually think it’s very funny that for three panels we get Greg Wilkins explaining to his tween son, in earnest detail, what a snow globe is and how it works. I guess the joke is that the kids today with their cell phones and Tesla cars (?) don’t know what a snow globe is or how it works and have to have all that explained to them, but I’m actually pretty sure that most of them are at least passingly familiar.

Alice, 12/18/24

This joke is actually — well, “good” is too strong a word, but it’s definitely passable. The only problem is that it should involve a child looking at a huge bookcase packed with books, not a small end table with six relatively slim volumes stacked atop it. But I guess we should respect the fact that Alice never wavers from its commitment to always take place in a mysterious and mostly featureless void.

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Beetle Bailey, 12/17/24

A thing that fascinates me is that deep in the DNA of the daily comics is the idea that their artists conceive of them as a black-and-white strip where the blacks and whites represent a platonic natural-color “reality” one conceptual layer down, even though probably the majority of their readers see them in a form where someone (not the original artist) has added color to the strip in ways that don’t or can’t reflect that “reality”. I realize that was an extremely complicated sentence, but a simple way to illustrate it is that Beetle Bailey’s Miss Buxley, in “reality,” wears a red dress to work, as depicted in the Sunday strips where the artists do the coloring themselves, but in the black-and-white dailies this solid color is represented by black, even in strips that subsequently have color added for online display.

Anyway, I bring all that because Zero’s red hat is clearly a bit of whimsy added by the colorist rather than something intended by the original artist, though comics are a collaborate process and I enjoy what everyone brings to the table. According to an article on the Smart Hospitality Supplies website (and who am I to argue with the severely underpaid content drone or, possibly, large language model-based AI that wrote this), a red chef’s hat “can signify passion, power, and determination. It might hint at a chef who is fearless in their culinary experiments, pushes boundaries and isn’t afraid to spice things up. This could translate into bold flavour combinations, innovative techniques, or a drive to keep service running smoothly and effectively in the kitchen.” Is writing a phone number in whipped cream an “innovative technique”? We’ll allow it. We’re also told a blue chef’s hat “can represent tranquillity, depth, and wisdom,” so clearly some thought was put into adhering to Zero’s character here.

Gil Thorp, 12/17/24

Speaking of passion and determination, Coach Perm Gerads, fresh off defeating the Mudlarks, is now aiming to defeat Marty Moon’s sobriety. Gil’s bartendress girlfriend (?) is hesitant about enabling all this, but maybe she shouldn’t have come to work today wearing a shirt that says “DO IT” (???) in big letters.

Family Circus, 12/17/24

You’re on the right track, Billy, but I’m guessing Grandma doesn’t want to see St. Nicholas of Myra in his bastardized Coca-Cola pitchman form delivering a cheery “Hi!” to adherents to orthodoxy and heresy alike. Surely there was a card you could’ve gotten her depicting the fiery 4th century cleric slapping the heretic Arius in the face for preaching that Jesus was a created being rather and not coequal to and coeternal with God the Father? That would be the sort of thing to get her going.

Mary Worth, 12/17/24

Hey, remember Dawn’s friend Cathy, who seemed pretty convinced that it was Dawn’s fault that her drip boyfriend Jared dumped her, because she was a wanton whore who liked to go to the club (with Cathy) while Jared was having an emotional affair with one of his physically abused patients? Well, she seems pretty intrigued by the idea that Jared might have forgiven Dawn enough to invite her to have a Christmas threeway, which scientists are already calling “the saddest sexual act in the history of the human species.”

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Gasoline Alley, 12/16/24

So the whole point of these uncanny children going to space in the first place was so that they could write a school report about the solar system, and despite the fact that they almost died out there and had to be rescued by their evil talking doll, they didn’t even bother applying the awesome knowledge they acquired first hand to their assignment and just had an AI write it. And it did a shitty job! Which they should’ve known it would do, because it was the thing that almost got them killed in space in the first place, due to its incompetence! And yeah, sure, writing a report for elementary school is a lot easier than navigating an interplanetary craft, but I’m sorry, if a machine comes close to killing me, I stop using that machine, even for lower-stakes stuff. I’m not going to say these kids deserved to die on the cold surface of Mars, but they definitely deserve bad grades on those papers.

Family Circus, 12/16/24

The joke here, I guess, is that Daddy has forced Jeffy to say this to a hapless mall Santa because he wants to set Jeffy’s own expectations correctly, but look at that face. That’s a guy who still Believes. “C’mon, Santa,” he’s thinking, “don’t fuck this up for me this year.”

Alice, 12/16/24

Uh, gee, Alice, do you think there’s an alien base on the moon? Alice’s boyfriend (?)’s attitude towards Alice (the character) really represents the reader’s position vis-a-vis Alice (the comic strip) here: Asking neutral questions, not making direct eye contact, sitting very still, hoping for the best.

Pluggers, 12/16/24

“Pluggers don’t wear gloves outside in Minnesota in December” is I think the point where we start doing wellness checks on the pluggers in our lives. Don’t wait until they end up in the hospital getting their fingers amputated!