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Folks, it is time for your first comment of the week of 2021, but first, a link I have been sorely remiss in sharing with you: faithful reader Mark Carlson-Ghost’s comprehensive guide to Mark Trail’s long, weird history. Check it out!

And check out this week’s top comment!

“I’d love it if Tootsie had an alliterative nickname for everyone in her social circle. ‘So then Chatty Charlene told me that Frowny Frances never wants to see Hairy Harry again. Anyway, how’s Dumb… I mean, how’s Dagwood?’” –Mr. A

Also: Enjoy this week’s hilarious runners up!

“Happy holidays from Mary and friends! Well, she could only get one friend to be with her on Christmas — despite the fact that most of the others live in her building — and the one who’s there is mostly in it for the sex (or maybe the muffins). Mary’s advice? Try not to get estranged from your family this year!” –BigTed

“Wait, are they just piling up damp clothes? I know it’s winter, but good lord, at least hang them up. Slim’s nudist lifestyle will be mercifully cut short by black mold poisoning.” –Schroduck

“I like that the dude is drawing the line at killing five men. He’s just a murderer, not a mass murderer.” –Rube

“I like that a full panel of this is just a peace symbol. To remind us who the true enemy is.” –Joe Blevins

“Today I learned something: you can take two distinctive types of vagueness and abut them to create the semblance of a joke! ‘Boy, past year was quite difficult for a number of unnamed reasons. Not unlike the reports that you prepare about the various activities we perform at this company. Coffee?’” –pugfuggly

“Is Saul bangable? On the one hand, he still has all his hair, he regularly goes for walks to stay fit, and he’s never not in a suit. On the other hand: pink shirt, green jacket, beige slacks, and a yellow tie?!” –Ace

“Finally. Some ‘hot lady pulling on khakis’ action!” –lorne

“The Phantom needs someone to shoulder his blame
And so Hawa and Kay are pulled back in the game.
When a guy needs some stooges for damage control,
He can call on the girls of the Jungle Patrol.

That luchador hombre’s an obvious dupe
And Worubu is once again out of the loop.
The gals take up their rifles and shoulder their role
As the cleanup brigade for the Jungle Patrol.

The Patrol is a front for a thug wannabe
Who murders folks extrajudicially.
The girls are accessories, not in control
Of the crime at the heart of the Jungle Patrol.” –Uncle Lumpy

“There really is endless potential in these pluggerized slang terms for sexual partners. Like how a plugger’s ‘side piece’ is an extra order of curly fries, or how a plugger’s ‘young friend on the down low’ is a neighborhood kid who will take fifty cents to crawl under their porch and clean out the dead cats.” –jroggs

“Sorry, but that is infuriating. Curtis, you cannot introduce a talking, trunkless elephant and then end it with, ‘I’m not magic,’ and consider the matter closed. If this was the banal, The More You Know-style, ABC Afterschool Special lesson you were going for, why not use a wise old hobo/possible genie? That would work. Talking, trunkless elephant? DOES. NOT. WORK. I believe it was Chekhov who said, ‘If you introduce a talking, trunkless elephant into your comic strip on Monday, there better be some god-damn explanation for it by Wednesday.’” –Chance

“It’s so great I asked you out to do a thing I don’t like and turns out you don’t either!” –Jay Pennington, on Facebook

“Tootsie’s name was on the van, but after a strong cease-and-desist letter from Tootsie Roll Industries, they had to drop it. The band Blondie is currently retaining counsel.” –Voshkod

“Of course Marvin is number 2. What other number could he be? I’m so tired, you guys.” –els

“‘Ha ha ha! Imagine if this kid didn’t sit meekly in the corner, as he was told, but did so in a way that defied his mother! Wouldn’t that be outrageously rebellious? How wonderfully absurd!’ –The thought process of someone totally unfamiliar with actual children.” –Urlance Woolsbane

“I admire this guy’s outfit. Does he want to be a trucker, or a character in an old Woody Allen movie? Yes. The answer is yes.” –made of wince

“Wilson is telling the random vagabond he’s come upon that Dennis’s parents are just ‘ordinary people‘ and wouldn’t have the financial wherewithal or political connections to mobilize a large scale search should their child go missing or something.” –Hibbleton

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Dennis the Menace, 1/8/21

I feel like over the years Dennis the Menace has spent less time on Dennis’s actual menacing more on everyone’s second-order reactions to said menacing, or their perceptions of him as a menace, which may or may not be based in reality. Like, be honest: who’s the real menace here? The kid who’s playing fetch with his dog? Or the guy who’s buttonholed a total stranger and appears to be deep into a conversation along the lines of “You’d think with a nightmare specimen like this you’d be dealing with a deeply tainted bloodline, just generation after generation of idiots and defectives, but no! I guess it turns out that true evil can arise from the seemingly innocent! Sinister horror lurks below the surface of our every day life, and indeed inside each one of us!”

Marvin, 1/8/21

I guess maybe this joke would’ve landed better if the Miller household weren’t a largely featureless void consisting mostly of a blue rug and a enormous expanse of white wall. But even so, it’s still a little off! Marvin refused to sit in the corner, so here he is sitting … not in the corner, ha ha? It’s like someone’s been told that they can’t do poop jokes anymore, and so they’re trying to reason out what other kinds of jokes might look like from first principles, and this was their first stab at it.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/8/21

We saw a glimpse of the exterior of Chez Winkerbean in a strip just before Christmas, and I was too busy focusing on the negative to take note of the frankly enormous house that Funky and Holly live in. This is curious, considering that their income derives from managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor for its fickle absentee owner, and not long ago Funky sunk his savings into a failed attempt to franchise Montoni’s shitty pizza in New York City, a metropolis noted for its pizza-snobbery. Admittedly, the real estate market in Northeastern Ohio is not exactly booming, so maybe my radar on what a 5,000-square-foot suburban McMansion would go for is off, but today we learn that the Winkerbean family has the means to drop on the order of four grand on a TV without that even being noteworthy enough for Funky to remember. What I’m trying to say here is that managing a perpetually failing small-town pizza parlor may actually be actually pretty lucrative, in the sense that it makes a great front for money laundering for organized crime.

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Blondie, 1/7/21

Blondie and Dagwood have matching “best friends” in their next-door neighbors Herb and Tootsie; while Dag is occasionally seen interacting socially with others — his carpool, his coworkers, the guy at the bird store for some reason even though he never buys a bird — he doesn’t really seem to have any other deep friendships, the troubling case of Elmo really being in its own category. Blondie’s social circle is even more limited, as just about the only person we ever see her with outside her family is Tootsie, who is not only Blondie’s friend and neighbor but also her business partner, which seems like a lot of emotional labor to put on one person, frankly! Anyway, today we get a little glimpse into why Blondie and Tootsie only hang out with each other and not anybody else: they’re terrible people who love to cruelly exclude people for minor transgression but love vicious gossip even more.

Mary Worth, 1/7/21

“Jeez,” you’ve probably been thinking, “I know Mary Worth can be slow at times, but how are they going to wring drama out of a couple of old people going on a date to the mall?” Well, you owe me, King Features Syndicate, its parent corporation Hearst Communications, and really the entire Mary Worth-industrial complex an apology, as today the sight of a headless mannequin has triggered Eve’s deep post-hypnotic conditioning and prompted the traumatic emergence of her true identity: a ruthlessly efficient assassin for a shadowy international terrorist organization. (Her signature move was beheading people.)