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Marvin, 9/27/20

It’s become something of a cliche for me to complain on this here blog about how the widely syndicated newspaper comic strip Marvin is just obsessed with poop, but I have to say that I can’t remember of an instance of them actually just showing a steaming turd in the strip? (Other than the noxious title character, of course! [ba-dum-dum]) That’s why I confess I’m vaguely intrigued that the punchline (“punchline”) panel here depicts snowdrift-thick piles of bird shit on Jeff’s car. Why do you suppose they can get away with that and not actual Marvin poop? My guess it’s because bird crap looks just different enough from our own excrement (since this is a Sunday strip, it’s colored by the original artist and really captures that real-life white-brown tinge) that it’s not quite as taboo, but … I dunno man, I feel like this is testing our boundaries and we need to launch a prim letter-writing campaign about community standards or things could get very, very dark in this strip. (Dark brown, I mean, because we’re going to be seeing lots of drawings of Marvin’s feces.)

Hagar the Horrible, 9/27/20

Hagar has come back from a long voyage robbing and pillaging, and his house seems to have been abandoned — maybe his family has left him, or maybe they’ve been kidnapped and enslaved by a rival raiding Viking band. Or they could just be dead! Hagar doesn’t seem to care much, though. Ha … ha?

Dustin, 9/27/20

I’m choosing to believe that Meg overheard yesterday’s stupid conversations about redundancies, got as mad about it as I did, and is now just rubbing her dad’s nose in it so he never, ever brings up the subject again.

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Dustin, 9/26/20

You know, for a brief, shining moment, I assumed the joke here was that “tuna” just means “fish” in its language of origin, and I thought to myself that “Hey, the few seconds I spent thinking about Dustin today won’t be wasted, for once, because I’ve learned something,” but nope, it turns out the word tuna ultimately derives from the Greek thynnos, which means, well, tuna. So “tuna fish” may be repetitive in that you’re naming a thing and then the larger category of thing that the thing belongs to, but it’s repetitive in an entirely different way than when you name a team after a city, but do so by translating the city’s name into English. And let’s not even get into how the team was for decades called the California Angels, which was actually a fairly clever way to nod to L.A. while claiming territory all over the state after they moved to Orange County, and only recently changed to Los Angeles Angels and it was a whole big controversy! Anyway, the big news is that I got so mad about this that I wasted a lot more than a few seconds thinking about Dustin today.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/26/20

Man, who could forget the Glenwood Motel, the depressing place where Truck was forced to quarantine in isolation for days because he was suffering from a persistent respiratory illness? Normally you’d say this experience was a terrible theme for a song, but occasionally, an artist stumbles into his perfect historical moment.

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Folks, extremely big news: Mark Trail has a new writer/artist, Jules Rivera, creator of the slice-of-life webcomic Love, Joolz, with new strips beginning October 12!

Will we be able to handle Mark with stubble, Rusty not being a hideous boy-thing, and Cherry with a job? We’re gonna find out, I guess! (Rivera also does action comics, so she knows how to draw a punch.) Also I have an inside scoop on a beloved former character coming back for the first plotline so stay tuned for that. Hopefully two more weeks of reruns will be long enough for us to find out if Andy survived and/or if Mark ever got that major award or not.

We’ll all be on tenterhooks for the next couple weeks, but until then, please enjoy your comment of this week that just happened!

“BROKE: Snake handling
WOKE: Snake trivia” –Ettorre

Plus your very funny runners up!

“Is that the normal Sunday strip look for Hi and Lois, or are the extra rosy cheeks meant to tell us that the entire family is mildly drunk? Is Thirsty having his influence on them?” –Remy

“Sure, having a COVID party is risky, but you know what else is risky? Being a couple of forty year olds who keep trying to pose as teenagers.” –Where’s Rocky?

“Chip thinks a Bob Dylan composition is folk music, a Led Zeppelin tune famously stolen from Willie Dixon is heavy metal, and the Eagles’ mellowest yacht rock is the blues. On the other hand, how much can we expect from a teenager who streams Gordon Lightfoot unironically?” –BigTed

“As much as I try to avoid clickbait church services like this, every so often I see the sign of my local parish advertising a sermon like, ‘The Top 15 Instant Karma Moments for Sinners Against Our Lord and Savior,’ and next thing I know I’ve been tricked into devoting my life to Jesus again.” –jroggs

“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, Sam, but instead of lecturing potential victims about their behavior, you might want to actually do something to stop the apparent roving packs of wild dogs that prey on your town’s beloved pets.” –Dread

“Normally Mark Trail’s dialogue panels show off the majesty of nature or the bloodthirstiness of the hunt, so I’m glad today they’re slowing down and showing us just the dumbest squirrel about to eat a rock.” –Schroduck

“‘LOOK AT THE WILDLIFE YOU’VE CONSERVED’ screams Mark, dumping Andy’s mangled corpse in front of a shocked crowd, before storming off with his award.” –DevOpsDad

“A plugger’s romantic dinner is accepting waiter service because the Ol’ Country Buffet is closed by the local health department.” –Rusty

“The scene where Buck and Mindy apply for a PPP loan was deemed too intense for the readers of this strip.” –TheDiva

“Anyone telling Mark Trail ‘Don’t be stupid!‘ is setting himself up for a four hour lecture on wildlife trivia.” –nescio

“Every time Dick Tracy comes up on the blog I feel like I learn something new about its weird world. Today it’s magazines: would you rather read Valyu Financial, the publication for those worried about thrift and copyright infringements, or AUTO ZINE, the red-hot car monthly with centrefolds of fuckable roadsters?” –pugfuggly

“Tommy, tell me more about your mother’s hot, rich, and sexually potent boyfriend. If something happened to Iris, would Zak want to start dating again right away? And how is your drug habit these days? I’ve heard there are some really powerful new pills on the streets. Almost irresistible, they say.” –GeoGreg

“Most people who don’t really care about pets have realized that they have to soft peddle it. Shouting NO DOG IS WORTH THIS just gets their hackles up. You gotta soft play it, like suggesting that it would be kinder to go ahead and just put the stupid dog down if it’s so close to death. It’s a loving gesture to euthanize the inconvenience so you can climb the ladder to the heights of conservation writing, a genre that William Faulkner once heard of.” –ArtistFKAtoxic

“You mean we’re not videoconferencing? Then what am I voguing with my chest thrust out for?” –Handsome Harry Backstayge, Idol of a Million Other Women

“‘I have some ideas about that.’ Two hour macroeconomics lecture ensues, involving multiple PowerPoint slides. Tommy’s date quietly slips away while he’s praising the Laffer curve.” –Voshkod

“‘See, if I don’t spend my entire paycheck, I can accumulate savings, which I can occasionally tap into so that I can spend more than I earned in a given week.’ Just kidding, his idea is to do a crime.” –A Concerned Reader

“That was a different time for Tommy, he’s in a much better place now. He’s off the meth and high on blond hair dye.” –Dan

“I’ve seen enough movies and TV shows about undercover femme fatale assassins posing as housewives to read Thel’s body language here, and it’s saying she could flick that knife and plant it right between Jeffy’s eyes without even looking, if she wanted to, and boy does she want to! Alas, she has her orders: Keep the pumpkin heads safe until they ‘ripen’ and Control comes to collect them for Phase II.” –Effluvius Erratus

“At the local college. This is how humans speak to one another, yes? There is a college locally, therefore that is where I will take a sales course of training?” –Glycyrrhiza Glabra

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