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Mark Trail, 11/4/20

Oh snap it’s Kelly Welly, everybody! Real Trail heads remember Kelly, who was sadly absent during the James Allen era, as one of Mark’s greatest foils, always trying to simultaneously steal Mark’s stories and get into his pants (or Bill Ellis’s pants, or the pants of whoever might help her write her next story). My friend Kaycee brought her to life years ago in the unforgettable Mark Trail Theater.

Anyway, while I think new-look Mark Trail has sometimes been a little too aggressive on the “look, we’re different now!” front, in the long run if the strip isn’t going to remain an anachronism, it has to come up with answers to the questions of “What would the Mark Trail characters be like if they lived in the year 2020,” and I think “Kelly Welly is a brash, nature-focused Instagram influencer” is absolutely a correct answer to that question.

Marvin, 11/4/20

You know what’s never going to change, though? Marvin, a comic strip that features babies chatting amicably about what kind shit-innable undergarments they’re wearing, They’re chatting about it now, and they’re going to keep on chatting about it, forever.

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Phantom, 11/3/20

My wife runs a lot of trainings for her job, which have predictably all become virtual trainings over the past six months, and her work sent her a handy little LED ring light to better illuminate her, but her home office is in the living room which gets great natural light and she doesn’t really need it, so it’s been repurposed for my Zoom comedy shows, which I run from my somewhat darker office. But what if we lived in a cave? What if we lived in a cave deep underground, with no natural light at all, but still had to do video calls for exposition purposes? Well, probably we would just get a normal set of lights that you would put in a house, since clearly the whole place is fully wired for electricity, but why not just set up a single theater-quality spotlight and point it directly at your head from like six feet away? The pros (long, moody shadows) surely outweighs the cons (profuse sweating).

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/3/20

“Oh, absolutely. Turns out caring for a bunch of sick, dying, highly infectious old people is a real drag. Plus that thing I heard on Facebook about doctors getting a bonus payment for every COVID patient was not true at all, and the CDC was extremely rude about it when I tried to invoice them.”

Family Circus, 11/3/20

Billy is so full of joy not because he gives a single shit about democracy, but because his teacher gave him such an incredibly easy assignment. What a dope! He’s gonna tape that thing up and not learn a damn thing, which is just how he likes it.

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Gil Thorp, 11/2/20

So the big Gil Thorp fall plot is this: not only are two young gentlemen competing for the starting quarterback job, but they’re also vying for the affections of sassy newcomer Corina Karenna. One of the lads (I haven’t bothered learning their names and I’m not planning on doing so any time soon) has figured out that the best way to a girl’s heart is to recognize that she exists as an autonomous human with interests of her own outside himself, and is coming to watch her play volleyball, which is nice, and he’s bringing half the football team with him. These guys don’t know jack about volleyball, obviously, unlike volleyball superfan Dallas, who I’d like to imagine had the bleachers to himself every game before this. I also don’t know jack about volleyball, so I’d also like to imagine that “libero” is an entirely made-up term and Dallas is just fucking with these meatheads.

Mary Worth, 11/2/20

Aww, looks like it’s the dark night of the soul for our star-crossed lovers! Tommy is singing “The Sound of Silence” in his mind right now, because he was belting it out earlier before Mary knocked on the door to say that “Simon and Garfunkel seem like nice young men but it’s after eight o’cock, dear.”

Dick Tracy, 11/2/20

Is … is Dick Tracy really the guy you want on this? Is he going to arrest a gas leak? Or, more likely, shoot a gas leak while it’s “trying to escape”?

Dennis the Menace, 11/2/20

The best thing about this, to me? I think it’s safe to assume that Mr. Wilson is financially comfortable enough to buy all the groceries he needs, so this manual labor he’s doing in his garden bed is for fun, at some level. Dennis is right! Adulthood blows!