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Mark Trail, 7/27/19

Oh, hey, here’s what the real story with the gold mine turned out to be: some bad guys robbed a dude at the Tucson Gem Show and took his gold nuggets, but then two of the three bad guys died in a shootout with the cops, and so the last bad guy hid the nuggets way out in the desert somewhere, and then, five years later, picked up some impressionable young wrangers/vet students and lured them out to the desert with nonsense talk about a magic wandering gold mine so he could “find” the stolen nuggets in the “magic mine,” which has to be the most convoluted method of laundering stolen money I can possibly think of. Then he left behind a framed newspaper article with the context necessary to figure all this out in a treasure chest! It almost hurts my head, how much sense this all makes.

The Lockhorns, 7/27/19

I’m really enjoying Leroy’s glum facial expression as he stands far away from his wife, talking to nobody at this party. In a way, doesn’t he represent all of us? Isolated and alone at a social gathering, floating in some weird void, while our supposed loved ones talk shit to someone else?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/27/19

“It’s as if they’ve lost any agency of their own and exist only to be rewards for us! Rewards we definitely haven’t earned!”

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YOOUUUU GUYS, after a month off me and my comedy pals are back doing live Internet-themed comedy in LA next week! DO NOT MISS IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

Pledge your allegiance by clicking on the Facebook event!

And also? Enjoy your comment of the week!

“I want to say that canonically the vulture is that kid’s only friend, but no online source is admitting that it knows about the vulture as a recurring character? Am I suggesting that I know more about Crock than the Wikipedia article? This is bad, folks.” –matt w

Also enjoy your runners up! They’re great!

“At some point, every Phantom must ask himself, ‘Should I have an armored outfit that will help protect me from my enemies’ weapons, instead of the usual skin-tight costume made of a thin fabric that reveals every inch of my magnificent physique?’ And our latest hero — even with a knife protruding from his chest — still thinks, ‘Naah, I made the right decision.’” –BigTed

“Take a lesson, Walker — when the narration box says it’s time to leave, it’s time to leave.” –Uncle Lumpy

“Mark’s hand is fully wrapped around that rock, so he clearly hit the lock straight on with his fingers. Adding insult to injury, his prediction of the lock breaking did NOT come true because the chest’s hasp broke instead. His look in the final panel is one of deeply hidden pain.” –Johnny Johnson, on Twitter

“Yeah, SNL just hasn’t been the same since the dawn of the age of the avians. The live-screening of vultures eating the last human cast has just ceased to be funny for some reason.” –pugfuggly

“My girlfriend seems to genuinely enjoy my company, but she’s a fucking idiot.” –Rosstifer

“Jughaid needs to market his concoction as Cajun Blackened Fudge and sell it as an expensive delicacy in the big city. Those hipsters won’t catch on.” –Jackson’s Third Hole, Wyoming

“Maybe this isn’t meant to have the Christian God read into it. Yes, there’s a nun, but for cartoon characters the creator is the cartoonist. Why does he let bad things happen to them? Well, why do bad things happen to him? Why do other human beings abuse him so, with no escape? If his existence is suffering, wouldn’t it be less than honest to have his creations experience anything else? So this is probably another one of those comics complaining about how, you know, the coffee was cold or something.” –pachoo

“If Dawn does not put out, it may be I can hire this ‘Tart of the Moon,’ no?” –Peanut Gallery

“Look, it doesn’t matter what you do; whatever it is, Mark Trail can and will one-up you. Discussing desert flora and fauna, swimming, martial arts, looking into well-lit boxes; you do it, Mark will do it better and make you look like a chump.” –jroggs

“It’s fun to imagine that Dawn’s cravat is actually holding her severed head in place. ‘Fascinating,’ she says, reminding herself to run to the bathroom before they leave to check for blood runs.” –jeltranksss

“At least one of them is also into shirts. Were you ever into shirts, Maggot?” –Foodar

“Our Town? Really? Dick Tracy has given us a guy eaten alive by rats, another crushed by a steamroller, and a third cut in half by an airplane, and now we’re gonna get several weeks of ghosts talking about trees and very precise street addresses? [sigh] This comic used to mean something, man.” –els

“Not only can Snuffy Smiff read, he’s reading the classifieds? This is bullshit.” –Mysterious Shirtless Lawyer

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/26/19

Well, I guess, uh, Jessica’s Big Hollywood Experiment is over, now that she has … not produced her long-ago promised documentary about her father, John Darling (seriously, this never came out, right?) and she and Cindy solved the Big Butter Brinkel Mystery (with that classic trope, “the talking chimpanzee was the real killer all along“). Just as her husband before her turned down the chance to work as a storyboarder on the next big-budget Starbucks Jones movie so he could toil away at a comics startup based in a dying cancer cluster of a town in northeast Ohio, she has now turned down the chance to be a assistant cinematographer on the next big-budget Starbucks Jones movie, so that she can do … something, I guess … in a dying cancer cluster of a town in northeast Ohio. Her logic is that she didn’t want to suffer what her father, John Darling, suffered from being in “the biz,” and despite the fact that local newscasting is in no way the same “biz” as cinematography or narrative filmmaking, you can see why she’d be worried about going down that road, since her father turned out to be a huge asshole who was murdered in an aggressively wacky manner. Was learning about Butter Brinkel’s murderous what made her realize she was in too deep? Was she worried that she, too, would be killed by Zanzibar or his successors because she knows too much? Is she laying low in Westview to stay safe from the Monkey Mob?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/19

Obviously I know Hootin’ Holler is behind the times, but it’s wild that they’re just now getting into Vine.

Dick Tracy, 7/26/19

“That’s pop culture for you! It sure is a shared language and set of experiences we can use as a shorthand to communicate with one another! Ha ha!”