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Mark Trail, 5/25/18

Wait, what’s this? Does Cherry have someone from her past who she’s nervous about seeing again? Does she have a past? Did she not spring forth from Zeus’s forehead to be Mark Trail’s asexual mate? Is this mysterious “Jim the PA” her mortal enemy, just as the iguana is the mortal enemy of the scorpion? I am very excited to find out! Chances of Mark punching out someone at a nice dinner while Rusty tries to flirt: increasing.

Dennis the Menace, 5/25/18

Wow, going from planning a germ warfare assault on the neighborhood to demonstrating embarrassing ignorance of the many convenient Great American Cookies locations in only a single day: truly some menacing whiplash going on here.

Gasoline Alley, 5/25/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because Slim may have suffered a debilitating head injury, but he’s afraid that seeking medical attention will leave his family destitute!

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Mary Worth, 5/24/18

OK, so all of us [checks comments] some of us [digs deeper into comments and also into Facebook and Twitter replies] I for one have been enjoying this Wilbur humiliation/unearned redemption arc over the past several … weeks? Months? Time has no meaning, here inside Wilbur’s troubled psyche! But anyway, I’m glad things seem to be wrapping up, because, warmly as I feel towards the Weston clan, we’ve been seeing an awful lot of Wilbur and Dawn lately. Mary Worth has traditionally been about the random one-off nobodies who get their lives meddled and then promptly walk off into the narrative sunset, but if we’re not going to do that next time around, let’s at least get into some of the other Charterstone regulars. Like Toby and Ian! God, I love Toby and Ian, and we haven’t had a good Ian story since that time Toby almost left him, so I’m really looking forward to him being eased back into the strip in a context where he’ll almost certainly say something really cutting and demeaning to Wilbur at a dinner where the ostensible goal is to cheer him up. The “promise” Mary is about to extract from Wilbur is that he wear tear-away clothes so that at the first sign of conflict he and Ian can settle matters in the greco-roman wrestling pit she’s conveniently set up in Charterstone’s rec room.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/24/18

Heather is of course merely a nanny, and isn’t capable of running an aerospace company like Avery International. But if there’s some disaster — well, that’s when you need to turn to a nanny to run your aerospace company, obviously! A good example of a disaster would be if someone were to try to sell the company to a high-tech Indian firm, boosting shareholder value in the process. You’d definitely want to call in a nanny to prevent that sort of thing from happening.

Marvin, 5/24/18

Marvin has spent the week doing an incredibly unfunny series of jokes about Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant, which for some reason they’ve decided to refer to as “Alfafa” … because of the popular Little Rascal, I guess? The Little Rascals, the incredibly current cultural reference that’s always at the top of everyone’s minds? Anyway, that’s just the an unfunny structure providing the base for the unfunny jokes, and you really have to keep reminding yourself as you read that at least they aren’t making unfunny jokes about shitting.

Dennis the Menace, 5/24/18

Dennis definitely has measles, an alarming number of his schoolmates are vulnerable thanks to anti-vaccination hysteria, and this is clearly his most menacing move yet.

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Crock, 5/23/18

A “favorite” joke format in Crock is “the troopers are getting so young,” which I guess is supposed to just be about how when you get older people come into the workforce who are themselves adults but who seem like children to you because the age gap between them and you is so big, but has the (I hope) unintentional effect of implying that France, beset by manpower shortages in its horrific and failing colonial war in the Maghreb, has been forced to deploy child soldiers. Fortunately, since e-mail has been a widespread and indeed in some contexts primary means of communication for 20 years, today’s strip is here to let us know that the Legion is now fully manned with adult recruits of prime military age.

Shoe, 5/23/18

“You know, Foster’s has a really effective advertising campaign in the States as ‘Australian for beer,’ but in fact it’s not particularly popular in Australia. No, my parents were really into beers like Carlton Draught and Tooheys New.”

“Is Foster’s a kind of beer? I was saying that the state put you in a foster home, because your parents were drunks.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/23/18

“I dug up his grave in th’ dead of night, cracked open his coffin, and cut off his beard for Jughaid t’ wear. He’s frownin’ on account of th’ smell!”