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Mary Worth, 9/20/18

If you’re ever in Baltimore, I strongly recommend that you drop by the Baltimore Museum of Art (admission is free!) and check out the Cone collection, an amazing assembly of impressionist art that was put together by two sisters over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, with pieces by Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin, and other heavy hitters. The sisters only left their collection to the museum upon their death, and while they were alive much of it was just hanging on the walls of the relatively modest Baltimore apartment they shared. There’s a computer reconstruction at the museum, and you can see that every surface was just covered with these masterpieces, even in the bathroom; they were probably what would be diagnosed today as hoarders, who just happened to have the eye and wherewithal to hoard incredible art.

Now, we’re only seeing a pretty small portion of Mr. Wynter’s apartment here, and things aren’t at quite the density of the Cone sisters’ home, but just the fact the even on this little stretch of wall we have not one but two pictures of Bella sporting a bowtie to match her owner makes me hope that each step deeper into his condo unit is leading Mary into a disorienting spiral of omnipresent Bellas. Local lech Charley plastered his walls with “art of a kind … I suppose” but that perversion will be nothing compared to the bug-eyed dead dog nightmare that is Wynterhaven.

Mark Trail, 9/18/18

Everything that’s actually relevant to the plot in today’s strip will presumably be spelled out shortly, which is good because I intend to spend the rest of the day not thinking about that at all but instead imagining Rusty playing with “Snap-N-Rap,” which I assume is an app you use to upload videos of yourself rapping to Snapchat. “My name’s MC Rusty and I’m here to say,” Rusty raps, Mara beatboxing in the background, “I do foolish things and get into trouble and need Mark’s help every day!” The video goes viral, and more importantly contains location data that Snap-N-Rap harvests and shares with its advertising partners and mysterious group of Chinese investors.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/18/19

The thing with Funky Winkerbean is that I honestly have a hard time figuring out its narrative point of view sometimes. You’d think that, when you have a plot where a group of comic book dudes get extremely pumped after coming up with a character called “Atomic Ape” who’s going to be a “Lone Ranger in space” (a real thing that happened in this strip), but then one of those dudes gets very upset when a lady suggests that “Atomic Ape” have a sidekick named “Charger Chip,” the point is that the dude is being dumb for getting upset about it! But, like, also, the standard Funky Winkerbean party line is that Superhero Comic Books Are Good, and the world of superhero comics today is actually full of adult dudes who take their obviously goofy superheroes extremely seriously, and resist any attempts to make them not dark and gritty, especially when those attempts are seen as coming from or catering to women, so who knows! Maybe we’re supposed to be rooting for Mopey Pete here! How dare some woman try to water down the masculine majesty of Atomic Ape, the Lone Ranger of space?

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Mark Trail, 9/19/18

Remember that time Rusty accidentally took some pictures of a couple of bank robbers laying low (?) at a local cafe, and then they offered to buy his camera and when he balked at that they just grabbed the camera and threw money at him? Anyway, if you look at that camera it was obviously from 1953, which means he’s not super up on modern photo-taking technology and it’s thus not surprising that he has no clear idea what he’s supposed to do with his phone as he and Mara surreptitiously try to gather more information on their suspect. I mean, phones are for making phone calls! And who’s he supposed to call? Mark? The police? The library, to get information about Mayan artifacts? You’re not making any sense, Mara!

Beetle Bailey, 9/19/18

We all have a good laugh about not know what Beetle’s eyes look like because he never takes off his cap, but having now seen the weird fleshly lobe that normally lurks under General Halftrack’s hat and apparently flops grotesquely down over his eyelids when he removes it, I for one demand that we remain protected from whatever body horror lurks on Private Bailey’s skull.

Pluggers, 9/19/18

Look, kid, you might not get why pluggers had to aid and abet the Indoensian genocide in the late ’60s, but just trust us: sometimes you gotta kill a million people, for freedom and America, OK?

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Shoe, 9/18/18

OK, so, see, if Roz’s boyfriend collected trash, “The Garbageman” wouldn’t be a nickname; it would be a straightforward description of his job. Like “garbagemen” is definitely a word we use to describe sanitation workers, in American English! Though I guess I’m assuming Shoe is using “collecting” here in the professional sense. Maybe he thinks Roz is dating a hoarder, and is trying to be as cruel to her as possible about it! Jokes on him, it seems: in fact, she’s dating one of his fellow newspapermen — and one who doesn’t believe in the pious niceties of bourgeois, “respectable” journalism! Those are some well earned goggle eyes of horror.

Slylock Fox, 9/18/18

So dad is wearing … hairpants? Like a hairshirt, but pants? Isn’t parenting a child who he obviously holds in contempt self-punishment enough?

Gil Thorp, 9/18/18

Ugh, once again football season gets underway without the annual bonfire, a tradition that dates at least back to 2007 but seems to have abruptly ended after the 2015 season. I for one would’ve loved an entire wacky summer storyline about how the school board’s insurance company finally broke it to the athletic department that giant bonfires are incredibly dangerous and they can’t have them anymore, because it would’ve given Gil a chance to be hilariously indignant, would’ve probably ended in some laughable compromise, and would’ve at least acknowledged that this annual tradition stopped happening for some reason. There’s a slim chance that we’ll get a true bonfire before the first home game, but until then I’m going console myself that the jagged white shapes in the background of panel two are billowing waves of smoke rising into the sky from Milford itself, miles away from Oakwood and in the process of being burned to the ground in an orgy of Mudlark-supporting.

Spider-Man, 9/18/18

Ha ha! They were holograms all along! Just like we all figured! The old hologram trick! A classic bit.