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Mark Trail, 4/26/18

Rusty had to get the sign-off from his teacher to go on this trip to Mexico, so I guess that he attends school, not that you’d know from the strip, where he always seems to be hanging around the isolated forest cabin he shares with his family. But presumably this is a tiny one-room schoolhouse that he shares with a few other stunted forest youths who are kept equally safe from “big city ideas” or the wider culture generally. That’s one explanation for Rusty’s laughable misunderstanding of the economics of civil aviation. The size of an airport isn’t related to the distance flown by any individual scheduled flight departing from that airport, you foolish boy! It instead depends on the population and economic output of the region it serves, so the real question you should be asking yourself is why the backwoods Lost Forest zone merits a sizable international airport. (It’s also possible that this is a tiny two-gate terminal and yet it’s still the largest building Rusty’s ever been inside.)

Dennis the Menace, 4/26/18

“Get it? It rhymes, you see! Anyway, it sounds like your eight-year-old son’s wandered off and you have no idea where he is, so good luck with that.”

Mary Worth, 4/26/18

Ha ha, remember when Dawn was overwhelmed with memories of her ex, while she stared at one of the greatest works of art in the Western canon? Well, you know what Marx said: “All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

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Hi and Lois, 4/25/18

They called it the Day of the Second Sun: one morning, people woke up to see another luminous star blazing in the sky. The disasters began almost right away, of course: the effects on the tides, the ecosystem, the atmosphere, and the Van Allen belts were swift and catastrophic, to say nothing of the corrosive effects of endless day on the world’s collective psyche. But still, in those first few moments of that first awful day, there were a few scattered reactions of naïve hope and even delight.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/25/18

Man, you ever publish a comic strip for, like, literally 35 years, so long that you basically forget that there was at one point a conceit to the strip, something about fairy tales, or maybe that was only the title and it was never used as a joke, it’s been 35 years so who can remember at this point, but then — but then! — you suddenly come up with a perfect punchline that ties into this long-forgotten strip origin story, and it’s just in time to be only a week too late to be topical?

Pluggers, 4/25/18

Pluggers have developed their own elaborate version of hanky code, in which the various colors and labels of the work shirts they hang on their clothesline indicate their availability for various sex acts.

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Dennis the Menace, 4/24/18

A question continually bedevils longtime readers of Dennis the Menace, in whose cursèd company I sadly count myself: why does Mr. Wilson allow Dennis, his most hated enemy, to spend so much time in his home, disrupting the peace in retirement that he has earned? Today’s panel gives us a glimpse at the answer: Mr. Wilson employs Dennis as the loathsome equivalent of a shabbas goy, using the child as an assistant in the sorts of tasks that would already fill him with distaste or unease, so that he can shift his anger from himself to Dennis. Perhaps allowing Mr. Wilson to play out this twisted dynamic rather than facing his own emotions honestly is one of the most menacing things Dennis has done.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/24/18

You know what they say — never meet your heroes! They say this because you’ll learn that they eat food in restaurants and have ideas in places that exist in the real world, rather than existing as creatures of pure mind, I guess? I guess that’s what they mean, based on this Funky Winkerbean, which is otherwise incomprehensible?