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Mark Trail, 6/1/18

Hmm, Mark is extremely circumspect about Professor Carter and this … lost temple, isn’t he? I mean, you can’t blame the guy. A few years back, some professor was so enthusiastic about this buried pyramid he’d discovered and Mark was just carried away by the excitement, and sure, he bought a share! Two weeks every year in a genuine pyramid — who can say no to that? Plus it’s an investment property you can sell for a profit later on! Well, it turned out this “pyramid” was just a double-wide in a “resort community” outside Sedona with a kitschy Egyptian Revival theme for the decor, and the pool in the development wasn’t even working. And there really isn’t much of a secondary market for timeshares, as he discovered! He’s been burned before, is what I’m saying, and he’s looking forward to learning more about this … lost temple, but until he gets a look at it, don’t expect him to get his wallet out.

Blondie, 6/1/18

Hmm, the question that’s about to become really important is exactly which kind of Cromwell Mr. Dithers just fired: a Thomas, who after years of faithful service to his sovereign was outmaneuvered politically and beheaded without trial? Or an Oliver, who raised up a New Model Army to do the unthinkable: defeat his king in battle and bring about his execution?

Beetle Bailey, 6/1/18

If Beetle Bailey abruptly became the story of a rogue U.S. Army sergeant funneling military weapons to the Animal Liberation Front, who used them in a string of violent attacks on cosmetics testing facilities and factory farms, I honestly wouldn’t be mad at all!

Mary Worth, 6/1/18

I’m sorry, if you’re not getting a little misty-eyed here, you have no heart to speak of and I bid you good day

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Dick Tracy, 5/31/18

Oh, right, they tried to kill Dick Tracy last year by tying him to a tree and letting him freeze to death? It was both ineffective and so boring that I seem to have not covered it at all on this blog, and you have to admit it isn’t necessarily the most obvious way to kill a guy when you’re hiring a man named “Sawtooth” with razor-sharp metal teeth to do the killing. I mean, you’d think you’d want the guy to, like, bite him, right? Bite him with his deadly metal teeth? Anyway, Sawtooth is working on his own now, which means he does it his way, which, I assume, means the whole biting-to-death thing. Ha ha, look how excited he is! Gettin’ all sweaty and worked up thinking about all the biting he’s gonna do!

Blondie, 5/31/18

The thing I can’t get past in this cartoon is Elmo’s opening line: “Mom made me wear this for graduation, Mr. B.” I can’t decide which possibility I like more: that Elmo, whose extremely bad attitude is on display throughout this strip, didn’t want to dress like a damn square the way the man says you should for your graduation, but his mom forced him to conform to social norms for at least the length of the afternoon; or if Elmo’s graduation from, like, second grade or whatever is rightfully not being run by his school with any particularly degree of ceremony, but his mother is insistent that her child and each of his milestones, no matter how seemingly insignificant, are of utmost importance and should be treated accordingly.

Dennis the Menace, 5/31/18

Ha ha, we make a lot of jokes on this blog about what is or isn’t menacing, but I think we can be serious for a moment and say that a guy sitting by himself in the park telling little kids about all the fucking he’s doing overseas is pretty bad news.

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Spider-Man, 5/30/18

If you’re going to have entire cinematic universe of stories dedicated to superheroes whose intellectual property rights are held by a specific #brand, I think one of the things that would be good to explore is how the media covers super-combat for the benefit of their mostly non-super-powered readership. Ideally, as I’ve noted before in this space, this exploration would take the form of a Netflix series called Bugle, of which I would be the executive producer, featuring a ragtag group of underpaid twentysomething reporters and bloggers whose lives are made miserable by their overbearing skinflint boss J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons, who we can hopefully get under contract to do at least six episodes a season) who occasionally yells at them to get more pictures of the Shocker up on the Bugle’s Snapchat or whatever. The big question, of course, would be how you’d do this without Peter Parker, who’s the best known Bugle employee but whose teen MCU arc doesn’t seem like it’d intersect with life as a stringer photographer anytime soon. My solution: there’s one episode where they use some of the blurry Spidey pics he’s posted to Twitter and promise to give him “exposure” and hint that maybe they’ll start paying him somewhere down the line, but when he can’t come up with pics of any other superheroes, they stop responding to his emails. You can’t afford to specialize in just one superhero and expect to get paid! It’s the era of doing more with less, journalism-wise! Get with the program, Peter!

Mary Worth, 5/30/18

I’m a guy who like karaoke, but I’m willing to say that a big part of its appeal is the you’re all in it together, you know? Like, if Wilbur is going to belting out Luke Bryan’s oeuvre, as a reward he should get to see Toby dancing “sexily” while she breathily makes her way through Ke$ha’s “Die Young,” or a stone-faced and extremely sober rendition of “Riders of the Storm” from Ian.