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Mark Trail, 6/30/17

Ha ha, today’s Mark Trail features not one but two hilarious revelations! Number one is that despite the ill-feelings arising from the infamous Water-World disaster, Mark apparently still calls Lesley Joyce on the regular, like whenever he encounters sea-wildlife of note (“Lesley! Yesterday a saw a shark and it made me think of Water-World! I’m still sorry about your car!”). And number two is that he decided that the best way to leave a breadcrumb trail that would lead law enforcement to his rescue would be to absolutely infuriate Lesley by implying that he worked for her. Actually, I guess the revelation that high-level WaterWorld executives still sport soul patches in the year of our lord 2017 is hilarious too, but that’s really more a “laughing at” than “laughing with” situation.

Judge Parker, 6/30/17

Wait a minute, are you telling me that Randy Parker spent months in a CIA black site in Macedonia enduring “stress positions,” waterboarding, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques and we didn’t get to see it? I for one will be writing angry letters to King Features Syndicate and my Congressman about this.

Pluggers, 6/30/17

I for one am pretty surprised that pluggers took in some summer movie fare last year! Good for them for getting out!

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Mark Trail, 6/29/17

Oh, I bet you thought that three months ago, when Mark Trail paused to do some jokes about a mysterious incident Mark and Johnny got up to “a long time ago” at the “Water-World Theme Park,” it was all just a silly aside, a wink to those of us who know about how Mark’s various dramas often leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Well, guess what: it’s turned out to be extremely key to this storyline instead, actually! Since Mark rented his car under Lesley’s name (is this something you can … actually do? just rent a car in the name of someone whose ID you do not possess? guess they’re still pretty trusting at the rental facilities in America’s rural heartland), this has led the FBI straight to the Water-World Theme Park, which upgraded its name’s orthography to WaterWorld right around the time they ditched their popular but increasingly controversial “poke a captive orca with a cattle prod” exhibit. Anyway, this will result in Mark being … freed, somehow? Probably because Lesley Joyce has dealt with his car-destroying antics before, giving her an uncanny ability to figure out his next move, as Mark well knows. The Water-World Incident took place years ago, when Lesley was just a simple Customer Experience Enhancement Agent in charge of cleaning up the dolphin poop; now she’s climbed the corporate ladder all the way to Vice President of Octopus and Squid, but an encounter with Mark Trail is something you never forget.

Slylock Fox, 6/29/17

You know, maybe I’ve got it all wrong about how the Animals seized control of the world of Slylock Fox. Maybe there was no violent revolution, no singular Event when the beasts achieved sapience all at once. Maybe humanity mostly died out in a series of great pandemics, started when pseudoscientific beliefs convinced people to abandon immunization and other techniques that had kept the microbes at bay. Here we see the opening stages of the Great Die-Off, when affected household are required, under the emergency authority granted to the Plaguemaster General, to identify the diseases present inside. The dog just sits and watches, waiting for a new ecological niche to open.

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Mary Worth, 6/28/17

One of my big disappointments in Mary Worth over the past few years is that her stints filling in as Ask Wendy have been pretty dull. I’m kind of an aficionado of advice columns, and let me tell you, one of the main keys to having a good one is to start by curating the interesting ones of the presumable flood of banal queries you get. The best letters to advice columnists take you on a journey; for me, one of the best ones ever was in this Dear Prudence column, the one titled “How to respect a vet on Memorial Day” (scroll down, it’s at the end). It starts with “I may have thoughtlessly offended my war veteran neighbor by inviting him to a birthday party on Memorial Day weekend,” takes a sudden left turn into “this hot, hot vet and I are both in unhappy marriages and have an unspoken attraction so I want to honor his service without giving anybody the wrong idea,” and barrels home into “I’m only staying with my husband so that his daughter doesn’t have to graduate high school in a broken home.” I assume that as an advice columnist, your main task is actually separating the “horny for heroes” wheat from the “How do I decide which of two very vaguely described job offers I should accept” chaff, but Mary seems to think she should just answer whichever question shows up in her inbox first.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up as that Mary should learn from this interaction with Derek. Because you know what would make a classic advice columnist letter? Someone starting with something boring like “My wife and I kept fighting about my cigarette habit” and then somehow ending up with “so there I was, making out with a cruise ship entertainer right outside our cabin…”

Family Circus, 6/28/17

This is just some bug Jeffy found an hour ago, making this a pretty low-stakes interaction Ma Keane can use to practice when she for has to have the same conversation with him about Barfy, or Billy.

Pluggers, 6/28/17

Pluggers are fine when their wives see their ancient, poop-encrusted underwear, but when visiting a medical professional still feel a twinge of shame.