Silent punchline

It looks like we have our standard three for the day.

Monty by Jim Meddick
Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey
Candorville by Darrin Bell

I've written about my thing about underwater cartoon settings before, and here is that laptop in the ocean again. How does he type with just fins? For some reason, I have no problem with alligators living in a suburban house drawing comics, but as soon as the location is underwater, all these questions that I should just ignore pop up in my head. It's a personal thing, it must be.

In Candorville, Darrin Bell follows up the silent penultimate panel with--


--another silent panel!

This actually works pretty well. The silence becomes the punchline rather than just the set-up.

The Comics Curmudgeon has already made this observation, but it remains very sad that we won't see a good, old-fashioned Mark Trail slugging in the current storyline.


The bad guy just turned himself in. What th-? There are so many things to love about Mark Trail--the hail storm of exclamation points, the talking animal panels, etc.-- but the greatest thing of all is the patented Mark Trail slugging of the bad guy. The slug defines Mark Trail's brand of environmentalism. Mark Trail doesn't just drive a Prius and re-use his Trader Joes bags, if and when necessary, he will punch your lights out for screwing with his Lost Forrest. We can only hope that Mark Trail will still slug that bad guy. Because, after all, an apology does not make you innocent, and someone needs to pay for that dead mountain goat.