Thursday, March 5, 2009

What is justice?

March 5, 2009


Panel 1: "Well, Ken, it's hard to explain, but you were attacked by a hysterical deer, the force of which attack caused you to fall down. The impact of hitting the ground combined with your backwards movement caused the deformation of your normally square head into the shape of a parallelogram. Boy, that's tough."

Panel 2: That squirrel saw everything! I wonder, though, how he knows Patty's name and her relationship with Buck?

Panel 3: And so we come to about a clear a statement of the theory of Jackelrodian Justice as we'll ever see in Mark Trail: bad people (or people who do bad things) deserve to be hurt. Generally, of course, characters in Mark Trail aren't quite as reflective as Ken the Kung-Fu Master, so we don't often hear them admitting that they deserved their punishment. In most instances, Mark delivers justice in the form of a right fist and a stilted one-liner. I don't think this degree of introspection is becoming of an action comic like Mark Trail, and I can only hope that Mark hunts down the global economic downturn that is hurting Ken's business and wallops it into submission. If I were Mark, I'd catch a plane to Mongolia and start scouring the steppes. Last I heard, the global economic downturn was seen galloping off towards Kazahkstan on a sturdy pony.

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