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It’s the 2023 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser!

Baby Blues, 8/9/23

C’mon, Darryl, you don’t need Wren for a three-legged race; just tie a shoe on that nose.

Crankshaft, 8/9/23

They train surgeons not to say “Oops”, but Ed’s dermatologist missed the class on “Holy $#%!!”. I hope she took the Continuing Medical Education unit on “Get me the belt sander.”

Between Friends, 8/9/23

Don’t get too relaxed there, Susan—Lucky Eddie could be lurking just around the corner, looking to get lucky.

Luann, 8/9/23

It’s not unusual for authors to tire of their main character—I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle is a famous example, and look what happened to Barney Google. Judge Parker turned into Sam Driver, Action Lawyer and stayed that way for decades. Team Luann has done a lot to sideline their protagonist: shunted her off alone to Community College, gave her dweeby thrall Gunther an actual girlfriend, introduced secondary characters (Tara, Stef) with far more robust backstories, etc. So why keep Luann around? Waiting for readers to get as sick of her as her creators have? I have news: that ship is a mere dot on the far horizon.

Anyway, former hottie Tiffany is hosting a pool party at her Dad’s house (persistently and annoyingly called “the Manse”). Tiffany covets and covertly ogles Stef’s boyfriend Kip, who is staying at the pool house because of the reasons, and complains that she doesn’t have a boyfriend. But Tiffany has never had a boyfriend; her Whole Deal was that she was “popular” in the abstract, i.e., she had a world of choice but never made one. It seems pretty clear that she “wants” Kip only to shore up her sagging, um, confidence, because Kip is so dull and dimensionless he couldn’t get cast as a Ken in that Barbie movie.

Sherman’s Lagoon, 8/9/23

Your son, Herman, Megan, c’mon, get with the program.

In an echo of February’s “Chinese Spy Balloon” incident, Sherman ate a bunch of helium balloons found in a crate of derelict property that fell into Kapupu Lagoon en route to Whacko’s Party Store. The Kapupu Self-Defense Forces seem a lot more on the ball about territorial integrity than our own armed forces were, for which their reward will be a deluge of shark guts.

Josh has sworn a Blood Oath not to cover Luann. A Blood Oath. Worth more than a few bucks, wouldn’t you agree? Make a generous contribution to the Comics Curmudgeon today!

—Uncle Lumpy

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Baby Blues, 12/21/21

Video is an illusion, a series of still images run in sequence so quickly that your brain can’t perceive them as individual pictures and instead smooths them together to create what appears to be movement. In animation, a smear is a trick that can heighten this sense of motion by using an individual frame that itself contains a blur or multiple still images of the moving figure. You can see some great examples here or follow this Twitter feed for more. The technique is also used in comics, sometimes to great effect! But sometimes it implies that a comic strip mom’s face is a nightmarish mass of writhing tentacles just barely contained by a protective mask, and by “protective” in this case, I don’t mean that the mask reduces transmission of the novel coronavirus, but rather that it holds back these awful and presumably slimy face-limbs from bursting out and squeezing the life out of us while we scream in terror.

Mary Worth, 12/21/21

I’m beginning to suspect that the larger point of this Mary Worth storyline is to tap into a near-universal situation: almost all of us have a loved one who is in a relationship with an obviously and objectively terrible person, and it interferes with our own friendship with them. Rather than trying to break them up, Mary implies, we should just accept that people come together for mysterious reasons of their own that we can’t understand. Which is a real cop out, considering that the reason Estelle and Wilbur got back together is because Mary told Estelle to take him back! It’s Mary Worth who’s responsible for your friend’s bad relationship decisions! Here, take this pitchfork and map to Charterstone.

Marvin, 12/21/21

There’s so much about Marvin the comic strip and Marvin the character I find objectionable, but at the top of the list, maybe even above the shitting, is when he gives the audience a smug, knowing look to accentuate some terrible punchline. “Eh?” he seems to asking us today? “Eh? Women be shopping? Sexism? Eh?”

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Mary Worth, 11/11/21

Wilbur continues to moderately out-hip Estelle in his choice of music, turning for his next number to Gotye’s 2011 hit “Somebody That I Used To Know,” an indie rock ditty that frankly cannot sustain the weight of the obvious aggression Wilbur is displaying in his stance here. I trust we’re all continuing to enjoy this as we contemplate the big questions, like why Estelle chose to sit directly in front of the karaoke stage, or why Dr. Ed hasn’t left yet, but I’m kind of tickled that Mary is so clearly not enjoying this. Not that I wish ill on our gal exactly, but the star-crossed Estelle-Wilbur pairing is in fact 100% her fault, and a little light karaoke combat is the least of what she deserves for making it happen.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/11/21

So one of the parishioners at the church where Harry is now the choir director wanted a New Orleans-style jazz funeral, but the church and/or the deceased’s family are way too cheap to actually hire a jazz band, so instead they’re going to try to make the church choir do it. This leads to today’s third panel, which I admit I don’t fully understand but it seems to involve Harry raging against God Himself for putting him in this predicament, which, honestly, is a fair reaction.

Baby Blues, 11/11/21

The COVID-19 pandemic has killed millions worldwide, disrupted economic activity for close to two years, and polarized our politics beyond what most of us imagined possible, but let’s not ignore the real horror: it’s caused some of us to pack on a few unsightly pounds, amiright ladies