Crankshaft, 7/16/14
Real Life: “Lillian, Ed was careless taking care of your plants and there was water damage. We brought in a crew to fix it, and added the wine cooler to thank you for being so understanding.”
Crankshaft: “Ed was an asshole, so now he and I are both going to be assholes, because comedy.”
Shoe, 7/16/14
Birds do not work like that, number eight hundred forty-three.
Skyler has a lifetime of this ahead of him; he knows it; and it shows.
Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/16/14
Most dogs sniff asses. Ralph kisses them.
Phantom, 7/16/14
Sanctimonious “No Kill” heroes like Batman, the Lone Ranger, and the Phantom talk themselves into knots trying to, y’know, KILL SOMEBODY without violating their precious “codes.” It makes you long for the moral clarity and no-nonsense efficiency of a Savarna, or an April Bowers-Parker, or … or … both of them together. Yup, long for them. Mmm …
– Uncle Lumpy
Judge Parker, 7/6/14
Oh boy oh boy, we’ve reached the best part of any Judge Parker storyline: the part where the smug, upper-crust protagonists get paid. Remember last year when Neddy befriended do-gooders Ross and Thalia and also invested in their dubious water filtration scheme, and Ross supposedly got kidnapped in Niger and it looked like maybe it was all a scam, but it turned out it wasn’t and our heroes were able to call in some shadowy black-ops extraction team to save him? Well, Neddy just got her first check for her trouble. Plus interest! Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
Speaking of gettin’ paid, remember how April’s dad Abbott had gone down to his heavily armed Yucatan jungle compound, to die? Well, apparently that’s for suckers, so he’s going to come back to the states and be Judge Parker Senior’s highly paid script consultant/the strip’s wacky neighbor instead. Come on board, Abbott! There’s room on this gravy train for everybody!
Shoe, 7/6/14
A good strategy for writing a comic strip is to take a joke your 10-year-old nephew heard in school, but then have one of your characters describe it, ashen-faced, as a terrible nightmare he had, to emphasize the intrinsic horror of the narrative.
Panel from Spider-Man, 7/6/14
Now that Spider-Man has been displaced from his super-heroic role by Doc Ock, Peter needs to find new employment — so why not as a mashgiach? “Wait, was this cow butchered improperly? My trayf-sense is tingling!”
Funky Winkerbean, 7/2/14
Oh, man, check out how terrified Les looks by the idea that even in the fictional world being weaved by Cable Movie Entertainment, Lisa might live! It’s almost as if her death was the foundation on which he built his entire artistic career and sense of self. It’s almost as if he has to kill her again every day in his mind in order to stay Les. It’s almost as if the thought of Lisa alive, standing before him, and seeing what he’s done with his life for the past decade fills him with a the darkest sort of dread.
Take comfort in our evil screenwriter’s cynicism, Les! He’s declared this ending a “happy moment of some kind of swear word (bullshit maybe? let’s say bullshit)” because he knows just as well as you that nobody lives, nobody ever lives, everybody dies.
Shoe, 7/2/14
Ha ha it’s funny because if this show were still on the air its writer-protagonist might use a contemporary publishing platform, can you even imagine how bizarre that would be
Pluggers, 7/2/14
Ha ha it’s funny because older people prefer the pop music of their own youth to contemporary pop music they are so unique and different it is extremely note- and praiseworthy
