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Funky Winkerbean, 7/19/19

For the past few days of monkey madness in this strip, I’ve begun to suspect that the payoff of this Butter Brinkel storyline would be “Zanzibar did it!” This would be some classic Funky grimness: though a chimp has the opposable thumbs necessary to pick up and fire a gun, clearly any resulting death would be both an accident and liable to result in an innocent creature being put down, and so Butter instead refused to testify in his own defense and went to prison in order to save the life of his beloved pet.

What I didn’t expect was that the real solution to the mystery was that Zanzibar did it, and also Zanzibar can think and talk and reason like a human being, and Zanzibar thinks of Butter as his “father,” and the only reason Cliff Anger is still alive is because he didn’t have any actual firearms in the house. I’m looking forward to the vicious, desperate hand-to-hand combat between man and killer ape that will transfix comics readers across the nation for the next several weeks.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/19/19

I had sort of built up this image in my mind of Miss Galexia as a very woo-woo new agey type, an older woman who’s been in this game for years, and who believed in her own mysticism once before she turned it into a lucrative revenue stream, or maybe even still believed and managed to hold both the commercial and the spiritual in her mind at once. Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where everything is pretty much exactly as it seems and can be resolved very quickly, and so Miss Galexia is a petty con artist who likes to cackle about the rubes she’s fleecing with her boss while drinking a cup of what I assume isn’t even herbal tea.

Mark Trail, 7/19/19

I like how the composition here makes it look like Mark and Leola seem to have angrily turned their attention not on JJ, who I assume is thoroughly unconscious, but on Doc, who after all is the guy who got them into this mess in the first place. “Look old man, I’m not scared of some bestubblèd mining shop proprietor with a gun, but at the same time I don’t exactly enjoy having a pistol stuck in my face, so there’d better be some god-damned gold in this magic mine of yours, capisce?”