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Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/19

Hey, everyone, did you catch the fun comics news in the Grey Lady yesterday? It turns out that this week’s strips, in which a CTE-addled Bull obsessively washes the family laundry over and over again, isn’t just another round of the usual CTE-addled laffs that we’ve come to expect. Nope, according to a big, spoilers-heavy article in the New York Times, it’s just the setup for a month-long storyline that climaxes with … (wait for it) … (stop reading now if you don’t want to learn the extremely predictable denouement to all this, I guess) … Bull’s suicide! Did you worry that Lisa’s demise, being brought about more or less by random chance, wasn’t bad enough??? Well, good news, the character deaths in Funky Winkerbean are just going to get more grim from here on in, and will continue until all the demands are met.

Mark Trail, 9/10/19

Fortunately Mark Trail is a tragedy-free zone, which means that Mark probably isn’t going to be eaten by a yeti. I do enjoy that Doc has stood up in the background between panels; perhaps he assumed that, having managed to survive a desert flash flood, he’d proven his mettle and would now be Mark’s permanent companion on adventures. His facial expression in panel two indicates that he’s terribly disappointed to be displaced by some kind of freakish camel-scientist hybrid.

Shoe, 9/10/19

Shoe of course is a leader on the funny pages among strips that telegraph to us how little any of the characters want to be there or to be participating in the “jokes” or “wordplay” therein. We’re all familiar with the Patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror, but I’m fond of today’s more subtle offering, in which the Perfesser leans away from Roz between panels, as if to get as far away from this “punchline” as possible without actually getting up.

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/19

The Gasoline Alley characters, meanwhile, are proud of their punchlines! So proud they need to explain them to one another, at great length, to make sure that everyone is on the same page.