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Family Circus, 4/29/25

Look, we all make fun of the crania of the various Family Circus children. “Melonheads,” we call them, and it’s become enough of a cliche that we don’t really think about it, really. That’s why it’s just a terrible idea for any individual Family Circus panel to invite us to contemplate the children’s heads in particular. Because they look awful. Like really unpleasant. There’s like a … lobe thing happening on the left side (our right) of these two’s heads, I think it’s supposed to be part of their hair but it’s drawn like it’s a curve in their skull? Don’t care for it. Don’t care for it all. The freckles don’t look great either, for what that’s worth.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/29/25

Welp, the cops came and arrested the dying stalker murderer guy without incident, so I guess we can take a measured breath and move on to the next plot and … oh, what’s this? Kelly’s rushed breathlessly back from college to learn what’s been going on all this time? Well, sure I supposed I have time to watch Summer recap the not particularly exciting last few weeks. I’m not going anywhere! Let’s roll with it! Probably could kill three or four days with this.

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Daddy Daze, 4/28/25

One of my favorite little linguistic quirks is the existence of true homonyms: when two separate words with different meanings and different origins evolve in a language until they happen to be pronounced and spelled the same way. That’s what’s going on here with the word funk, or more accurately the two words funk(s): the “be in a bad mood” word derives from a Scottish and Northern English word of uncertain but possibly Flemish origin that means “become afraid,” whereas the “music to put you in good mood” word derives in slang from the sense (still in use today) of a funk as a bad smell, which in turn comes to English via French from the Latin verb for putting off smoke, fumigare. This is the sort of information I would convey to my baby, if I lived alone with my baby and had very little contact with the outside world and it drove me to a state of madness in which I believed that my baby’s incoherent babbling noises constituted meaningful attempts to communicate that only I could understand.

Andy Capp, 4/28/25

Nice try, Andy Capp. You think you can slip this kind of blatant falsehood past us because we’re dumb Americans who don’t know any better? We may be dumb but we do have access to Wikipedia, which informs us that the parliamentary constituency of Runcorn and Helsby has been vacant for nearly six weeks now. Sadly, the by-election to fill the seat is this Thursday, so it’s too late for Andy to throw his iconic hat into the ring. The sitting MP resigned because he got caught on camera repeatedly punching a man in the street, so it sounds like the locals would’ve been open to Andy’s whole vibe, frankly.

Crankshaft, 4/28/25

Remember “the burnings,” the apocalyptic event in the near-future of the Funkyverse that wiped out most printed literature? Well, it turns out Lilian invented them, as part of her cozy mystery series. And yet we know that her building-code-violating above-the-garage store survived them, which certainly is interesting in light of this new revelation, although we can at least take solace in the fact that she’ll eventually be replaced by a robot.

Heathcliff, 4/28/25

Heathcliff is finally starting a cult! And, you know what, good for him.

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Dustin, 4/27/25

You might recall last week when Dustin was, if not concerned about his parents’ increasingly obvious marital dysfunction and mutual antipathy, then at least kind of satisfied to see it. But Meg? Meg’s younger, and she no doubt has even fewer memories of her parents ever having been happy. This is just the background radiation of her life, and if she has a choice between listening to her father mutter about the long list of resentments her mother clings to or looking at literally anything on her phone, well, that’s not really a very hard decision for her.

Mary Worth, 4/27/25

I’m sorry, I object to this. One thing that I am very certain about is that, culturally speaking, Dawn is an utter philistine. Dawn has not seen Psycho enough times for it to worm its way into her subconscious. Dawn has never watched a black and white movie, or really anything longer than one of your middle-length TikToks. This scene should really be overlaid with the text “POV: Your father’s new girlfriend tries to unalive you with a kn*fe” and somehow take place in the front seat of a car.