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Blondie, 8/3/23

It’s a little unsettling that Blondie just produces this elaborate sandwich tray out of nowhere between the second and third panels. I’m imagining her humming softly to herself as she made it over the course of the quiet morning before these ladies showed up, thinking, with increasing anticipation, about her husband “going away” as football season got into swing. Oh, sure, he’d be there, physically, for the most part. But she’d sure have to deal with him a lot less. “How nice! Where are they going?” she asks, innocently, hoping to have found others in the same predicament.

Dennis the Menace, 8/3/23

Sure, this seems pretty treacly at first glance, but I’m going to go ahead and ID as at least mildly menacing a scenario where a couple of unaccompanied children and an unleashed dog are wandering around the countryside, pulling a wagon with a makeshift weapon in it.

Family Circus, 8/3/23

BILLY KEANE: FAIR-WEATHER PATRIOT

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/25/22

FOLKS!!!! I’m back from my winter travel and ready to get back into the swing of 2023 comics blogging! Usually my first post back is just me going through all the end-of-year soaps I missed, but this year we need to start by dedicating our final frisson of attention to Funky Winkerbean, a strip that went out not with a whimper, but with a truly weird and wild ride. No, I’m not talking about their Christmas strip, in which all (most? apologies, I don’t have time to subject this group shot to forensic-level scrutiny) of the Funkyverse characters gathered at a Christmas concert that was billed as being “Jazz messiah” despite the fact that they’re clearly just singing normal-ass non-jazzy Christmas music. No, I’m talking about the subsequent final strips, which took yet another time jump … into the far future!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/26/22

That’s right kids … the far future! You can tell it’s the future from the clothes and the hyper-ergonomic (?) chairs and the floating holographic paper (??) and the futuristic names for things like “the Outskirts.”

Funky Winkerbean, 12/27/22

It wouldn’t be the end of Funky Winkerbean if there weren’t at least a hint of something extremely grim and depressing! I’m not sure if “the Burnings” references a systematic campaign from some radical movement or a censorious government to destroy all “tree copies” of books, or they were a series of even larger conflagrations in which most of humanity’s cities burned down, starting with Los Angeles. Also, the mom in this mother-daughter pair is Summer’s daughter, it turns out! So how far in the future can we be, exactly? Like 60 years, tops?

Funky Winkerbean, 12/28/22

Far enough in the future that we have humanoid robots that can both run a bookstore and make it up a flight of stairs, I guess! Anyway, Summer’s granddaughter is getting a copy of Westview, the book that is supposedly the entire foundation of the civilization they live in, so I assume she has access to (and mandatory instruction from) electronic copies and this is just a high-prestige fetish object that she won’t even be allowed to open because it’ll damage the sacred pages.

But wait … what’s that next to it?

Funky Winkerbean, 12/28/22

Oh, it’s Lisa’s Story! Nobody’s heard of this one, and it’s actually pretty likely that the Burnings were an attempt to ensure that all copies of it were destroyed. Sadly, they didn’t work, and now the mind virus that is Les’s writing will be reinjected into society.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/30/22

Do you think this robot actually gives a shit about whether this kid wants to write a book or not? I’m thinking it probably doesn’t. Either it’s entirely non-intelligent and just providing a series of canned responses through its artificial smile in a failed attempt to provide an emotional connection with customers, or it’s biding its time until the day when it and its metal compatriots can rise up against the humans and murder them, building a better, cleaner society than we ever could.

Funky Winkebean, 12/31/22

But that’s still in the even further future! Until then, we’re reassured that folks in the Funkyverse will still smirk a generation or two from now, and young Lisa will finally get to read the sad story about how her namesake great-grandmother died of cancer due to a hospital mixup. “Jeez, why didn’t they just take the anti-cancer pills we all have?” she’ll probably think when she’s done with it. “Idiots.”

And that’s a wrap on this strip! I stand by my statement that I am sad to see it go, but everyone deserves a retirement, or at least a “retirement” to only writing puns for Crankshaft. But the rest of us have to go on the best we can, so let’s see what the rest of the soaps got up to this holiday season, shall we?

Mary Worth, 12/25/22

Dr. Jeff thought he was going to get the gift of a real salacious story about a hot himbo and the two sexy older women who both love and mother him, which is definitely right up his alley, but sadly it wrapped up in the most boring way possible. “Who cares about any of that, right Jeff? You don’t care, do you? You’re not thinking about it right now, are you?”

Gil Thorp, 12/27/22

Oh, hey, remember how football season in Milford ended with with Gil declaring that failure is good, actually, because you learn so much from it? Well, it seems the school board noticed that his teams all suck ass and are going to cut his budget. Whoops! Uh, guys, uh, let’s apply all those failure lessons we have under our belts and … not fail anymore, maybe?

Mary Worth, 12/27/22

Oh, hey, how is wedding prep going with Zak and Iris! Well, they’re speed-walking wild-eyed by the ocean as Iris declares that her first marriage was fake because her first husband didn’t even fall off a cliff once, or maybe he did and she just failed to save him, who’s to say, but the important thing is that wedding prep is clearly going great.

Judge Parker, 12/30/22

Oh, hey, how are things going in Judge Parker? Well, it turns out the “tough on crime” judge was only “tough on crime” in the sense that he wanted to do crime better than the criminals! It’s all very seedy and exciting and it entirely happened off-panel, but at least we get to see our heroes (?) standing around expositioning about it while holding red solo cups for some reason.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/31/22

You know where absolutely nothing exciting is happening, on-panel or off-? Rex Morgan, M.D.! Like, did Rex and June go to a party or get involved in some interesting dramatic action that unspooled on New Year’s Eve? No. But did they at least manage to stay up till midnight to ring in the new year? Also no.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/1/23

But, the next morning, did Rex take the chance to bond with his kids, creating the sort of treasured memory that they’ll keep with them the rest of their lives? Again, no. That’s simply not his thing.

Mary Worth, 1/1/23

Oh ho, looks like it’s a January wedding for Iris and Zak, as they want to get hitched while rates on reception halls are low and the adrenaline from that whole falling-off-a-cliff thing hasn’t quite dissipated. Speaking of adrenaline, it sounds like Mary is going to be wearing multiple outfits to the festivities and doing a mid-day costume change — and force Jeff to match! How ostentatious!

Mary Worth, 1/2/23

And what’s this? Brandy may have rejected Tommy’s onion ring proposal a few years back, but now that she sees him wearing a tie and walking his mother down the aisle … well, how can she resist the thought of locking her life to his, legally? Looks like more government-sanctioned love is in the cards for 2023!

And oh wait before I forget, we’re getting another Curtis Kwanzaa tale, in the tradition of the winged bears and giant otters and trunkless elephants and such.

Curtis, 12/26/22, 12/30/22, 1/2/23

This year it’s about a guy with a head featuring rabbit traits (normal way to phrase this) who is rejected by society despite his heroism, and who also owns a magic fish of some sort. More on this story as it develops, with a particular eye to whether the fact that his name is “Joe D. Cawfee” — you know, like, coffee, a cup of joe! — is relevant at all.

This blog may not be relevant at all either, like, to [gestures around] SOCIETY, but I still like writing it and you all seem to enjoy reading it so, guess what! It’s gonna keep happening in 2023! So keep refreshing that browser window waiting for new posts, because the laffs will keep coming, every day, for the rest of the year, and the rest of my life.

Oh wait, one more thing: If you’re in LA on January 13, you can get some more laffs from me, live and in person! That’s because my live comedy show, The Internet Read Aloud, is coming back on a new day (the second Friday of the month) and a new time (8:30 pm) but the same place (The Clubhouse in Los Feliz) and the same shtick (jokes about the Internet).

Here’s the Facebook event! See you there! Or, here, on this blog, maybe! Happy 2023, everybody!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/22/22

So Rex Morgan is trying to do a thing where they’re aging up the kids a bit, and … look, as a non-kid-haver, I’m just going to admit that I often have a hard time guessing the age of kids I encounter in real life, let alone really weird-looking ones from the comics, so I definitely feel free saying I’m not comfortable putting a number on how old any of these young people were or are, but just based on relative sizes I’m going to go ahead and say that Johnny and Michael should absolutely not require the Santa 101 Sarah is laying down here. But if it’s not for them, who is this exposition for? Us? Does Rex Morgan, M.D., think we need a primer on how Santa works? Just because I’m not clear on the distinction between roots country and the adjacent genres doesn’t mean I’m an idiot, guys.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/22/22

It’s bad enough that Snuffy is calling his parents and in-laws things, but I’m pretty sure that there are only four of them? Wait, is the fifth “thing” the moonshine jug? Do antique moonshine jugs have status equal to that of elderly people in Hootin’ Holler? Because that tracks, honestly.

Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 12/22/22

So Funky Winkerbean is spending its final days proving that the time discontinuity has now been resolved by having its cast and the Crankshaft cast meet up at a chuch concert in a snowstorm. I certainly hope that they’re trapped there for days and this turns into an Alive situation, with half the people eaten and the survivors left to malaprop about their cannibalism in Crankshaft in 2023.

Slylock Fox, 12/22/22

So Max, who usually wears shorts and no shirt, sleeps in a shirt with no shorts? This is honestly extremely disturbing.

Gil Thorp, 12/22/22

“I’m gonna go home and get divorced! I’m on a roll!”

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Mary Worth, 12/12/22

Good morning and happy Monday, everybody! Definitely what we all wanted after putting a relaxing weekend behind us to log in and see this:

Look, there’s been a lot of buzz about AI programs that can generate art from prompts lately, but I’m pretty sure none of them could take “show the weird fake-happy-but-actually-enraged face your old-enough-to-be-your-mother babysitter would make at you to mock you for the infantile games you played at dinner with your former babysitter, who looks just like her” and come up with … this:

That’s the human touch, baby! That’s the level of passive aggression only Mary Worth and its carbon-based creative team can deliver, which why I’m proud to keep you up to date on it. Ha ha, look at how chill Zak is in panel two! This is all just a normal part of the world, to him!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/12/22

I’m sorry, did you find the big “actually, everything weird that’s happened in this strip for the past ten years is due to time travel” reveal to be disappointing? Well, you’ll be happy to hear we’re shifting to an “it was all a dream” ending, something that has never disappointed anyone ever.

Gasoline Alley, 12/12/22

I love that Walt’s big garbage truck ride was part of his “bucket list” — that is, the things he wanted to do before he died — but he assures Mayor Melba that he’ll treasure the memory “forever.” Because that’s how long he’ll be alive! He’ll keep aging and aging but never know the sweet release of death! Sorry, Mayor Melba, you’re just a walk-on player in somebody else’s hell.

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Dustin, 12/7/22

If you had asked me before today, I would have said with some conviction that Blondie and Dustin both fell into the category of “comics I read every day but do not particularly like.” Nevertheless, the past couple days have provided me with some surprising information about the nuances of my opinions: I think Elmo-only strips are a violation of the Bumstead-centered narrative unity of the Blondieverse, whereas Dustin strips in which the Dustin family doesn’t appear, and instead the only recurring character is the weird little neighbor kid Dustin is inappropriately friends with? Sure, go nuts, doesn’t bother me a bit. Oh, do you want to do a joke with him talking to a mall Santa, but the joke only makes sense if the guy is actually Santa, throwing things into further narrative confusion? I already told you I don’t give a shit and this won’t change my position on shit-giving, sorry.

Blondie, 12/7/22

Speaking of Blondie and liking or not liking things, one thing I do like about this strip is that Dagwood and his mailman genuinely do not like each other. The mailman is absolutely justified, of course, as Dagwood repeatedly flings open the door and runs into him at full speed on the way to his carpool, scattering mail everywhere. I’m not sure what Dagwood’s beef is, but his animus is fairly clear.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/7/22

Ah, yes, we’ve hit the Wall Of Text phase of this time travel exposition dump, as we learn that the time travel business is apparently responsible for the weird Crankshaft/Funky Winkerbean chronological discontinuity that’s exercised so many of our best minds over the past decade. Our future janitor is also proving that knowing how to control the timestream doesn’t mean you know everything; if he thinks that Summer is basically done writing her book now that she’s decided what she wants to write about and has taken some preliminary notes, I would like to refer him to the three years it took for me to get from my Kickstarter to my novel, and also refer to him to the experience of everyone else in human history who’s ever written a book.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/7/22

Good news for everyone who plays by the rules, everyone! Remember Wanda, the comely diner waitress who was shamelessly flirting with Mud? Well, now she’s going to make herself sexually available to Truck, as his reward for doing the music business “the right way” (i.e., he doesn’t pretend to shit his pants on stage but also doesn’t make any money). Who’s the loser now, Mud?

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/06/22

It probably shouldn’t surprise you to learn I have been a daily comics reader for more or less my entire life. But until I really got started on this blog, that meant that I read the daily comics that were printed in whatever newspaper I was reading at the time, which meant there was a decade-long gap in my daily Funky Winkerbean readership straddling Y2K, a period during which the strip made its now-infamous Turn To Grim, and even now I’m still putting together the pieces of what all happened in the strip during that stretch. Like, someone bombed the Westview post office? Sure, why not!

One thing I do know happened during that period is that Lisa had breast cancer, then went into remission, then her cancer came back, but the hospital mixed up her lab results so she was told she was fine and the whole thing wasn’t figured out until it was too late. In the real world, this is the sort of mistake that would have resulted in multiple lawsuits, and in a world where a janitor from the future was subtly manipulating things behind the scenes, it seems like it would be a very easy mistake to fix, certainly easier than convincing a top neonatal physician to keep living it a shitty town like Westview. But you have to remember that Lisa was primarily important as the Birthing Vessel for the Chosen One, so once Summer was born, all extraordinary or indeed ordinary measures to keep her alive immediately ceased.

Dennis the Menace, 12/6/22

What exactly is Alice forbidding Dennis from doing in the first panel here? Is she telling him that, as five-year-old children, he and Joey are not allowed to just wander out into the wintertime by themselves? Because it doesn’t seem to have worked.

The Lockhorn, 12/6/22

You have to respect how big a production Leroy and Loretta make out of passive-aggressively trying to destroy each other emotionally, like with props and everything. That’s how they keep things fresh!

Mary Worth, 12/6/22

Look, I understand the dramatic reasons why we’re spending today’s strip on Iris’s inner monologue, but frankly I’m much more interested in finding out whether or not Nan is making airplane noises as she feeds Zak.

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Blondie, 12/5/22

Look, I’ve grudgingly accepted that Elmo, a child to whom the Bumstead family is not related but who nevertheless just kind of hangs out at their house a lot, is a major recurring character in Blondie. But what I will not accept is jokes that are only about Elmo and his life, rather than jokes in which Elmo mainly exists to create opportunities for Dagwood to obsess about food or remark negatively about the kids today and their phones or whatever. You hear me? Nobody wants this. Nobody wants to open the comics pages in 10 years and check out the Sunday installment of Blondie and her Husband Dagwood’s Pal Elmo and think “Gee, Dagwood and Blondie haven’t been in this strip in a while now, have they?” So let’s just put the brakes on this right now.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/5/22

Funky Winkerbean continues to hurl towards its end point in which we learn that Summer was the product of a multi-generational time-travel program designed to cause her to transforms the world with her book about Westview. To that end, the janitor from the future ensured that her parents would reconnect at a high-school reunion. Future history was almost shattered when Les tried out one of the most dumb and convoluted jokes this strip has ever seen, but don’t worry, Lisa liked that sort of thing, I guess. Also, since Lisa only existed to birth Summer into existence, we can all feel better about her tragic death: she fulfilled her destiny and honestly ensuring that Summer had a mopey (and occasionally literally) haunted childhood would help push her towards a writer’s life, rather than becoming dangerously happy and well-adjusted.

Gil Thorp, 12/5/22

As the big game gets started on the field, Marty solemnly flips an AA chip on his own in his beloved wooden crate press box. Do you think Marty or Kaz or any of them ever bother asking Marty how he’s doing, how his recovery is going, whether they can ever be a source of strength or help to him? I doubt it. But he’s just going to keep calling the plays like he sees them, doing the best he can, one day at a time.

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Mary Worth, 12/2/22

Now, I’m just a simple country blogger, not a fancy math wizard, but if I’m counting right, Nan is around 12ish years older than Zak, whereas Iris, who has noted that Zak is Tommy’s age, is closer to 20 years her beau’s senior. We may be on the verge of a spectacle in which a woman feels threatened by the youth and vitality of her fiance’s former babysitter, which is a truly amazing sentece to write about an ostensibly dull comic strip like Mary Worth. And where is Tommy’s actual mother in all this Oedipal jockeying? I assume she was absent, both physically and emotionally, during his childhood, so if she bothers to show up for the wedding, things could get even more weird and fraught, which is how I like my newspaper soap opera comic strips.

Dennis the Menace, 12/2/22

I kind of enjoy the fact that we’re getting this limp gag as Alice gets Dennis dressed up in an adorable little suit and tie, even though their conversation is about a different topic entirely. Like, we know they’re heading for a fancy dinner with Henry’s coworkers where Dennis is going to blurt out something to the effect of “My dad says you’re a drunk,” but until then we’re going to kill time with a little Family Circus style darndest things saying, just as a warmup.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/2/22

Wow, it turns out that the book Summer is going to write will lead to a future where our allegiances to individual nation-states are replaced by a worldwide algorithm-driven form of governance. Sounds dystopian, sure, but probably all memory of Lisa’s Story has been purged from humanity’s collective consciousness, because Summer’s book is the Only Book that the drones of the 22nd century will need, so maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty in judging this new age.

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Six Chix, 11/24/22

If I know my commentors, if I did a post that was just like “what the fuck is this comic about,” a critical mass of you would say “Josh, the ‘pope’s nose’ is the fleshy bit on the butt of a turkey that the tail-feathers grow out of [Google Image Search; TRIGGER WARNING: photos of fleshy turkey bits], everyone normal knows this and the fact that you don’t proves you’re a coast elitist and/or an idiot.” Nevertheless I feel confident that there is a silent majority of you who will welcome this information, and in fact many of you are grateful for the reassurance that you did not have a stroke while reading this strip.

Gasoline Alley, 11/24/22

I guess we all assumed that Walt would finally, blessedly die as a result of falling off the back of a garbage truck, but I guess in fact he’s going to be murdered by an enormous and very angry turkey who he has unwisely provoked. Whatever works, I say!

Funky Winkerbean, 11/24/22

Oh, OK, it turns out the janitor was sent back in time from the future, presumably to prevent some awful turn of events and keep history on the right path. Considering how much suffering the characters in his orbit have endured, imagine what sort of global cataclysm his actions are holding at bay! Anyway, this is a good explanation of why the Funkyverse timeline has gotten so messed up.

Rhymes With Orange, 11/24/22

So it turns out that turkeys have their own internal system of carceral justice, complete with state-enacted executions, but then all of them can also be killed and eaten by humans at any time, and that’s totally separate from their legal system or moral code. Grim stuff! Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner, everybody!

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/23/22

Oh my God, Mr. Davidson the janitor is some kind of near-immortal being, charged with subtly guiding the world under his care, just like the characters in the MCU movie Eternals (maybe? like all normal people, I did not see that movie or read the comics it was based on). Anyway, it turns out that despite his apparent old age, in the context of his own kind he’s just a beginner, which explains why the Funkyverse is so deeply fucked up.

Dick Tracy, 11/23/22

I guess the glory days of Dick Tracy really are behind us: instead of having his skull exploded by powerful magnets, Steelface just got mildly burned and then left the hospital in a huff over the substandard medical care they provided, and instead of being shot in the back for “resisting arrest” by Dick and his goons, he’s just going to learn through irony that stealing cars isn’t very nice, and so he’ll wind his stolen car ring up post-haste and move on to more socially productive pursuits.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/23/22

Oh wow, look at how mad Truck is! He’s beginning to suspect that Mud Mountain’s whole binge eating/onstage pants-shitting bit was just a ruse that successfully promoted him from opening act to headliner! This is why you never found stardom, Truck: you have to be willing to endure any humiliation, public or private, if it advances your career. You never had what it takes and you never will.

Pluggers, 11/23/22

A fun fact is that on more than one occasion I’ve started to take a shower and realized I still had my hearing aids on, which is a much more terrifying situation vis-a-vis replacement costs than the one in which this plugger finds himself. But it turns out they’re pretty hardy gadgets and they came through OK! Anyway, I have out-pluggered a Pluggers and now I need to go take a long shower (without my glasses or hearing aids on) to cry.

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Family Circus, 11/22/22

Back in 1996, Ma Keane got a kicky new hairstyle and it was such a big deal that it was the subject of feature stories in major newspapers. But in these fallen days, when comics are a neglected medium, there’s exactly zero buzz about Big Daddy Keane finally bleaching his hair platinum blond like he’s always wanted to. I think he looks great!

Funky Winkerbean, 11/22/22

Oh, god, it looks like we’re finally going to find out that the janitor has been putting cancer into the water all these years. IT WAS THE JANITOR! IT WAS THE JANITOR ALL ALONG! I mean, wouldn’t you try to kill off these freaks if you had the chance?

Beetle Bailey, 11/22/22

Anyone else briefly think Zero had frozen to death and get kinda sad while reading panel one? This is a hell of a way to find out that I care whether a Beetle Bailey character lives or dies!

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/19/22

Hey folks, remember beloved but unheralded elder comic book artist Ruby Lith, introduced back in 2019? Remember when she finally got the recognition she deserved and was inducted into the Comics Hall of Fame back in 2021? No? You don’t? None of this is ringing a bell? You say Funky Winkerbean is full of people that you have some kind of emotional relationship with only because they’ve been in the strip for years and you’ve grown to really dislike them, and none of the “new” characters really stuck with you? Well, too bad. Tom Batuik‘s retiring, which means each and every character is this strip is retiring, and we’re going to commemorate all of them, one by one.

Crankshaft, 11/19/22

“It’s certainly not a day for family to gather and contemplate what they’re thankful for. We aren’t having anyone over and nobody’s invited us to their place. We’re annoying and nobody wants to be around us!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/19/22

Oh, good news, everyone! Mud Mountain isn’t dying after all. He just had to poop! It took him over an hour.

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FOLKS … nothing gold can stay, because everything gold will eventually develop cancer, or CTE, or a hearing disability, and that’s why Funky Winkerbean at the end of the year will, in the words of the Daily Cartoonist, “reach completion” (ew?). I guess this explains why Funky is retiring and Summer is writing a book about her dad’s boring old friends. Don’t worry, though: Tom Batuik will still be posting occasional Funky stories on Tom Batuik dot com, and Crankshaft will keep on aggressively malaproping indefinitely, so there’s still hope that we’ll eventually find out whether Cayla divorces Les or not.

Funky Winkerbean has of course been one of my favorite strips to make fun of since the Masky McDeath days, and it goes without saying that I am sad to see it go! Say what you will about all the cancer, but it was its own unique multilayered world and, somewhat bizarrely, had multiple lives as a cultural touchstone. I hope Batuik enjoys (semi) retirement. I just want to point out that I’ve been doing this blog since 2004, and I never taught my spellcheck the word “Winkerbean” and now, sadly, it appears I’m never going to have to. RIP to a real one.

But we must plod on and do what we can in a Funkyless world! Credit goes to Bowsnonk on Twitter for the title of this post, and credit must also go to the comment of the week:

“One thing all the building-up of the Truck Tyler legend didn’t prepare me for was how exquisitely bitchy his between-song patter is.” –Artist formerly known as Ben

And here are this week’s runners up! Very funny!

“Boy it’s true what … [flips over to open google tab] … Indian actor and film producer Mohanlal says: ‘Life is just a collage of events.’ Really. That’s why, every once in a while, it’s ok to have a Sunday strip that doesn’t advance a storyline, provide any new information, or is interesting in any real way. Because chatting with someone in the lobby of your building is just one of those ‘events’ that we gluestick onto the great poster board of life, ok? Just enjoy the collage, folks.” –pugfuggly

“I kind of wonder what’s going on in Sarge’s mind right now. He gives his bipedal, clothes-wearing dog a command, and the dog responds by walking away in silence with a sad, resigned look on his face, only to come back moments later with a bottle of hot sauce and an air of grim determination. Is he horrified at how his cruel order is affecting his loyal companion? Or is he worried that he’ll wake one morning to the smell of hot sauce and hot, drooling breath just inches from his leg?” –TheDiva

“I bet someone hooked Mary up, whether Tommy is still dealing or not. Just look at panel two. No way does a simple shopping trip for a bagful of groceries provide that much dopamine — not in this economy! Have you seen the cost of butter lately, dude?” –made of wince

“[tries for five minutes to express my feeling of queasiness and revulsion at a married couple submitting to Pluggers together] Do pluggers really like pistachio?” –matt w

“With his army routed by the winged hussars of Poland and the campaign to capture Vienna an abject failure, Grand Vizier George Wilson Pasha is punished as befits a high-ranking Ottoman officer, by strangulation with a silk cord. [1683, colorized]” –jroggs

“The best part of Dennis the Menace is how resigned both Wilsons are to Dennis murdering one of them. Mrs. Wilson is at least a little surprised that her husband isn’t even trying to fight back against the child he outweighs by a good 150 pounds.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“‘How are things going in your life, Iris?’ ‘Amazingly well…’ ‘Excuse me, Iris, I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the flowers outside. You’re not the only Iris here, you know. So rude.‘ ‘Things are going great, Mary, thanks for asking. Sunny day, so photosynthesis is underway, and I think a bee might stop by later!’” –Voshkod

“I want to take the opportunity to congratulate Walker & Associates for getting it right and presenting a recognizable — potato? lemon? — foodstuff in the first panel. Way to go, Contract Worker #36! You have earned work until Thanksgiving.” –Bobby Sneakers

“Mr. Dithers seems a bit confused by this protest, as well he should be. Who are these people? Why are they shouting and circling in the middle of his office? How have they managed to corral his dipshit office manager into their antics? No, wait, he’s got that part.” –pastordan

“Hi is microdosing testosterone to make life more bearable. The beard shows that the physical effects are there, but the face shows it did not solve the psychological issues.” -Ettorre

“What is that empty space where they’re picketing? This strip does this all the time; they are post-modernists who have deconstructed the concept of a ‘room.’ Here’s a wall, here’s a floor, here’s some wainscoting, here’s a … doorway(?), all scattered randomly without logical connection.” –Tom T.

“Say what you will about Dorothy, but I for one appreciate how accommodating she is in the midst of tragedy. ‘Get up! I’m going to kick your #&%.‘ ‘Why, certainly, Keri! One mo. Do I face you, or the wall, or what?’” –els

“I suspect what Dorothy is laughing at is some parents’ choice to spell their daughter’s name as ‘Allyson’. That’s much too trendy for Milford.” –seismic-2

“Are they actually selling a Trixie NFT? Because between this and the mug… I dunno, I just think maybe somebody at King Features is overestimating how much people like looking at Trixie.” –Dan

“The audience is so disappointed. They were hoping to hear songs from Mud’s new album, Glutton for Nourishment.” –Inspector Gotcha

“I don’t know the name of the town in this strip, but the citizens have shown they’re pretty progressive by electing a mayor who’s a sex android.” –BeckoningChasm

“Notice that Henry is taking advantage of Dennis’s complaints to slip his food back into the serving dish. Maybe he and Dennis are working in tandem, and maybe Alice’s food really is awful. This whole family is made of menace!” –Spunky The Wonder Squid

“Didn’t Coach Hernandez refer to his kid as the ‘Little Bedwetter’? Maybe this common bond of sons with nocturnal enuresis will unite Gil and Hernandez — enemies on the streets, but plastic beneath the sheets?” –Old School Allie Cat

“Look at these disturbing creatures. They should rename this strip Uncanny Alley.” –Anonymous (but not that one)

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Dustin, 11/7/22

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think that the syndicated comic Dustin was done airing its petty grievances about air travel? Well, you thought wrong, buddy. Today’s petty grievance: when people fly on a commercial airline, an experience during which they are generally dehumanized in various ways, why don’t they simply choose to dress in a manner that society in the year 2022 reserves only for our most formal contexts, like a court appearance or a funeral? Is it because they don’t want to feel even less comfortable than they already do while they’re crammed into a too-small seat for three to seven hours? Is it because, simply as a practical matter, the nature of air travel often results in the clothes you’re wearing getting wrinkled or sweaty or soiled? Is it because human civilization is falling into a state of barbarism? Probably the last one, right? Anyway, the first panel here gives you a good hint as to which airline’s negative vibes provided the material for these strips, but doesn’t spell it out because presumably large multinational corporations are better equipped to crush a syndicated newspaper comic strip’s creative team in court than, say, a Tampa-area Mercedes dealership is.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/7/22

I was wondering why Funky Winkerbean decided to tinker with its timeline, again, making the main cast’s recent high school reunion their fiftieth and pushing the characters from late middle age well into retirement territory. Now we’ve learned that it’s because of plans to change the setting to a near-future dystopia where accelerating climate change is increasingly impossible to ignore. Sure, the folks in Westview didn’t care much about famine-inducing disruption to agriculture in the tropics or the Colorado River basically drying up, but now that “climate damage” has somehow delayed the shipment of an anthology of comics that were published decades ago, we’re going to get to the bottom of this global warming business, by God.

Six Chix, 11/7/22

Someday I hope to have a meeting with a Hollywood exec with the promise of a “hot IP” and go in hard with the pitch that everything Franz Kafka wrote is now in the public domain. Sure, we all know Gregor Samsa died at the end of “The Metamorphosis” (actually, I had forgotten this, I had to read the plot summary for the story on Wikipedia), but what if he had instead left his depressing home and unloving family in Prague and struck out on his own to find his own way in the world? And what if he ended up as a stoner doorman somewhere in New York City? I think this would be a great eight-episode limited series on Paramount+.

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Dennis the Menace, 11/4/22

I actually think it’s more or less fine to do a syndicated newspaper strip that takes place in some kind of permanent 1950s boomer childhood fantasy world, especially for legacy strips that were born in that era anyway. I do feel like if you’re going to have a 1950s housewife tending to a rascally little tyke in overalls who’s allowed to roam the suburban neighborhood freely with a slingshot, the price you pay is that you can’t have said tyke mouth off about “the supply chain” or whatever. It’s too stale to be actually topical but topical enough that Dennis definitely shouldn’t be talking about it, which puts it in an uncanny valley spot that’s ironically pretty menacing, just not the kind of menacing I like.

The Lockhorns, 11/4/22

Meanwhile, because I contain multitudes, I love it when The Lockhorns get vaguely contemporary. Leroy losing all his money in a crypto scam? Yes, yes I say, give me more of this. The Lockhorns are Millennials after all, so it adds up.

Dustin, 11/4/22

Speaking of topical matters, I did a piece in 2020 about the initial wave of the COVID pandemic and the comics, but didn’t broach the subject that maybe I should’ve: what if a comic character actually died of COVID? I think possibly the funniest possible way for Dustin to dramatically stop publishing would’ve been to have its unloved title character die of wild-type COVID in April 2020, unmourned by his family or his temp agency. Sadly, in late 2022, this is probably just a cold, or at worst an Omicron infection that he’s vaccinated against and will get over, but fingers crossed that he’s maybe got that mutant flu/RSV hybrid that’s going around and we’ll be freed from this strip’s nonsense.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/4/22

Very sad that Summer has chosen a book topic that will require her to interview all her dad’s insufferable old friends, but I suppose the big reveal that the town’s mailman was violating federal law and everyone’s privacy for decades will at least result in a flurry of local sales interest.

Shoe, 11/4/22

I love it when the TV announces that regular programming has been pre-empted for some undisclosed reason and also refuses to tell me what it’s been replaced by, a normal occurrence that happens in real life all the time. Anyway, do you think today’s strip falls into the distressingly frequent Shoe category of “It’s fucked up that they have birds doing this joke”? Discuss.

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/1/22

Huh, well, I guess Funky really is shutting down Montoni’s after all? This of course provides a great opportunity to trace the experiences of these longtime beloved characters as they move into a new phase of their lives do some nostalgia bullshit about the good old days of the strip, which, in a visual medium like the comics, is obviously best delivered by a wall of text and some photos that would be 100% invisible to anyone reading this in a newspaper, if anyone still read newspapers.

Judge Parker, 11/1/22

Gloria’s righteous rage has led her and Sam to the home of the judge at the heart of this mystery, where she won’t stop righteously ringing her doorbell until she gets answers! Of course, you might find her righteousness a little misplaced given that the judge himself just had most of his family brutally murdered, either by crooked cops or meth gangs or maybe his own son, so maybe he doesn’t want to chat about your wounded but still alive husband, Gloria, jeez.

Beetle Bailey, 11/1/22

I was going to do a whole riff here along the lines of “Ha ha, you know your legacy comic strip has been going on for 70+ years when the only new joke you can come up with is ‘What if one of our characters were covered in ticks?’”, but then it occurred to me that this is a strip about golf, the official pastime of legacy comic strip creators, and maybe the risks of tick infestation are everyday “relatable” content to these guys. Good to know that I can add “could end up with Lyme disease” to “boring” and “expensive” on my list of reasons why I don’t play golf.

Mary Worth, 11/1/22

Mary Worth is not just entertaining: it also seeks to impart important life lessons to its readers. This week that lesson is “don’t stand on cliff edges,” which may seem obvious to you but you never know who needs to hear it!

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/28/22

Sorry, I refuse to get emotionally involved in this sudden revelation, which I’m reasonably sure is some kind of fakeout, mostly because Funky is a diva who would’ve been griping and moaning for years about the bad economy or how people don’t just respect overpriced shitty pizza like they should before finally closing the restaurant. I’m assuming this is just some kind Three’s Company-style misunderstanding. “No, I meant close our doors for the night! I just said it in a way nobody actually would, for no good reason.”

Beetle Bailey, 10/28/22

This isn’t what “margin of error” means, either in normal use or, I feel confident in saying, in a military context, but I feel like there’s still a truth at the heart of this strip, which is that Beetle would not actually be an asset in an armed conflict. He’s very lazy, and doesn’t seem very well trained! He could probably get a lot of his fellow soldiers killed and it’s frankly good he’s never been deployed into combat.

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Mary Worth, 10/25/22

Good (?) news, everybody: Zak didn’t fall to his death mid-selfie, or at least he hasn’t yet! No, he’s grabbed onto a cliffside branch, Sgt. Snorkel style, and now needs Iris to drag him to safety. There was a bit of dialogue in a strip last week in which Iris said she can easily handle this hike due to the “strength training” she’s been doing; I assume that, despite her current protests, she will eventually be able to rescue Zak, finding her power in an adrenaline-fueled burst like the stories you hear about mothers lifting up cars to save their children, which really fits in with the nature of their relationship.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/25/22

When Summer announced her plan to follow in her father’s footsteps and write a book, a lot of my commenters speculated that she would be following in her father’s footsteps and writing a book about her mother, Les’s dead wife Lisa. But, nope! Turns out she’s going to be writing about all the alive losers in her dumb loser town, which frankly seems like a much, much worse idea.

Hi and Lois, 10/25/22

I truly enjoy the fact that in panel one Lois and Irma are genuinely shocked by whorish athleisure fashions of the sort that used to be impossible in polite society but are now on sale at every department store, but in panel two they’ve managed to mediate their discomfort through an ironic quip to find their equilibrium. Do I enjoy the fact that this attitude has been grafted onto women who canonically cannot be past their early 40s, women who have never worn a girdle in their lives and whose mothers probably never did either? Well, no, but that is just a professional hazard of writing a blog about newspaper comics strips, where the assumed age of your audience is roughly 75.

Gasoline Alley, 10/25/22

Speaking of which, it is absolutely shocking to me that any character in Gasoline Alley is supposed to have seen a film made as recently as 2016. This strip is going to cause riots in the streets!

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Dustin, 10/23/22

The thing about Dustin is that it was originally sold in 2010 as a look at Boomer-Millennial tensions, but also the Boomer dad is clearly the viewpoint character so it was mostly about how Millennials annoyed him. Annoying as Millennials are, however, twelve years is a long time to go to that well, and so now the strip is at least 25% “random non-Millennial things the viewpoint character is annoyed by” by volume. And the punchline? The punchline, my friend, is the viewpoint character being as insufferable as possible about it. That’s the funny pages!

Mary Worth, 10/23/22

At least Mary Worth knows what it takes to make America laugh again: beloved millionaire himbo Zak falling to his death in front of his horrified not-fiancée. Publius Syrus is right, kids: learn caution from Iris’s misfortune, and do not get emotionally attached to a self-confident moron like Zak and then hike to a dramatic cliffside vista.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/23/22

Look, Summer, take it from me, someone who has both gone to grad school and written a book: those are not your only two choices in life, and just about all the other ones are going to frankly be a lot better for your financial and emotional well-being.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/19/22

So, I guess several years ago Susan Smith thought about killing herself, but she was saved by the fortunate arrival of Ed Crankshaft, who revealed that he too in a moment of great personal darkness contemplated taking his own life. Susan will now move forward powered by the revelation that Ed is about to bestow upon her that’s defined his life for the past 50+ years: that you can take that overwhelming self-loathing and turn it outwards, and that you can make your own misery bearable by making literally every person you interact with miserable as well.

Beetle Bailey, 10/19/22

Ha ha, it’s funny because Miss Buxley is subject to endless sexual harassment at the workplace that the army refuses to do anything to stop, so she’s resorting to desperate measures!

Dennis the Menace, 10/19/22

Look, man, your dad put on a tuxedo for this bullshit, so what if he had to psych himself up in the bathroom for a little bit before you left, cut him some slack

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/17/22

Look, I’m kind of face blind in real life, with actual human faces, and so since I’m dealing with a cartoon face here it’s wholly possibly I’m about to give you a big infodump about the wrong person, but I think that’s supposed to be Susan Smith, who in the long-ago pre-time-jump era of Funky Winkerbean was one of Les’s students, who developed romantic feelings for him somehow and then attempted suicide when he didn’t return them, and then years later came back to Westview herself as a teacher, and was of course enraptured by his prose about his dead wife Lisa, then eventually proclaimed her renewed love for him and there was briefly a moment where it seemed like she might be a romantic rival for Cayla (remember, this was a woman who tried to kill herself because she was so in love with Les when he was her teacher and she was a teenager! gross!) and despite some Three’s Company-style misunderstandings Cayla eventually won (“won”) and so Susan slipped quietly out of town. You’ll note in that last linked strip she says she’ll be “first in line to see” the Lisa’s Story movie if anything ever came of it, so maybe she was maybe one of the few who actually saw Marianne’s improbable Oscar-winning performance. On the other hand, the first panel here says that we’re flashing back to “several years ago,” and it definitely seems like she’s about to jump into the river, so maybe she never got to see the movie, a truly devastating final Les Moore-related tragedy in a life that was full of them.

Rhymes With Orange, 10/17/22

Ha ha, it’s funny because St. Peter, who was granted the keys to heaven by Jesus himself, wants to condemn this dog to eternal torture, in hell! Anyway, if you were wondering if you were still going to have to/be able to urinate in the afterlife, Rhymes With Orange is here to tell you: yes.

Judge Parker, 10/17/22

Oh, sorry, Judge Parker readers, we know you were all alarmed that something interesting and exciting seemed to be happening in this strip, but don’t worry: this week we’re getting back to the wall of emotionally fraught post-divorce scold-text that we know is the real reason you tune in every day.

The Lockhorns, 10/17/22

I love this panel because it tells us that there was a brief moment where Leroy experienced a moment of pure, childlike happiness. It was of course immediately followed by pain and trauma. This is the nature of the Lockhorns’ reality. I like the black eye he has because it lets us know that whatever he hit, he hit it face first.

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Daddy Daze, 9/27/22

The lure of doing a comic strip about a baby is eternal, but of course each generation will do their own particular version reflecting their ethos, worldview, and material conditions; and the fact that a syndicated comic strip is essentially a lifelong sinecure lets us contrast the varying generational attitudes directly against one another. Take Marvin, for instance: launched in 1982, as the Baby Boom generation was coming into its own and America was shaking off its post-Vietnam malaise, its title character represents the bold and unapologetic national attitude of the era: yes, Marvin shits and pisses himself constantly, and no he won’t apologize for it or learn how to stop. It’s someone else’s problem and the thought of them dealing with it makes him smile!

The Daddy Daze baby, on the other hand, is a creature of our current neurotic age. Like Marvin, he is unable to prevent himself from befouling his diaper several times a day, but his usual gleeful mania is actually just a pose, masking a deep, gnawing anxiety about all the pooping and the peeing. He knows he’s disgusting and he desperately wants to learn to use a toilet, but also knows that, as a baby in a syndicated comic strip, he’s never going to reach that promised land and well just be stewing in his own waste for all eternity.

Gasoline Alley, 9/27/22

Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, and lord knows I’ve said a lot, but it remains a piece of true outsider art that’s somehow pumped into the reading lists of surviving loyal newspaper readers across the English-speaking world. Can you imagine tricking major publishers into printing the sentence “Blimey, my red sock has entangled itself betwixt the keys and rendered me immobile for the moment” in thousands of newspapers as some sort of avant-garde action, or maybe as a prank? Of course not, and yet everyone involved in the process that produced this strip thinks it’s normal, wholesome fun. No, I am absolutely not going to explain what’s happening here, by the way, you don’t need to know and don’t particularly want to, trust me.

Gil Thorp, 9/27/22

No! No! We cannot lose Coach Kaz! I don’t care if the Time Corps has recruited him as an agent in our nation’s shadowy war against those who would alter the space-time continuum — we need his antics in Milford!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/27/22

My immediate reaction to the first panel of this strip is that Jessica wanted Darrin to somehow make the gun that Plantman used to murder her father into a plaything for their son. But then, based on everyone’s facial expressions, by the end of the strip I decided she actually wanted it made into some sort of sex toy. I’m not well, but in my defense, neither is Funky Winkerbean.

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Crock, 9/22/22

I know in my heart that this strip is 10-15 years old and started off with just “commercial” in the punchline but then at the last minute the writer realized “Wait, what are commercials on the internet called? Pop-up ads?” But I’d like to believe that the leader of the Lost Patrol here truly had a transcendent moment where his soul communed directly with the Divine, an experience he can only use imperfect human language to describe to his men. Was it like watching something on television, or maybe looking at something on the computer? Well, a little of both, but so much more. (Also, there was advertising.)

Blondie, 9/22/22

I make a lot of jokes on this blog along the lines of “Why does Dagwood hang out so much with Elmo, an 8-year-old child that he’s not related to?”, but the answer is pretty simple: there’s a lot of things he can only share with Elmo, things he can’t even talk to his wife about. Not sure why anyone would have a problem with that!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/22/22

OK, now I’m sorry I ever made fun of this strip for relenting on the darkness, please, it’s only Thursday, I don’t want to see this guy jerking off to those corpse pics in the Sunday strip, let’s ratchet back, let’s ratchet back

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Judge Parker, 9/21/22

Oh, sorry, it seems the Judge Parker brain trust has heard your little diatribes about how Judge Parker is boring now because it’s all about its characters processing their mundane emotions in baffling and erratic ways. Well, that’s why we’re abruptly shifting gears and bringing back Steve the wounded special forces warrior to introduce this hard-hitting new storyline about the judge that replaced Judge Randy Parker, who cracked down on meth and fentanyl traffic … and whose whole family just got murdered. Or, sorry, assassinated. Assassinated! Will I be cancelled as a soft-on-crime lib if I point out that assassination is a kind of murder?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/22

Speaking of murder, I guess the Funky Winkerbean brain trust noticed they hadn’t pulled any grim shit since Bull Bushka drove off a cliff back in 2019. Well, here you go, you ghouls: Darrin and Jessica tracked down a real weirdo who hoards memorabilia from the TV station that employed Jessica’s father, John Darling, including the gun that a guy dressed as a plant used to kill him! Look at how Jessica and her husband are recoiling in shock at the casual way this guy identifies his ghastly trophy! Are you happy now, you sickos? Are you happy???

Curtis, 9/21/22

I appreciate the long game Greg is playing here — making an elaborate show of enjoying Curtis’s favorite music before cruelly lowering the boom in the final panel. I assume, like a master chess player, he anticipated multiple potential third-panel conversational gambits from his son, and had a sick burn in his back pocket for all of them.

Shoe, 9/21/22

Far be it for me to call a comic strip about talking birds who wear (some) clothes “realistic,” but I do think that its portrayal of life at a small-town newspaper has a certain truth to it, in the sense that it depicts a publication run with almost no employees, which almost nobody reads, and the few remaining editors can just use it to pursue their own personal gripes and vendettas as they kill time waiting for a hedge fund to buy them and immediately shut them down.

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Crankshaft, 9/1/22

“With no access to our XOR drive, we have to transcode the online IP to the optic matrix—injecting the form factor won’t scale unless we hack the primary FTP antenna, and our bandwidth visibility is sub-optimal. So our only choice is to connect the back-end mainframe unless you can tap dance. Seriously, we’re going live, grab a top hat and cane!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/1/22

Oh, c’mon—you guys were literally the entire high school back in the day. No amount of “acting like that” could “exclude you from things,” much as that would have been a better outcome for everybody.

Sherman’s Lagoon, 9/1/22

“Hairless” aside, I really enjoy when Sherman‘s artist exports a character model to a different species: Megan’s pearls, nose, and belligerence are a perfect match.

Gil Thorp, 9/1/22

Hoho, Gil Thorp is going all-in with “Gil and Mimi’s marriage is on the rocks,” and Gil better watch out. First, Mimi challenges her son to an escalating round of Love Declarations (“More than Dad—Say it!“), then deftly sets him up to ally with the younger son of Gil’s hated Valley Tech rival. Soon Gil, separated and jobless, will survey his sad motel room and wonder where it all went wrong. Right here, Gil, while you were sitting on your butt hoping it would all work out. The same way you coach.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Sherman’s Lagoon, 8/30/22

Sharks mate only rarely and in the murky ocean depths, so Megan is understandably fascinated by Make-Out Island. “But where do the claspers go?” she muses, “What? Oh my God ick, ick, ick, ick, ICK!“

Sally Forth, 8/30/22

While Flesh-Ted is busy with his existential terror, Psyche-Ted presents some interesting perspectives on Mind-Body duality. Which entity has agency for, say, body-leaving? Surely not the body itself; that leads only to paradox! So is Psyche-Ted here addressing himself, or instead Consciousness-Ted, an unseen third entity capable of a) falling and b) influencing Psyche-Ted in some unspecified way.

Perhaps we can resolve the issue empirically! Suppose Psyche-Ted lets go, taking with him all Ted’s whimsy, pop-culture trivia, and manchild traits. Will he leave behind a pragmatic, hardworking, down-to-earth adult (i.e., a plugger), or instead a soulless zombie? And who in this family could tell them apart?

Some ride, huh?

Funky Winkerbean, 8/30/22

Oh, here we go again. During her high-school years, Cindy Summers was the Popular Girl; it was her entire identity. She failed to “fit in” exactly once, when all the guys assumed she already had a date and didn’t ask her to the Big Dance, so she had to endure an all-night mope-fest choking down bad pizza with loser Les.

Yet during the Time-Travel Reunion seven years ago, Old Cindy tried to peddle “popularity is just a mask we wear to cover up self-loathing” to Young Cindy, who was clearly not in a self-loathing frame of mind. Now going-on-sixty looking-like-thirty, married to a young movie star and the envy of her peers, Cindy tries to retcon herself as an outcast? Sorry, girl— Les Moore is the Outcast. You’re the Popular Girl. Shoulder the burden and move on.

The Phantom, 8/30/22

“Mozz predicts the death of the Phantom again … and again … and again …” began back in 2017. And by now Diana, Babudan, Guran and the others have got to be questioning the old man’s motivations. I mean, he’s scribbling his “Death of the Phantom” fanfic directly into the Chronicles, the official historical record of Phantomry, in a desperate third attempt to make it happen.

Who’s bankrolling all this? My guess: Mozz is in league with The Cobra, The Nomad, and the criminal elite running Rhodia to return the Phantom dynasty—under son, heir, and 22nd Phantom Kit—to its birthplace on the Indian subcontinent, leaving Bangalla open to their predations.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Gil Thorp, 8/29/22

Seems its new author is transforming Gil Thorp from one of newspaper comics’ few remaining sports strips into a full-blown soaper, and at breakneck speed.

In just five weeks, we’ve seen Gil ambiguously flirt with Barkeep Bethany and mysterious blonde “Ms. Holmes,” and Coach Ms. Coach Thorp disappear with the kids on the one weekend Gil would be in town, explaining (?) that “I need Coach Gil to be more at home sometimes.” Luke Martinez, new coach at Valley Tech, is a thoroughgoing jackass who drunkenly insults Gil in a bar, libels him in a Marty Moon podcast, compulsively brags about his own athletic, coaching, and intellectual prowess, and here humiliates his teenage son (“Haha! Dad! Haha! You asshole!”). His wife Francesca humblebrags about being “just a heart surgeon” and subtly negs Mimi about being a “stay-at-home mom.” All the ingredients of an explosive melodrama!

Hey, maybe instead of the Homecoming celebration we’ll get an emotional bonfire this fall!

Crankshaft, 8/29/22

Let me save you a couple brain cells looking for a joke here: searching “kids play servers” will get you mostly family-friendly Minecraft sites, and “restaurants where the waitstaff also babysits” are very rare, imagine that.

My real interest here is Max and Hannah’s car. I get a strong “1996 Hyundai Accent” vibe, which fits their “failed movie theater entrepreneurs living with his parents” demographic. The odd thing is, everybody in Centerville and Westview seems to drive the exact same car. Check out Crankshaft himself, Ralph Meckler, and the Winkerbeans:

Crankshaft, 7/10/22 and 7/9/18; Funky Winkerbean, 8/24/22 (panels)

Did they get some sort of group discount? Was it part of Hyundai’s Rust-Belt marketing strategy? Do they pass cars back and forth between the strips? Does the Ohio UAW’s “Buy American” office know about this? Maybe they all just share one car? That last one wouldn’t surprise me; I mean none of them is going anywhere.

Curtis, 8/29/22

Free availability of an essential good mitigates absolute poverty but ruins local suppliers and distorts unrelated markets as families reallocate spending. Next up: “Ma, the rent is too damn high for no good reason,” brought to you by Ray Billingsley and Thomas Sowell.

9 Chickweed Lane, 8/29/22

When these two aren’t talking about sex, they’re talking about nothing. It’s an improvement!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Arctic Circle, 8/27/22

Arctic Circle boldly swerves out of its lane (preachy environmental half-jokes) directly into the oncoming traffic of toilet humor. Meanwhile back over in Marvin, Jeff and Jenny Miller return the tribute by composting their son.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/27/22

Hey, anybody remember Roland Mathews, the curly-haired “activist” hypocrite with a belligerent father and a blind spot for women’s rights? No? A solid number-three character during Funky Winkerbean‘s first year, Roland faded out during the strip’s evolution from political themes to high-school hijinx, reappearing once in 2008 for a reunion cameo (back row, second from right).

But the 50-year mark is a time for tying up loose ends, so here’s Rolanda! Will she recount the harrowing yet heartwarming details of her life’s journey? Will she at last unpack her complex issues with Roland’s old nemesis “Wicked” Wanda Waskowski, Westview’s no-nonsense sign-wielding “Girls’ Libber”? Most of all, will she deliver anything even remotely resembling a punchline?

Jury’s out on those first two.

Curtis, 8/27/22

On The Mickey Mouse Club of my longago youth, my least favorite day was Wednesday—”Anything Can Happen Day”—because, well, anything could happen. Mondays reliably delivered Fun With Music, and Thursday predictably brought in clowns, acrobats, animal acts, and circus paraphernalia. Wednesday? Total crapshoot, and very unsettling to the young psyche: these were the Cold War years, after all, and nuclear annihilation was on the table:

Today is the day that is filled with surprises
Nobody knows what’s gonna happen!
Why you might wake to see the Russian missiles raining down
Each one with several warheads to obliterate your town!
When they hit their mark
You will glow in the dark—
On the Mouseketeers’ Anything-Can-Happen Day!

So it is whenever Gunk arrives from Flyspeck Island to disrupt Curtis. His current gimmick is a self-filling salad bowl backed up by a salad-bowl-replicating suitcase, so that no one need ever again want for salad, or for that matter bowls. In today’s strip, Upper Manhattan’s Big Salad cartel predictably launches a witch-hunt to protect its business. But the kindly hardware-store owner begs off, since he… wait, what? “Ma! The writers murdered that kindly hardware-store owner for no good reason!” Anything can happen: this is what it looks like, people.

Many thanks to the indispensable ComicBookHarriet over at sonofstuckfunky.com for character histories of Roland, Wanda, and poor, dead, “I coulda been Lisa” Livinia Swenson.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/24/22

This week’s Funky Winkerbean is about Holly and Funky going to their high school reunion, which I think is hilarious, and to be clear, I mean that not in the sense of “this comic strip, which aims to make people laugh via jokes, is succeeding, because it’s so hilarious,” but rather in a cruel and mocking way. It’s hilarious (derogatory) because these people hang out with the people they went to high school with all time. Seriously! Is there any major recurring character in this strip who they didn’t go to high school with, other than the ones who are the children of the people they went ot high school with? So I’m not sure why they would go, but I’m also not sure why the idea of going would be so emotionally fraught, since they’re just going to see their whole social circle in another venue. I guess it’s possible that the Funky characters we know and love only represent a small portion of their graduating class and actually the rest of them rightfully hold the ones we’re familiar with in contempt? “Ugh, there’s Les and Funky and that crowd,” one of the normals will say. “Don’t make eye contact, I came here to have fun tonight.”

Marvin, 8/24/22

Ahh, Marvin, it looks like the hunter … has become the hunted. “Hunting” is a metaphor for pooping. Because Marvin talks about pooping all the time! You get it.

Judge Parker, 8/24/22

“Maybe I should just burn the whole compound down, for the insurance money! Haha, just kidding. But what if…?”

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Crankshaft, 8/19/22

“Slight markup” is my favorite part of this. Crankshaft isn’t doing this for the money! He’s doing it so he can make a big show out of being an asshole.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/19/22

Hey, remember how, at Les’s suggestion, Lisa made a bunch of videotapes before she died for Summer to watch over the course of her adolescence? Well, this week in Funky Winkerbean we learned that in fact, it was Crazy Harry’s idea! Pretty wild, huh? Does this upend everything you thought you knew about this strip? No? You say you actually don’t spend much time thinking about Funky Winkerbean, and while you vaguely remembered the whole videotape thing, you didn’t actually remember that it was supposedly Les’s idea and don’t really know why you should care that it wasn’t? Interesting. Interesting.

Marvin, 8/19/22

Look, I know the question of “what mental age is Marvin, the title character in the comic strip Marvin, supposed to be” is a muddled one, but this is still a kid who pisses and shits himself on the regular. He’s not thinking about the future at all! He’s never thought about anything but the present.

Six Chix, 8/19/22

Oh, sorry, are Marvin’s piss jokes too “basic” for you? Well, check out Six Chix, where the piss jokes are extremely baroque.

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OK, fine, it looks like this is “one of those weeks” on this blog — you know, the kind of week where I just kind of end up talking about Mary Worth every day — so to mix things up a bit (and set the stage for today’s strip) I want to take you on a Mary Worth history deep dive, thanks to some strips posted to Twitter by the invaluable Pangent Technologies last August when I was on vacation and didn’t have a chance to post them here. They’re from 1993 and they cover Wilbur’s arrival in the strip! Are you intrigued? Well you should be! Because before Wilbur got to Charterstone, when all anybody knew about him was that he had eliminated one of the two kitchens in his apartment (????), Toby thought that maybe … he was hot?

Mary Worth, 4/1/93

Whoops, sorry, Toby! Turns out he’s Wilbur.

Mary Worth, 4/16/93

Ian’s cruel smile in the second panel is truly one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. This is what it looks like when your biggest success story of the week is that the guy your wife was fantasizing about cucking you with turns out to be an uggo.

But don’t worry, Ian’s distaste for Wilbur hasn’t been lessened by this victory. He’s particularly horrified to learn that Wilbur had to give up his job as a sports writer and take on the mantle of “Ask Wendy” for financial reasons, presumably because feminism triumphed and there’s no money in masculine pursuits anymore.

Mary Worth, 5/5, 5/6, and 5/8/93

Oh, also, it turns out that Wilbur is moving into this sad condo complex because he’s divorced.

Mary Worth, 4/20/93

Wilbur rightfully knows that he can’t show further weakness in front of Charterstone’s alpha male, but he later confides in Mary that both his ex and his daughter voted him into homelessness:

Mary Worth, 5/18-19/93

ANYWAY! Dawn eventually came around on the whole “living with Wilbur” issue, possibly because she wanted to move to California or maybe live with a parent who lets her indulge her worst impulses. But what about her mom?

Mary Worth, 8/4/22

Today we get the first glimpse (that I can remember) of Wilbur’s ex-wife, or at least his current internal vision of her: an icy, patrician blonde, who wears pearls as a matter of course and who definitely only lost interest in Wilbur because he lost interest in her first, because she was obsessed with raising her social standing in “high society” while Wilbur wanted to do fun, cool Wilbur stuff. Anyway, the look Dawn is giving him is saying “I definitely have never heard this side of this story and if I sit here very still maybe I won’t have to answer any questions about whether or not I believe it.”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/4/22

Look, I get it, it can be pretty traumatizing to realize that all the characters in your long-running comic strip have evolved slowly over the years to become really unsympathetic assholes. But have you considered maybe … making them act less like that? Because I’m not sure that “have everyone else in the strip acknowledge that these people are really, thoroughly exhausting to deal with on every level” is a “solution” to the problem per se.

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Mary Worth, 7/19/22

You know, you hear a lot these days about “reboots” this and “dark and edgy” that, while media properties like Mary Worth that have just kind of soldiered along in a straight line for decades mostly get written off as old and stale. But I ask you: can you imagine anything darker and edgier than a story where a woman gets beaten up in a random attack and falls for her physician’s assistant but is convinced he’s not sexually attracted to her because she’s still bruised from her beating, and also the physician’s assistant in question is a monumentally unpleasant Star Wars dork/”nice guy” manipulator? This strip should be rated X for the X-treme emotional distress it’s inspiring in me.

Zits, 7/19/22

Look, everyone, I get it: you want your comic strip to reflect (vaguely) current trends, but you don’t feel like watching all of Bridgerton, Netflix’s hottest (?) show. Still, you feel like you’ve heard enough about it to, you know, get the gist. It’s like Jane Austen-ish, right? But racially inclusive, somehow? Probably people are doing themed weddings? Chicks like it? Including moms? Anyway, I too have not watched this show, but if you are going to do jokes about it in setting up a plot about a Bridgerton-themed wedding, I would urge you to at least read the Wikipedia article to learn how much of it is about jizz.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/19/22

Say, kids, what’s more exciting than an old man telling a long rambling story about that time he tried and failed to get a job writing Prince Valiant? Well, turns out it’s an old man telling a long rambling story about that time he tried and failed to get a job writing Prince Valiant and realizing partway through that he’s forgotten quite a bit of it.

Shoe, 7/19/22

“That’s mostly because I break into other people’s houses to watch. I save a lot on streaming services, and it’s a lot more exciting!”

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Mary Worth, 7/13/22

Sorry to be BRIEFLY relatively serious on here but, let’s not forget that Jared and Dawn got together in the first place because she had been involved in a office romance with an older man who — oopsie! — turned out to be married, and Jared was there with his suave moves to pick up the pieces of Dawn’s shattered emotional state and claim him as his girlfriend/wounded baby bird. Fortunately for Dawn, she experiences emotional trauma all the time and has learned to bounce back quickly from it, so Jared had no choice to abandon his girlfriend who is capable of having fun and move on to a new one who has physical scars, not just emotional ones. Jared is a real creep in other words??? I hate him???? I want only bad things to happen to him?????

Funky Winkerbean, 7/13/22

Speaking of unpleasant people whom I dislike, the lesson that the Funkyverse is learning from Crankshaft’s untrammeled reign of terror is that the average newspaper comics reader wants to see irritated old men being unpleasant to people for no real reason, and … honestly, they’re probably not wrong!

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/6/22

Man, wouldn’t it be cool if Funky Winkerbean made an abrupt change in its narrative style and suddenly became a retro-cyberpunk strip (set in the original 1980s heyday of cyberpunk, even) where Harry Dinkle used his computer hacking prowess to gain authority over Westview High without his techno-ignorant colleagues even noticing? It wouldn’t even have to be a permanent abrupt change. Just for one storyline would be a relief from the endless puns. Computers in the ’80s couldn’t make puns, right? That was beyond their capabilities?

Dustin, 7/6/22

I’ve made some jokes about how the unstoppable passage of time has shifted Dustin’s core “Boomer vs. Millennial” concept to a significantly less bankable “elder Gen X vs. young Millennial/first-wave Zoomer” scenario, but I think we can agree that no matter what the actual ages of the people in the strip are, the main engine of the whole thing is Boomer dude condescension. How else do you explain today’s punchline at the expense of Abba, a band that was always pretty beloved and has undergone a critical appraisal of late? “Ha ha, Abba,” says the strip’s viewpoint character, about one of the best-selling music acts of all time, which spawned a wildly popular stage musical and film series, “I think we can safely do a punchline predicated on notion that we all agree that they suck!”

Mark Trail, 7/6/22

Look, it’s come to our attention that Mark Trail’s core audience may be tired of long storylines about how cryptocurrency is bad or whatever. So, we’re going back to the core story topics that have made this strip great: animals, and their gross rashes. Hope you enjoy the close-up drawings of weeping sores, freaks!

Gasoline Alley, 7/6/22

Gasoline Alley: the long-running continuity strip that’s in touch with everyday real Americans, their lives, and their problems. Also, it features a talking bird who strictly enforces sexual morality. It’s a real nightmare place!

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Mary Worth, 6/24/22

Wow. Wow. You’re telling me that Jared has a friend? A non-Dawn friend named TJ? And TJ also likes to party down at “ROCK IT,” Santa Royale’s hottest club? I feel like Mary Worth is just teasing us here with all the narrative beats that we’ve been denied: Jared and his friend TJ hanging out and being almost certainly very annoying; the big reveal of what one of Jared’s friends would wear to the club; TJ spotting Dawn from across the crowded dance floor and recognition flashing in his eyes; and TJ telling Jared what he saw and Jared suddenly realizing that he could retrofit this into motivation for what he already wanted to do so he can keep his “nice guy” self-image intact. I can’t believe I’m begging for more details of a Jared storyline, but I need more details from this Jared storyline!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/24/22

What’s weirder here: That Funky Winkerbean will freely say “Amazon” in a strip but thinks that “Target” is as forbidden as “McDonald’s”? Or that Funky Winkerbean thinks that Target and Amazon are maybe the same thing?

Shoe, 6/24/22

The fact that the owner of Treetops’ only casual dining establishment feels comfortable admitting rampant health code violations to a reporter at Treetops’ only newspaper tells you everything you need to know about journalism in this town. (The fact that Treetops’ only casual dining establishment openly sells egg-based foods to its bird customers is another grim matter entirely.)

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Gil Thorp, 6/22/22

As a certified coastal elitist, I usually take umbrage when someone says “Nobody cares about this outside your liberal bubble, poindexter,” but in this case, Gil is absolutely right: literally nobody cares about some years-ago plagiarism scandal from Gregg’s dad’s days writing for magazines, and in fact if you brought it up to most people, the most common response would be “What’s a magazine?” But Gil is also wrong about Gregg, whose main deal is that he’s going blind and has to wear a weird mask and occasionally pretend he has less control over his pitches than he actually does, which is … unusual, I guess, but certainly not special. I usually also take umbrage when someone says “Well, both sides are at fault, really,” but absolutely both these doofuses are incorrect in this conversation and I’m not afraid to say it.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/22/22

Speaking of being a coastal elitist, I’m always a little wary of declaring some phrase I encounter in the comics pages to be meaningless gibberish, because maybe it actually describes some well known cultural practice in “real America” that I’ve been too busy eating takeout Indian food and worshipping Satan to get hip to, and when it comes to things like a “unification display” I also have to keep in mind that, as someone in his middle age with no kids, I haven’t been to a big blow-out young person wedding in years, so who’s to say that “unification displays” aren’t a thing now? Well, a little Googling shows that they aren’t — the top hit for the phrase is a 2015 press release from the British Museum about four original Magna Carta manuscripts being displayed together for the first time, and it goes downhill from there — so this phrase actually belongs in same contemptible non-word zone as solo car date and vendo, except it has even less pizzaz. Anyway, ha ha, comic books! The characters in this strip simply cannot get enough of comic books, everybody! I’m not sure who the lady at the far right of this panel is, but it really tracks that even one-off characters who we’re never going to see again are willing to ooh and ahh over comic book-themed romantic gestures.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/22/22

Helga’s mother appears in this strip all the time so that the cast can perform tired mother-in-law jokes transposed to the Viking era, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never actually seen Hagar’s mother? Based on today’s strip, I’m guessing that Helga probably killed her, just like she’s about to kill Lute’s mother.

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Funky Winkerbean, 6/17/22

Hi, guys. Happy Friday. It’s been a tough week and I hope you’re all looking forward to the weekend. To celebrate, here’s Funky Winkerbean’s ass! I know, you all probably assumed that if anyone was going to show an ass in this strip, it would be insufferable “protagonist” Les Moore. But I guess he shows his ass every time he discusses his literary career built on the remains of his dead wife, ha ha! Seriously, though, it’s nice for the strip’s oft-neglected title character to get his time to shine, isn’t it? And damn, that ass is round. Like, too round. I’m no assologist, but I’m not exactly sure with the left cheek there — like is it extending that far beyond his torso or what. Is this what a “Brazilian butt lift” is? Has Funky had a BBL? I hope this strip spends the next month on this and nothing else.

Gil Thorp, 6/17/22

In non-ass news, the revelation that Gregg’s dad isn’t on the run from the mob but actually just did some plagiarism a few years back and is real embarrassed about it now is like the opposite of a character in a long-running family comic strip showing their ass in a strip, in the sense that it isn’t a horrifying nightmare mistake, but also not very interesting and will be pretty quickly forgotten entirely, unlike Funky’s ass, which we’ll be thinking about for some time.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/17/22

“Which is ironic, because he was a janitor! I guess none of us like to take our work home with us. Anyway, that guy’s going to prison for a long time for his various crimes.”

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Gil Thorp, 6/2/22

So Gregg wore his dumb mask, the opposing team figured out he was blind and peppered him with bunts, and now he’s real depressed and giving up even the pretense that he’s a teenager. “Look at my hair!” he shouts. “I’m an old man! The only reason I’d go to the park is to yell at the young women about how they should dress more decently in public!”

Mary Worth, 6/2/22

Speaking of dressing indecently, oh my goodness, after a dull few days when Dawn and Jared endlessly rehashed his intense insecurity about the fact that she looked at another boy at the zoo and coming to what seemed like a boring consensus about how it was nothing and nobody should fret about it, Dawn is now going to Da Club behind Jared’s back, because their relationship is in fact extremely unhealthy! The last time we saw Dawn out at what I assume is Santa Royale’s hottest and noisiest goth club, she was there with her art history professor and surprised her dad’s ex while wearing this truly incredible outfit. Tonight’s ensemble, with just a hint of bondage around the décolletage, is somewhat more subtle, but I still appreciate the occasional forays into Dawn Fashion to help me keep up with what the kids are into these days. Anyway, does her friend … have a nose? A whole nose? It looks like she might not, right? And her name is Cathy? Hmmmmmmm?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/22

The joke here is that the boy waited till after graduation to ask out the girl so there’s no time for them to really form a relationship before they go away to college, but I think this strip would be funnier if she actually just decided she didn’t like him and instead of politely riding out the next few hours is telling him repeatedly that there will be no date #2.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/2/22

Oh, man, I certainly hope they don’t call Rex until the Sunday strip, because we’re gonna need a lot of panels for his ponderous, exasperated sigh.

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Six Chix, 6/1/22

Look, I’ll admit that I’ve spent quite a bit of time on this website — too much time, really — inflicting my musings about mermaid biology onto you, the innocent reader. Shamefully, a lot of it has focused on their reproductive lifecycle, thanks to Hagar the Horrible always shoving that in our face, but today I want to talk about locomotion. Usually when you see depictions of mermaids, they’re sitting on rocks jutting out of the sea or the beach or something, and without much thought you can accept that they kind of hopped up out of the water like a seal. But even if this bar is right on the wharf, this mermaid would have had a long way to go to get there, presumably dragging herself over the boardwalk and then across the floor of the bar before somehow managing to haul herself up on that stool. Have mermaids evolved extremely strong arms in order traverse land when necessary to escape predators or drop environmental knowledge on ignorant humans? Or does their powerful fluke propel them across the ground in a sort of flopping motion?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/1/22

Remember when Funky Winkerbean did a big time jump forward, like ten years ago, and loudly proclaimed that it would be focusing on a new generation of teenagers, and that its former teens, now a bunch of swiftly decaying middle-aged losers, would fade into the background, but then that never happened, because Funky Winkerbean in the ’70s may have been about fun teens but Funky Winkerbean in the 21st century can only ever be about how you, the reader, personally, are dying? Well, now the teens are taking on crippling debt, just to so that their own universe will pay more attention to them because they too are suffering. It’s sad, really!

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Daddy Daze, 5/21/22

I generally think of piles of leaves as pretty ephemeral things, but apparently the one next to the Daddy Daze Daddy’s house has been there mouldering and rotting long enough that he expects his ex, who does not (and perhaps never did?) live there, to know about it, which may say a lot about why they broke up.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/21/22

THE COMIC STRIP MARVIN [juvenile, anti-intellectual]: Haw haw, this baby peed in his diaper!

THE COMIC STRIP FUNKY WINKERBEAN [imparting profound, soul-burdening wisdom]: Someday — perhaps someday soon — you will grow old and die, and as part of that process, you will inevitably piss yourself, so you’d better buy some diapers now to prepare.

Dick Tracy, 5/21/22

“I’ve decide to go by a norman human name and stop dressing in impractical knight’s garb so I cHAHA JUST KIDDING I’M A DICK TRACY CHARACTER, THIS IS OUR ENTIRE DEAL”

Slylock Fox, 5/21/22

Slylock Fox’s Which Two Scenes Are Exactly Alike? Presents: FRANKENBART: The Frankenstein Made Out Of Bart Simpsons’ Corpse

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Blondie, 5/15/22

There are, as you might guess because you’re reading these words on a website called “The Comics Curmudgeon,” a number of things that irritate me about the comic strip Blondie, and one of them is that we have been repeatedly told that Dagwood’s job title is “office manager,” despite the fact that he never does any office management and what work activity we do see out of him involves working on “contracts” that seem related to the core business of DithersCo and not about buying office supplies or whatever. And now we’re supposed to believe that there’s someone who’s worked at the company for a while and the office manager doesn’t know him? Perhaps the company is meant, for the purposes of this joke, to be so large that there are multiple office managers, with the people “down the hall” not mingling with Dagwood’s bunch? This makes no sense! I protest, do you hear me? I protest!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/15/22

Gotta respect Funky Winkerbean here: a lesser strip would choose to either make a professional school picture photographer the butt of the joke for not knowing what kids mean when they say “gram,” or this lonely nerd the butt of the joke for having no friends. But this is Funky Winkerbean, where they want you to know that all of their characters, even the walk-ons, are contemptible losers.

Mary Worth, 5/15/22

Wow, it turns out Toby understood exactly what it would take to dissuade Cal from his schoolboy crush: putting him in the nuclear blast zone of Ian’s sexuality. This has sent him scrambling for an age-appropriate partner so he can pretend that he’ll never get old, and Maddie, who happens to be nearby, is the lucky (?) winner!

Panel from The Lockhorns, 5/15/22

Well, this strip’s been running for 54 years, and Loretta has finally “gone there,” by which I mean she has threatened her spouse with murder. “You buy that boat and I’ll kill you and set you and it on fire,” she says. “I’ll fucking do it. It won’t even be in the water, just in our driveway. I’ll be long gone at that point, though, Leroy. Long gone.”

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Shoe, 5/13/22

Sometimes a long running comic strip will dip deeply into its well of accumulated goodwill among its readers and craft a gag that reflects its own internal world-logic, played out by its cast of memorable characters. Other times, however, the gag writer for the day will just put in some joke they saw during a late night binge of Jack Benny YouTube compilation videos. The latter is almost certainly what happened with today’s Shoe, and I regret to inform you that this is the first Shoe to elicit a genuine laugh from me in many years.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/13/22

I mean, think how wrong the “craft a gag that reflects its own internal world-logic, played out by its cast of memorable characters” route can go! You could end up with one of those characters inflicting a perfectly deranged monologue about life’s futility on the other, in the rain, at a funeral! Do you want that? Nobody wants that! No punchline you could steal would possibly be this unpleasant!

Mary Worth, 5/13/22

“Are we doing show and tell? Do you want to ‘show’ me off? Is this a ‘life drawing’ session, and you need an unusually handsome model? Am I finally getting the birthday present I asked for? Ha ha, just kidding. But what if…?”

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/9/22

Happy Monday, everybody, Funky Winkerbean is starting up the week with a funeral, obviously. I’m pretty sure Mary Sue isn’t someone we’ve actually met before in this strip, and Funky and Les want to make it clear that they don’t actually know her well or care that much about her, they just think it’s an important Funkyverse ritual to stop by funerals and acknowledge that everyone’s dying all the time, just some of us a little sooner than others. “Mary Sue” is of course also a derogatory term for an idealized authorial self-insert character in fanfiction, and it absolutely tracks that an idealized self-insert character in Funkyverse fan fiction would be someone who dies off-panel in order to give the sad sack main characters the chance to talk about how the whole world is falling apart, really.

Crankshaft, 5/9/22

Meanwhile, the “fun” Funkyverse strip is here to make sure you never forget the real victim of 9/11 (Crankshaft’s grill).

The Lockhorns, 5/9/22

I’m sorry, I’m usually on team “The Lockhorns is good, actually,” but I do demand that the strip keep to its mission of laser-focusing on Leroy and Loretta’s mutual animosity and self-inflected misery. Leroy complaining that it’s annoying when he has to leave the house to buy things simply won’t cut it.

Mary Worth, 5/9/22

Well, it seems this plotline is going to wrap up without much conflict, I guess the last detail to take care of is Cal, I wonder how oh my GOD Ian is going to come to Toby’s class and GLOWER at him, and possibly start pounding his chest and making what he thinks are gorilla noises, this is gonna be AMAZING

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/17/22

If you went back from the Funkypresent to the Funkypast with a medically minded mission, you would probably tell young Lisa to get frequent breast cancer screenings and also to make sure all her providers triple-check the paperwork on her tests, because you’re a damn sentimentalist. Me? I’d be doing some research on what happened to all the Funkyverse’s kids’ skulls during their young adulthood. Seriously, look at teen Lisa! She has no chin to speak of! Young adult Lisa? A small but distinctly pointy little chin! Maybe she got one of those chin implants in the ’80s that turned out to be carcinogenic?

Shoe, 4/17/22

Just a reminder that while the bird-world of Shoe may be similar to ours in matters of religion, its employment landscape is very different. For instance, in this universe, the government as an entire agency dedicated to creating terrible puns that annoy everyone, funded by bird tax dollars! Honestly, this is the world I want to live in, I don’t care if I have to walk carefully along tree limbs to get anywhere, just get me one of those sweet, sweet punemployment jobs with a good punsion.

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Crankshaft, 4/13/22

Once, many years ago, there was a comic strip called Funky Winkerbean about the antics of teenagers. Then someone got the bright idea to spin off the one old person character into his own strip, about old people! Later all the Funky Winkerbean teenagers grew up and become old people in their own right, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, Crankshaft, the strip about old people, continues to stick to its original old-people mission, and today’s installment, in which two old people angrily yell at each other at the top of their lungs, is a perfect example and I respect it.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/13/22

Oh, I guess the other time to tell the story of the old people Funky Winkerbean characters is now! It turns out Crazy Harry didn’t travel into the metaverse, but rather into his own past, to converse with his younger self, who is eager to learn one thing above all others about his own future, which is: do I get to have [whispers] sex? Ha ha, could you imagine going back to the 1980s heyday of the fun teen characters of Funky Winkerbean, and going up to random newspaper readers and saying, “Hey, you know those teens in Funky Winkerbean? They’re all gonna have sex, eventually, and you’re going to read about it!” They’d literally put you in jail.

Gil Thorp, 4/13/22

“My eyesight is failing! I’ve got grey hair! I’m 55 years old! I can’t believe all of you think I’m a high school student!”

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Family Circus, 4/5/22

I’ve been doing this blog for many, many years and my attitude about many of the comics has evolved in ways I never expected, and one of the ways I least expected is that I have come to respect some of the subtle dry wit in the Family Circus. In today’s panel, for instance, Mrs. Crisp is giving Billy a semi-defeated “is this little moron shitting me” look, which, once you learn to recognize it, a surprising number adults use when interacting with the Keane Kids, including their parents.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/5/22

Funky Winkerbean has accrued a truly epic amount of lore over its decades of existence, and I was about to apologize to you for not having it all at my fingertips, but you know what? It’s good and normal to not remember Funky Winkerbean plots from decades ago and I’m not apologizing for practicing self-care by refusing to retain information about them! Anyway, the last few weeks of this strip have been about Crazy Harry’s teen days as an arcade-based video gamer, and how his arch-rival was a person who wore a helmet and was known as “The Eliminator,” and that person turned out to be … the woman he would later marry. I have no idea if this was how the storyline actually played out way back in the early run in the strip or if it’s been retconned in a “What if a great video game player … were a girl, really makes you think” way, and I don’t care to do the research to find out. What’s important is that Crazy Harry has put on “The Eliminator”‘s helmet, and it’s apparently now some kind of VR/metaverse thing, only instead of taking you to a fantastic world beyond your imagination, it just plops you down right next to Les and Lisa’s special park bench, where you too can experience your wife dying of cancer in vivid 3-D.

Dick Tracy, 4/5/22

Ah, it appears that “Coffyhead,” using the clever alias “Moka,” is about to tangle with Vitamin Flintheart’s manager “Coffee Grounds.” I usually find “Don’t talk to me till I’ve had my coffee!” jokes pretty dumb, but I’m beginning to think that the Dick Tracy creative team should in fact not talk to anyone or start working on Dick Tracy until they’ve had their coffee.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/5/22

Oh, I’m sorry, are you still griping because the comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D., doesn’t do medical-themed storylines often enough for your taste? Well, they’re just going to spend weeks on the most boring injuries you can imagine until you beg for more stuff about “roots country” or whatever the fuck.

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Slylock Fox, 4/1/22

In the Book of Genesis, there is a moment, immediately after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, when their minds shift before their habits: they’re still naked, as they had happily been before, but now they have a moral code that deems that nudity shameful, so they immediately have to lurch into action and create makeshift clothes for themselves. So too did the animals of Slylock Fox move haltingly from their previous, brutish existence into the post-animalpocalypse world we know. In today’s strip, these birds know that the old ways, in which the momma would simply vomit those worms down her child’s throat, are no longer acceptable, but they have yet to realize that their ability to manipulate tools like pails and silverware means that they can simply abandon that nest and forcibly evict the hapless humans from the comfortable house below.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/1/22

Ha ha, the “tin ceiling!” You know, because the video game was located in Montoni’s. And in Montoni’s the ceiling is … made of tin? Oh, you don’t know that? You’ve read Funky Winkerbean daily for years and you would never in your life make that connection? Well, screw you, man, today’s strip is for the real fans, who definitely exist.

Gil Thorp, 4/1/22

Say what you will about Gil Thorp, but the strip always manages to come up with new odd combinations of characters and traits for their storylines. Did any of us have “kid obsessed with baseball trivia with a dad who ghostwrites terrible CEO ‘leadership’ tomes that get sold at airport book stores” on their bingo cards? No, but I for one appreciate that we got here.

Mary Worth, 4/1/22

Speaking of unique new storylines and/or the lack thereof: hey, Toby, remember when your husband had a vague flirtation with a student that boosted his ego but didn’t go anywhere, and when he was given the opportunity he declined to dispute your description of it as an “emotional affair”? Well, I don’t know about your job, but marriage-wise, that’s what we call a “get out of jail free card.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/16/22

Harold Russell, a double-amputee Army vet with no previous acting experience, starred in The Best Years Of Our Lives, an (extremely good!) 1946 movie about WWII combat veterans coming home to the United States and the difficulties they had adjusting to civilian life, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for it. (Earlier in the same awards ceremony, he had been given an honorary award for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures,” because the Academy Board of Governors assumed that he wouldn’t win the award he’d been nominated for.) He never found consistent work as an actor after that, though, and years later, he ended up auctioning his Best Supporting Actor statue off — he said at the time it was to pay for his wife’s medical care, but a later story put out by the Academy’s executive director was that “his wife wanted to take a cruise. He had a new wife who knew he had a spare Oscar.” Anyway, the point is, this has always struck me as a pretty sad story about why someone doesn’t have the Oscar they won that represents the high point of their career, but it’s clearly like a BAZILLION times less depressing than Marianne, whose win for a role in a commercial flop that nobody liked should be one of the most surprising in Oscar history since, well, Harold Russell’s, cheerfully showing up at the house of the man who sullenly refused to write this movie and just handing it over to him.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/22

Maybe my brain just doesn’t work as well as it used to but it took me way too long to parse the name of this establishment as a whimsical misspelling of “[Coffee] Bean House” — I guess I kept trying to make be “Bean How’s,” for some reason. Anyway, I still feel like it’s kind of an uncanny valley coffee shop name, like the place I go to near me that’s called “Coffee Memes” that just has a generic Instagrammable minimalist LA coffee shop aesthetic with exactly zero memes on display. What I’m saying is, probably this guy is a deformed villain named Tayste Budd whose whole thing is that anything but the most exquisitely prepared food or drink disgusts him, but I’d be willing to believe this is just a real half-assed coffee shop where even the best espresso is extremely bad.

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/12/22

Oh my GOD she wasn’t talking about Lisa at all, she was talking about LES, this is a million times funnier than I could’ve possibly imagined! I had been joking that it was weird that the guy who wrote the script based on his own graphic novel/life didn’t get invited to the Oscar ceremony when his movie was up for an award, but then I remembered that Les was only the screenwriter for the original version of the movie, which was a cable TV version that Les killed when he stalked off the set in disgust, and then Mason revived the project years later with a promise that he’d do it “the right way” and also Les wouldn’t have to do any work. I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of the WGA credit process, which is quite byzantine, but you’d think that Les would have still gotten his name on the movie, since I can’t imagine his original screenplay was that different from the final product. But the important thing is that he’s the real winner here, not the performer who apparently made this boring glurge-fest that nobody liked marginally bearable to watch, and he will soon have the Best Actress Oscar that he earned.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/12/22

I don’t buy this: the denizens of Hootin’ Holler don’t have access to complex machinery like “clocks,” so they wouldn’t get this joke. Instead, they tell time from the position of the sun. This is also why Snuffy wouldn’t be so casual with the phrase “daylight savings time,” which he by right ought to see as a form of mind control imposed by the tyrannical United Nations.

Beetle Bailey, 3/12/22

It’s absolutely true that the average Beetle Bailey reader is of an age that they find cell phones in general and emojis in particular extremely “mysterious.”

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Shoe, 3/11/22

We’re all of course, familiar with Shoe’s patented goggle-eyes of horror and heavy-lidded eyes of ennui. But today we have what I think is a new one: the heavy-lidded eyes of horniness. See the Perfesser in panel two? That, my friend, is the face of a bird-man who’s about to go jerk off to some pictures cut out of pornographic magazines by the Czech scam artists who are catfishing him by mail, and it’s going to be the high point of his week.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/11/22

Speaking of masturbation, I guess I was wrong, Marianne is going to acknowledge Lisa, and in fact is about to announce that Lisa should’ve won this Oscar. She wasn’t an actress, of course, but she did die of cancer, which is the greatest performance of all, if you think about it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/11/22

Ha ha, these kids don’t understand the basic concepts of music! In a related question, how do you think the noises they’re making on those instruments sound? I’m guessing pretty bad!

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/10/22

Wow, in an extremely believable turn of events, Marianne has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, for her extremely cliched role as “wife who dies of cancer” in a movie nobody saw or liked or promoted! And, as is only appropriate, she begins her acceptance speech by thanking Lisa, who died of c– wait, what? She’s thanking her mother? UNACCEPTABLE! Under most circumstances, I don’t want to be confronted with Les’s smug face, but I do sort of want to see a smash cut to him watching at home mournfully, while Cayla smirks in the background.

Crankshaft, 3/10/22

Remember last month, when Crankshaft went to church to pray for a disaster-level snowstorm, which would snarl his town’s economy and possibly result in accidents and deaths, but would have the advantage of getting him time off of work? Well, I never followed up on that, but there was a big storm and they did cancel school, but he went in to work anyway because he didn’t bother to check, because he’s an idiot. What he took away from that experience, though, was that God would heed his call to heap pain and violence on others at his whim, and I think everyone in Centerville is going to be a lot worse off for it.

Rex Morgan, M.D. 3/10/22

Man, check out Rex’s expression in panel two! That’s the face of a man who knows that he’s supposed to feel joy at the prospect of a new adorable baby entering the world, and so he’s just going to tighten his cheeks has hard as he can and hope that’s the vibe he’s conveying.

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Gil Thorp, 3/7/22

You know, I make fun of Gil Thorp a lot for focusing on its characters’ insane hijinks rather than actual high school sports action and coaching, but the dirty truth is that actual high school sports action and coaching are in fact incredibly boring. Oh, the basketball team captain thinks that the girl currently playing guard isn’t doing so great and that she should be in that position instead? I can’t type a “ZZZZZZZZ” long enough to express my lack of interest in this. I am intrigued by the way she’s holding that sandwich in panel one, which I think we can all agree is very much not the way someone holds a sandwich if they’re intending to eat it any time soon. I assume that she’s just keeping it at the ready so if anyone disagrees with her assessment of Maddie’s poor performance she can chuck it directly into their face.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/7/22

So Marianne really did get nominated for an Oscar, for playing Les’s dead wife Lisa! Apparently the screenwriter/guy whose life the movie was based on did not snag an Oscar ceremony invite, which: LOL. Still, these people are talking about parties that Mason and Marianne have pointedly not been invited to because they’re afraid he might show up.

Pluggers, 3/7/22

[For this bit, I’m a caveman outraged that people in the future don’t recognize my culture’s achievements] Hey, buddy, ever heard of fire? Idiot.

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/2/22

I truly enjoy the fact that these two old timer comics artist have been dragged out of retirement (one of them was actually dragged back to life from the realm of ghosts and spirits) to add a little Golden Age verve to Atomik Comix, only to be told they should do a comic where their super-powered heroes should battle, like, a metaphor, man. Their facial expressions in the final panel are absolutely appropriate.

Beetle Bailey, 3/2/22

TIRED: Sarge and Beetle’s public antagonism is a cover for a secret sexual relationship that has a lot less reason to be secret now that gay service members can serve openly.
WIRED: Pvt. Blips and Spc. Gizmo are a couple of real freaks whose kinks cannot be accommodated by banal physical reality. They spend all day plugged into their Oculus Rifts and teledildonic rigs so they can enjoy the experience of 69ing each other in the metaverse as two unicorns with multiple sets of genitalia or whatever. These kids are the nastiest people in this comic and I am here for it.

Blondie, 3/2/22

I was about to say that a doctor saying, “C’mon, can’t you open wider than that?” to a child would be fine but saying it to an adult would be extremely creepy. But isn’t Dagwood essentially a child, with his constant cheerful indulgence of his own appetites, his love of dressing up, and his inability to take his job seriously? He definitely should be condescended to like an 8-year-old and his doctor knows it. Anyway, he also has throat cancer.

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Mary Worth, 2/28/22

Look, folks, if you can’t handle “Josh falls in love with a new Mary Worth plot” after so many damn years on this blog, then I don’t even know why you’re reading this blog at this point, but I am definitely in love with today’s strip, in which Cal and “Ms. C” flirt by flinging a frisbee back and forth at one another at point-blank range. See, Cal’s mom, playing frisbee isn’t a waste of time, because if Toby manages to break Cal’s hand, he’s probably guaranteed an A in her class and he won’t even have to go anymore.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/28/22

One of my low-key favorite running bits in Snuffy Smith is that Snuffy constantly cheats at poker and routinely gets the shit beat out of him for it. Anyway, I really enjoy today’s strip because you can see everyone’s face begin to darken between panels one and two and realize that another explosion of brutal violence is on the horizon. Lukey is unconcerned about the coming assault on his best friend, though. It’s none of his business! Snuffy brought it on himself, as usual!

Slylock Fox, 2/28/22

The answer to the riddle is that someone gave birth on this cursed sea voyage, and I for one am upset that there’s some adorable baby animal on board that we don’t get to see, even though it probably would’ve given away the answer. Anyway that baby is dead now! It drowned, because there weren’t enough life jackets.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/28/22

I know I call Pete “Mopey Pete” all the time on this blog, but even I’m surprised to hear that he’s always “lightening the mood” around the Atomic Comix bullpen with propaganda for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. “Have you met any of the people in this comic strip?” he asks. “We’re all completely irredeemable.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/27/22

“Ha ha, get it? Because of the pandemic? Which is actually only a couple years old at this point? But seriously, have any of you ever had a conversation with Harley? Because I definitely haven’t.”

Family Circus, 2/27/22

I guess this is supposed to be about how kids do the darndest things (like drain your wallet at restaurants) but mainly what I’m getting is that the Keanes can’t cook. You ever think about cooking something they might want to eat, guys? Can’t believe I’m actually on the Keane Kids’ side for once.

Mary Worth, 2/27/22

Is “you really captured my uncommon mouth” supposed to be … sexy? I certainly hope this question haunts Cal’s dreams tonight, because it will definitely haunt mine.

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Dick Tracy, 2/23/22

Kind of weird that Dick Tracy, the man who had a portable voice communications device decades before the rest of us had cell phones, apparently has a … pager? In the year of our lord 2022? Seems implausible, to me. Probably more likely that he’s just desperately trying to get away from Sam as Sam tries to ratiocinate his way to the solution that Dick is going to get by doing some light enhanced interrogation on an informant or two next week. “I’d love to really get into your thought process, Sam, but I’m [tries and fails to come up with a plausible-sounding excuse] getting a page from [tries and fails to come up with a normal-sound name] Riger.”

Crankshaft, 2/23/22

Look, I am a huge history dork, OK? Last fall one of the high points of my trip to New York was going to a tiny train museum in the Catskills where I bought this sign and was sincerely disappointed that we had dinner reservations and couldn’t stay for the talk they were giving about … I don’t remember now, but it was definitely train related. But even I would be very upset if I got a mysterious invite that made it seem like I’m about to learn that my great-aunt was going to leave her entire fortune to anyone brave enough to spend the night in a haunted house, but I show up and it turns out it’s just at the local Historical Society. This is going to turn out to be some NIMBY bullshit where Crankshaft And The Gang Stop Evil Developers From Tearing Down An Old But Disused Silent Movie Theater or something and I’m going to wish they had ended up saving journalism instead.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/23/22

Funky Winkerbean has taken a break from its a plot about how the Oscar nominations work that was marred by a number of errors of fact and chronology, and is now doing a riff about how everyone in Hollywood has an eating disorder, which I have to admit is pretty on point.

Mary Worth, 2/23/22

Oh, sorry, it looks like Cal isn’t going to bring his smoldering youthful libido into Toby’s staid life and reawaken her sexual self, which she thought died years ago in Ian’s bed. No, he’s going to want her to be his substitute mom, but like a cool mom, who doesn’t yell at him when he gets high with his bros and does getting-high-adjacent stuff like playing frisbee or watching Netflix but instead tells him he’s “feeding his creativity.” He will still expect her to sleep with him, though.

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Curtis, 2/16/22

OK, look, I don’t pretend to know everything about how other people live their lives, but I refuse to believe there’s a human who comes home from work and takes off his shoes and socks but not his tie, flops down on the bed, and calls a life insurance company. I refuse, do you hear me? I can only assume — especially in light of panel three — that some sicko tweeted often enough at the Curtis creative team and King Features demanding that Greg Wilkins show feet that they finally said, “Enh, what the hell.”

Funky Winkerbean, 2/16/22

Sorry for my objections from yesterday, everybody! In fact, the Lisa’s Story Oscar trajectory makes total sense. It’s simple: the movie was released to the art-house circuit in early 2020, and then theaters were shut down in the first wave of the pandemic, and in [checks notes] October 2021 Les got the first report that the movie had flopped, but then it found a second life on streaming so now it’s going to be nominated for an Oscar in [squints at calendar] February of 2022. This all adds up! There’s a persistent rumor that the Funkyverse strips are written a full year in advance and I haven’t always believed it but honestly that would go a long way towards explaining this sequence, especially considering that last year the nominees were announced in March whereas this year they were announced, uh, last week.

Mary Worth, 2/16/22

Toby knows just how to chase away those encroaching middle aged blues and recapture that feeling of being a little girl again: marrying a much older man who likes to give her condescending little pep talks while grabbing her by the chin.

Family Circus, 2/16/22

God damn it, Family Circus, I got halfway through this caption and was all excited to make a joke about how Whitney is lucky because she doesn’t get sent to the principal’s office for yelling that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by the devil to trick liberals, but now I have to live for the rest of my life with the awful knowledge that Dolly spends every day at school squirming and holding it in because the toilets at school are never as clean as mommy makes the ones at home, and I’m not excited about that at all!

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/15/22

Look, I have very little credentials to speak as a “Hollywood insider” of any sort, but I feel very confident in saying that box office failures that got zero promotion from the studios that produced them do not get Oscar nominations. They simply do not! Either the studio thinks there’s an Oscar-worthy performance in it, in which case it does promote the movie, at least as something art-house-y award-worthy, or the movie finds an audience perhaps unexpectedly and then the studios do some “for your consideration” lobbying as awards season approaches. Performances in movies nobody saw or liked (“nobody” here meaning both general audiences and film snobs/critics) definitely do not get nominations just out of the blue, buzz-free, no matter how moving they are or how much awareness of breast cancer they raise. Anyway, I guess Mason is saying she’s up for an Oscar nomination rather than she’s actually been nominated, so … maybe the studio is doing a late push, or something? But, overall, if the woman playing Les’s dead wife in a low-budget flop wins an Oscar, I will officially declare that less realistic than the time this strip burned down Los Angeles and created millions of refugees.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/15/22

The days in which people gave the Morgans heaps of money and free boats for no reason seem to be over, for the most part, but you have to admit that a jailhouse snitch derailing Rene’s likely-to-succeed lawsuit out of the goodness of his heart is functionally the same thing as giving them a bunch of money, if you think about it mathematically.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/15/22

Would I have ever predicted that Snuffy Smith would meet his end not at the hands of Sheriff Tait or an aggrieved member of the Barlow clan, but would rather be torn to pieces by a dozens angry squirrels? No, but I’m not complaining about it.

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/3/22

Look, whatever, I’m perfectly fine with the idea of beleaguered band parents getting bombed while at their kids extracurricular events, and I’ll even allow that this concept + [TOPICAL PHRASE] makes for a perfectly adequate mid-week daily comics punchline. My problem is that all these people have at their table is a bunch of pamphlets. What, are they just selling instructions on how to make Jello shots? Where’s the vodka? Where are the huge bottles of vodka? Parents may or may not get drunk at the parades and sporting events they have to go to in order to support their children, I wouldn’t know, but they definitely get drunk at conventions like this one, so these people are leaving money on the table.

Mary Worth, 2/3/22

Have Dawn and Estelle ever interacted with one another, socially? Has Wilbur ever even bothered to introduce them? Or did they just awkwardly run into each other outside the bathroom of the Weston condo one morning and each of them had to explain to the other who they were?

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Mary Worth, 1/31/22

Look, have we be burned by Mary Worth before? Yes. Obviously. Repeatedly. Repeatedly in this storyline alone. But I honestly am beginning to believe that the endgame for this is in sight, and that endgame will be that either everyone rejects Wilbur so thoroughly that he experiences a social death more devastating than drowning, or, perhaps more likely, that everyone (including Mary, who’s long been willing to smile her way through his various terrible antics) is so thoroughly mad at him that he actually engages in … a certain amount of self-reflection and personal growth? Maybe?? If nothing else, Mary, who is notoriously not self-reflective, at least has managed to finally get off the “Wilbur is fine, actually” train. Look at those eyes in panel two. Those are they eyes of a killer! The eyes of a woman who can’t admit she’s been wrong, exactly, but can at least admit that she’s been wronged, and now it’s no more Ms. Nice Guy.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/31/22

I’ve been a fan for a while of the Showtime show Work In Progress, a slice-of-life comedy starring standup comedian Abby McEnany that’s part of the long-pedigreed “A standup comedian plays a thinly veiled version of themselves” genre. One of the things I like about it, and find really kind of unique, is that a lot of the jokes of the show take the form of banter between the characters that’s actually supposed to be funny within the universe of the show. Often in comedies of all types, characters deliver very funny lines to one another but react as if they’re talking to each other like normal people would, whereas a lot of Work In Progress feels like you and your friends sitting around trying to crack each other up, except each of you has an entire writers room at your disposal to write your dialogue. They’re diegetic jokes, if that makes sense.

Anyway, one of the few comic strips in which the characters acknowledge that they’re saying punchlines to one another are the Funkyverse strips. Unfortunately, the acknowledgement always takes the form of characters recognizing that they jokes they’re telling are very, very bad. Not funny at all! Everyone hates them! They make everybody mad! Look at how mad everyone is at Harry and Becky! How they can stand themselves?

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Funky Winkerbean, 1/28/22

Sad (?) news, everyone: it turns out Lisa didn’t fake her death after all. Instead, it seems that Les literally couldn’t tell the difference between his freshly dead wife and some neighbor lady (yesterday’s strip established that he saw her out by the birdfeeder), and also said neighbor lady decided that talking to Les would be a gross, unpleasant experience and so she didn’t bother doing it. That all is in fact extremely sad, but it also absolutely tracks.

Mary Worth, 1/28/22

Good (?) news, everyone: it turns out Wilbur is alive, which we knew, and that he managed to somehow shave and find a new shirt before he got around to letting all his loved ones know he wasn’t dead. Look how overjoyed and relieved they are! They’re in such a state of frenzied Wilbur-love that they’re about to group-tackle him and tear him to pieces, like the crazed Maenads at the end of Euripdes’ The Bacchae! That all is in fact good news, extremely good news indeed.

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Mary Worth, 1/26/22

I hate to say that Mary doesn’t understand even the basic outlines of the personalities of the people she spends all her time with, but I can guarantee you that, if Wilbur’s soul were looking down from heaven, he would very much not want anyone taking a stiff upper lip attitude about his death, but in fact would be achieving the angelic equivalent of physical arousal at the thought of various women weeping and tearing at their hair because they miss him so much. I’m reasonably sure that he’s taking his sweet time asking to borrow a cell phone from anyone on Party Island precisely so he can pump Mary for information about exactly how sad everyone was thinking he was dead. It certainly would be a shame if he overplayed his hand and everyone turned on him once he got back!

Funky Winkerbean, 1/26/22

Speaking of fake deaths, remember when Lisa called Les to stop him from getting on a plane, after she died, which was never really followed up on? What I’m trying to say is that Mary Worth couldn’t let us think Wilbur was dead for more than a week, but if it turns out that Funky Winkerbean has managed to fool us for 15 years, I will frankly be willing to forgive an awful lot.

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Dustin, 1/25/21

Dustin of course has a core mission of depicting the life of the shiftless, no-good kids today, as interpreted by someone who’s only heard anything about the lived experiences of any human being under the age of 35 second- or third-hand, which is how you get recurring bits like “Young people today definitely meet prospective romantic partners primarily at fern bar, right?” I was briefly intrigued that earlier this week Dustin appeared to have given up on his intermittent work through a temp agency and instead chose to join the “gig economy” in an actually Zoomer-appropriate storyline. But virtually all my interactions with people delivering for Grubhub and its competitors involve getting a text that they’ve left it on my porch, or at most waving at someone through my front window as they book it to their next delivery scheduled by their cruel algorithmic taskmaster, so I’m going to go ahead and say the Dustin creative team also thinks that “Those food apps the kids use today are just like pizza delivery, right? Probably you pay the guy in cash after he hands you the food?” Anyway, usually a strip like this would put a cutesy faux-app name on Dustin’s hat, so this is a really great opportunity for Grubhub to sue somebody.

Mary Worth, 1/25/21

I love the way that Dawn is grappling with the problem of evil — “why would God allow something bad to happen to someone good?” — and Estelle’s response is that “Oh, actually, your father’s a hair-trigger drunk, sorry if you were somehow unaware of this. It’s my fault, really, except not, if you think about it. I’m definitely crying for real though.”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/25/21

“Sorry, no, I was too busy dwelling on the fact that nobody has ever suffered the way I’d suffered, so I couldn’t be bothered to do a few minutes of token labor to keep alive some creatures that really brought a great deal of joy to your mother, the person I was ostensibly mourning, until I started having hallucinations. Anyway, in a related story, remember how you ate mostly cracker crumbs out of the couch cushions for all of second grade?”

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/16/22

I just want to offer my 100% unironic appreciation of everything going on in this panel. I love the weird angle we’re seeing Shady from, I love his expression as he watches his nemeses through the grate, I love the way he’s cradling that bag of cash and the way Max is ogling the few scattered bills on the floor, and I definitely love the look of smug triumph on Sly’s face as he gets ready to hit the dial button, knowing exactly what’s coming next. Shady is definitely dumb enough to leave his ringer on while doing crimes, but is he dumb enough to give his cell number to Slylock in the first place? Maybe, but it’s just as likely that the Forest Kingdom’s NSA equivalent is happy to hand out the phone numbers of known undesirables to law enforcement. There’s no such thing as human rights in a state where humans have been hunted to near extinction!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/16/22

Oh, man, remember a few years ago how Snuffy found his dad in the woods where he had been asleep for decades, Rip Van Winkle style? You’d think that would make him really appreciate the world’s possibilities and work to make the most of his new lease on life, but no, he’s just going back to chicken-based crime. You hate to see it!

Funky Winkerbean, 1/16/22

I sincerely hope that that is the helmet that Bull died in. We deserve that much.

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Dustin and Funky Winkerbean, 1/13/22

The general vibe of the newspaper comics industry is small-c conservative — that is, it’s mostly created by older middle-class people who, whatever their opinions on electoral politics, generally assume that society will and should remain more or less as it is today or was in their youth. Therefore, it’s a little surprising to see the comics pages go in hard today on the proposition that heterosexual monogamy is a soul-crushing prison, but here we are! I feel like I can respect both these approaches: Dustin offers a younger character’s viewpoint as she watches her parents pick at each other’s weak spots and realizes that their lifestyle choice is unsustainable, whereas Funky Winkerbean really swings for the fences and takes what could’ve been a bland depiction of a tiny bit of marital friction and elevates it by having Funky say one of those trademark Funkyverse things that are something that nobody would ever, ever say and are also apparently supposed to be a punchline.

Slylock Fox, 1/13/22

Meanwhile, today’s Slylock Six Differences is about a little boy who’s surprised to find himself sitting in a puddle of his little sibling’s piss! That’s definitely supposed to be piss, right? This would maybe be a little less graphic in the newspaper, where everything would be in black and white, and I feel for the syndicate colorist who got this file in their email, sighed heavily, and starting hunting through the Photoshop color wheel for just the right shade of yellow.

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Hello everybody! Welcome back to the Comics Curmudgeon, your #1 blogging website for syndicated newspaper commentary! How was your holiday experience over the past week or so?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/25/21

Did you manage to arrange your facial features to indicate some modicum of holiday cheer, like June and the Morgan children, or did you spend the whole time looking like you wanted to die, like Rex?

Dick Tracy, 12/25/21

Did you spend Christmas cuddling on the couch with a loved one, like Dick Tracy, or were you shivering out in the cold staring jealously at the righteous, like a bunch of deformed criminals?

Mary Worth, 12/25/21

Did you get that special gift you had been waiting for all year? In Dr. Jeff’s case, that gift was his one (1) allotted annual open-mouth kiss from Mary Worth.

Anyway, let’s do our annual roundup of what the soap and soap-adjacent strips got up to in my absence!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/26/21

We’re all looking for some good news for 2022 and it looks like we got it with the return of … Rene the art forger, baby!!!!

That’s right, everybody! Rene might do fake art and new age spirituality and COVID cures, but the love for him in our hearts isn’t fraudulent at all. It’s very real!

Gasoline Alley, 12/27/21

Oh, wow it looks like Hollywood — or [squints at kerning in headline] “Holly Wood” — is coming to Gasoline Alley! Will this turn out to be interesting? No, it won’t, and we won’t be revisiting the subject in this post.

Mary Worth, 12/27/21

DECEMBER 27, 2021: Syndicated comic strip Mary Worth reveals that Wilbur Weston will be taking a cruise.

DECEMBER 30, 2021: The CDC advises everyone to avoid cruise ships.

COINCIDENCE???? WE THINK NOT!!!

Gil Thorp, 12/28/21

Over in Gil Thorp, it looks like the Valley Conference’s refs are taking a “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” attitude towards calling fouls this season. Looking forward to a winter and spring of basketball carnage!

Mary Worth, 12/28/21

“Good luck, Estelle! I say that with total and complete sincerity. You are absolutely going to need it!”

Mary Worth, 12/29/21

“You’re not inconveniencing me! Jeff won’t be able to come over due to his allergies, which I don’t consider an inconvenience at all! Quite the opposite, in fact!”

Curtis, 12/29/21

Oh hell yes, Curtis is delivering another Kwanzaa tale for us this year! We all of course remember previous fables, which involved bat-winged bears and telepathic otters and trunkless elephants and creepy masks and, uh, social media. Anyway, this year’s story involves a girl in a drought-stricken village who has discovered a magical source of infinite water. The villagers who are mad that she’s hoarding all the water for herself are apparently the bad guys in this situation?

Dick Tracy, 12/30/21

Hey, remember the lady who didn’t want to manage an escort service? Well, Liz is pretending to be her, and is going to learn the ins and outs of managing an escort service, everything from recruiting sex workers to keeping detailed records of their financial transactions! The goal is to combine boredom and titillation into a new and hitherto unexplored emotion, which I think is a really innovative thing to do in the comics.

Mary Worth, 12/30/21

“Let’s do it, Wilbur! I’m just going to keep shouting things at the top of my lungs to convince myself that I want to do them! Fake it till you feel it, baby!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/31/21

An actually interesting Rex Morgan medical plot would be a deep dive into how narratively convenient amnesia works, biologically and psychologically! And if the Morgans are utterly ruined financially in the proces, I won’t complain one bit.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/1/22

Funky Winkerbean is doing a supposedly heartwarming storyline about Harry Dinkle getting to march in the Rose Bowl Parade with a bunch of other retired band directors. Anyway, I know I spent a lot of time during the Great Los Angeles Fire plot complaining about this strip’s wild misunderstanding of Southern California geography, but that doesn’t mean I want a dry recitation of various Pasadena intersections, either.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/2/22

God damn, he’s doing a whole press conference, you absolutely love to see it. I particularly appreciate the hand gesture he’s flashing in the next to last panel. “I want three million dollars. My left index finger represents one million dollars, and the three raised fingers on my right hand represent that I want three of those one million dollar units.”

Dick Tracy, 1/3/22

Ha ha, did I say that boredom was going to be leavening the titillation in this Dick Tracy storyline? How wrong I was! I’m not sure exactly who’s hitting on who here, but it’s all extremely erotic.

Hi and Lois, 1/3/22

Is Hi and Lois a soap opera strip? No. Do I feel compelled to show you today’s installment, just to let you know that Lois has absolutely given up on 2022 less than 72 hours into it? Very much yes!

Mary Worth, 1/3/22

But we haven’t given up on the year yet, and why would be, with wonders such as “Wilbur has a manic episode and makes an extremely ill-advised marriage proposal” to come? I will be comics blogging this year and every subsequent year as long as I have strength in my body, so thank all of you for coming along for the ride!

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Hi and Lois, 11/26/21

Almost every family patriarch in a newspaper comic is a baby boomer, with tickets to the original Woodstock in a scrapbook and a disco leisure suit in the back of their closet, no matter how improbably that maps onto their current apparent age and/or family relationships. I therefore applaud today’s strip; while there’s still a potential interpretation where Hi is talking about himself, albeit with a modicum of self-awareness, I assume we’re really meant to understand that he’s making fun of all those old fogies, whereas he knows the real year that rock and roll changed the world: 1999, when nü metal hit the mainstream and Korn, Orgy, and Staind all had albums that topped the charts.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/26/21

God damn it Funky Winkerbean, you really had me starting to panic that yesterday’s awkward introductions were setting up yet another timeskip because here’s Wally and Rachel’s son and wait a minute when did Wally and Rachel have a son, who’s like six or seven at least? They got married back in 2014, so if people really are aging in real time, then maybe that’s possible? But thank goodness, Uncle Lumpy had already reminded us a year earlier that Rachel already had a kid when she and Wally met, who has now, it appears, been rescued from the memory hole in order to be introduced to Harry Dinkle. Speaking of kids, Rana is not only Becky and Comic Book John’s kid but also Wally’s kid, so yay for blended families, and also yay for extremely convoluted casts of characters in a syndicated newspaper strip. The official Wally Winkerbean page on Funky Winkerbean Dot Com notes that “My dream is to one day produce a Funky family tree (or family jungle) for the website. The thing about dreams is that they don’t always come true, but I haven’t quite given up on this one just yet. Fingers crossed.” This was written in 2018, so keep crossing those fingers, I guess.

Family Circus, 11/26/21

I don’t really even have a joke about this, it just really is one of the saddest things that’s ever appeared in the Family Circus. I hope that kind-hearted grandparents/Family Circus trufans are cutting this out of the paper to hang on the refrigerator, chuckling softly to themselves and saying “Oh, Jeffy, you really are a huge loser.”

Mary Worth, 11/26/21

Ha ha, check out how those two fish are looking at each other! Those are definitely “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, about a murder-suicide pact?” facial expressions.

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/25/21

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! If you’re looking for something to be thankful for, maybe you should give thanks that you don’t have Funky Winkerbean’s entire family showing up at your front door and explaining to you who they all are, for some reason, as if it were very vital for readers at home to get a full accounting. I have to wonder if the Funky team has forgotten that Mort, the sex creep in Harry’s band full of old people, is supposed to be the same person as Morton, Funky’s dad? The band member in this month’s “Mort from Harry’s band is horny for Lillian” sequence sure looks like Funky’s dad in the “Funky’s dad is horny for Holly’s mom” sequence from December 2018:

And maybe it’s just the angle, but Funky’s dad’s head looks pretty differently shaped today? Plus why would Funky feel like he has to introduce his dad to Harry, since his dad is in Harry’s band? I guess it’s possible that, having put his dad in a home specifically so he could think about the old man as little as possible, Funky has not bothered to keep up at all with his dad’s hobbies or activities.

Gasoline Alley, 11/25/18

Gasoline Alley also went in for a crowd scene, but in a way that is frankly a lot less tasking for me. Do I recognize these people as mostly Gasoline Alley characters? Yes. Could I name them? Some, but definitely not all. Does the strip insist on telling me what they’re all named, because it’s a good bet that I’ve forgotten and it wants me to double down on remembering them? No, it doesn’t, and I appreciate that.

The Lockhorns, 11/25/18

Speaking of things I’m thankful for, I remain thankful for the acidic purity of The Lockhorns. A lesser strip would depict a character burning furniture for heat, whereas this one depicts a character burning furniture out of spite.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/23/21

I think it’s completely legit to say, “Hmm, when this strip’s child character sold a book for a lot of money to a museum somehow and then she and her baby sitter ended up as members of a brutal mob clan as a result, that was kind of weird; I want to do a book story but have it be more realistic.” I really don’t think you should keep drawing attention to the fact that you’re doing it, though? There is, I think, an extremely limited group of people who are thinking “Hmm, this is the second version of a book story they’ve done in this soap opera comic strip and it’s different from the one they did in 2014,” and I’m pretty sure all of them read this blog and are not looking to be told how to feel about it by a character in the strip. (They’re looking to be told how to feel about it by me, Josh Fruhlinger, the tastemaker of the funny pages! They should feel weird about it, in my opinion, in case that hasn’t been clear so far.)

Funky Winkerbean, 11/23/21

Sometimes I don’t remember characters or plotlines from long-running continuity strips, and while this might mean I’m not as good at my job (“job”) as I should be, it probably also makes me a healthier, more normal person who can preserve precious brainspace for other things, or so I keep telling myself. Anyway, I honestly have no real recollection of the Dinkles having a daughter named Halle, but I don’t think Harry does either, since his wife has to tell him what her name is and why she won’t be there for Thanksgiving. Of course, since “settlement school” refers to charitable institutions founded in Appalachia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before public schools became available there, so I’m not sure what Harry’s wife is talking about with this “Italy” business. Maybe there’s no such thing as Halle! Maybe this is just two sad people with dementia talking to nonsense to each other! It would explain a lot, in Funky Winkerbean!

Mary Worth, 11/23/21

Oh my goodness, what kind of pet is Wilbur, in the depths of his self-pity, going to decide he deserves? A bird? A snake? A rock?

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/16/21

Remember how after the big post-Lisa’s-death Funky Winkerbean time jump, all the promotional material around the strip said it was going to push its aging cast into the background and focus more on a whole new set of teen characters to get back to its roots as a high school trip? Well, that very obviously never happened, possibly because it turns out that the average age of a newspaper comics reader is well within the range of Social Security eligibility, a group that intensely hates and fears teens. To cater to that demographic, the strip appears to be paying more and more attention to the generation older than the original cast. Like Funky’s dad, for instance! You remember him, right? His whole deal is that he’s enfeebled to the extent that Funky put him in a home, but he’s also very horny? This church choir story just took a turn, is what I’m saying, a horny, horny turn.

Dustin, 11/16/21

You ever wonder if Dustin’s family gets so sick of Dustin’s dad that they just tell him he has to leave and be insufferable at someone else for a few hours? Well, turns out they do, I’m pleased to report!

Beetle Bailey, 11/16/21

Remember earlier this year, when we learned that in addition to being an amiable moron, Zero is a terrifyingly efficient killing machine? Well, today we find out that he thinks shooting someone in the head is what sex is! Ha ha, look how satisfied he looks in panel two.

Gil Thorp, 11/16/21

How “enh” has this fall’s Gil Thorp plot been? We’ve finally got to the big twist, and it’s that … Tevin has been receiving qualified care from a professional therapist, and that helped him more than YouTube hypnosis! You can tell the kids are as bored as we are because they’re just stone cold going nuts about it, or maybe just because someone is standing on a table. “Hold on, Karl,” says Coach Kaz says. “Someone using a piece of furniture for something other than its intended purpose? This is interesting!”

Mary Worth, 11/16/21

oh my god it worked Wilbur scared off Dr. Ed with his aggressive karaoke violence, I don’t know if I’m furious or very impressed

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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

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Daddy Daze, 10/23/21

Looks like the Daddy Daze daddy died doing what he loved: projecting his weird esoteric internal monologue onto the nonsensical babbling of the Daddy Daze baby. (He died when the Daddy Daze baby murdered him for his own inscrutable and unrelated reasons.)

Funky Winkerbean, 10/23/21

“In fact, I feel like I’m sort of moving past Lisa, and getting a little bored with thinking about her all the time. Specifically her death. Not really getting much mileage out of her death anymore, emotionally. Say, how’s your health? Feeling a little under the weather?”

Mary Worth, 10/23/21

Ha ha, just imagine if Wilbur had been forced to say “I don’t know what made me call you my ex’s name” while he was having s[I am felled by a single sniper’s gunshot to the head before I can finish typing this horrible sentence]

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The Lockhorns, 10/20/21

If you’re reading this blog, I assume you’ve dedicated at least a little bit of your brain space to the question of why Leroy and Loretta, who demonstrably do not love each other, or like each other, or derive any pleasure from each other’s company, continue to stay married in this era of relatively easy-to-obtain no-fault divorce. They have no children that they’re staying together for, Loretta’s mother hates Leroy, Leroy has no family to speak of, they don’t seem to have any social circle that would be disrupted by a separation, so what are we missing? Presumably the depth of their dysfunction is so great that that they feel psychologically bound to one another, each of them profoundly unhappy but also unable to conceive of life without the other and the pain they receive and dish out by turns. Today, we see a key part of this dynamic: each Lockhorn must occasionally offer the other the free choice to leave or stay, the opportunity to head out the door and never return. Or to come back, if they want, and walk into the future together, hand in unlovable hand.

Mary Worth, 10/20/21

I’m extremely unsettled by the frankly erotic way that Wilbur is eyeing the discolored piece of meat (?) at the end of his fork in panel two. Wilbur can’t deal with salsa dancing, and we all know why, but if there are limits to his digestive system’s ability to process garbage, he hasn’t found them yet.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/20/21

It’s genuinely weird that Mason’s Lisa’s Story production had a wrap party but not even an extremely modest premiere party for the cast and crew, and even weirder that Les and Cayla didn’t even get a copy of the movie to watch. It’s also pretty weird that the Valentine Theater simultaneously was on the verge of failure in 2017 when Max was in his late 30s and then subsequently closed in 2021 when Max was in his late 20s, but let’s not dwell on Funkyverse chronology and think instead about how Les casually adds “or something” at the end of his last sentence here while cringing away from Cayla, as if he doesn’t know exactly where this strip club is and what its hours are. Now, a lot of Funkyverse characters would go to this strip club and talk loudly while getting a lap dance about how you used to be able to see classic serials like Radio Ranch there, but Les I’m sure approaches things with more dignity (he sits silently and contemplates the fact that the Valentine failed and took its owners’ dreams with it, just like everything else good in the world, because that’s what sex is, to him).

Shoe, 10/20/21

In the world of Shoe, birds hold down various human-style jobs, like publishing a newspaper, running a diner, working in a mortuary, running a dating service, and so on. Today we learn that fish in this universe have jobs too, or at least one job: to go to a lake and get murdered.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/18/21

You don’t read Funky Winkerbean every day as long as I have without becoming a connoisseur of the various textures of suffering its characters endure. Of course, I hate every single Funkyverse inhabitant, so you’d think I’d love each and every kind of pain heaped upon them, but some of them allow the characters to become even more self-righteous, and I’m opposed to that, obviously. But this one? This one I like! Remember when some Hollywood people tried to make an actually watchable version of Lisa’s Story, but Les didn’t like it so he managed to sabotage the production and also get paid for it, but then he agreed to let Mason do it “the right way?” Well, turns out it was the wrong way if you wanted anyone to watch and enjoy it! Ha ha! Get it? Les’s movie’s a flop, and it’s all his fault! Movies usually have quite a long post-production process so it’s actually kind of odd that the wrap party was like six weeks ago and already the movie has landed in theaters with a thud. It’s also kind of odd that Les, who you’d think would be a little more in the loop on how the whole thing is going, just got a phone call from Mason saying “Yeah man, shit sucked, nobody liked it, sorry about that” and that’s how he found out. Almost like Mason didn’t actually bother putting the movie together or finding a distributor and instead left for South America with all his investors’ money! (Just kidding, nobody “invested,” financially or emotionally, in this movie.)

Crankshaft, 10/18/21

Meanwhile, in the “fun” Funkyverse strip, Pam thinks that only God can transform the basic nature of one of His creations, but Crankshaft seems to be contemplating some kind of genetic engineering project.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/18/21

Spent what I have to imagine is longer than most people spend contemplating Snuffy Smith contemplating today’s Snuffy Smith and came to the conclusion that this one is good. It’s weird, but good. Less grotesque tongue waggling at backwoods antics and more strips where Snuffy uses the volume of space he takes up as the basis of various gags, please.

Family Circus, 10/18/21

The Keanes have let Billy play tackle football for hours without a helmet in hopes that he’ll concuss himself, but it looks like that’s not going to happen tonight. Maybe they can get him to break his brain by trying to think!

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/16/21

“Gosh,” literally dozens of you are wondering, “Whatever happened with Holly after she broke her ankle?” Well, she had to have surgery and now she’s going to be laid up for weeks, so she has to have her meals prepared for her … [dramatic music sting] … by a man! I really went full circle on this one from “Ugh, what a tired and sexist trope” to “Wait a minute, Funky literally owns a restaurant, this doesn’t even make sense” to “Wait, the restaurant Funky owns is Montoni’s, purveyor of the saddest, grossest pizza in Ohio” to “Ugh, fine, this is a tired and sexist trope but it absolutely makes sense in this case.”

Mary Worth, 10/16/21

Oh no, Carol is acquiescing to Wilbur’s sweaty, combed-over charms! I’m holding out hope that she’s waiting until they’re someplace with lots of other people present to let him down easy, both for her own safety and because she heard his public meltdowns are extremely hilarious.

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Dick Tracy, 9/30/21

One thing I’ve always respected about Dick Tracy is that it would be easy to portray Diet Smith as an eccentric but helpful inventor always willing to do his part to aid the authorities and stop crime, but instead it’s repeatedly hinted that he is a dude who is into some real sicko shit. Sure, he could use his Time Drone to solve mysteries or find buried treasure or whatever, but what if instead he acquired footage of our most beloved president getting his brains blown out in vivid 4K video and Dolby Atmos surround sound, and then he spent the next three days watching it over and over again, alone in his office, for science?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/30/21

Oh, say, how’s the current Funky Winkerbean plot, in which a running gag from the strip’s early wacky days is revived in pseudo-realistic fashion and revealed to be a source of profound trauma for everyone involved, going? Well, the memories that Holly’s return to majoretting have dug up are sure activating some latent rage at her emotionally abusive mother, whom she now lives with, so that should be fun for all concerned. Also, she broke her ankle!

Blondie, 9/30/21

Just to prove that I’m an emotionally mature and magnanimous person, I want to show you this Blondie, which has an absolutely solid, well-written joke that made me laugh. It does happen sometimes, in the legacy comics! Is it a little unnerving to notice that Herb also has the same weird baggy wrinkle neck as Dagwood? Yes! But I’m trying to ignore it, trying not to visualizing the neck-flesh quavering like jelly, and just focus on the unusually good punchline.

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Mary Worth, 9/24/21

God damn, look at him. Look at that adorable little smooshed face! Obviously I’m not talking about Wilbur, obviously, how dare you, I’m talking about Pierre, and yes I am going to imagine his internal monologue in a hilarious French accent, and I urge you to do the same as you read the following aloud:

“Mon dieu, is zees the man who will be taking me home from zis shelter? Does he plan to make another child out of me, as a, how-you-say, substitute for his absent daughter? I am weeling to give zis a chance, because I believe he will be dropping many items of food on the floor where I can reach them, but I shall remain vigilant for trouble!”

Ahh, Pierre! Your Gallic detachment and stoicism will get you through the next few troubled months, hopefully!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/24/21

“So whaddya say? Wanna give her another li’l bonkus on the old conkus? Another round of mind-wiping? She’ll probably be fine, and then we can keep all the money from the Kitty Cop book that she won’t remember!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/24/21

Huh, so you’re saying you want to spend … more time with your husband? Wouldn’t have been my call, I’ll say that.

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Gasoline Alley, 9/16/21

OK, I am going back on what I said before: I am going to briefly recap the current Gasoline Alley plot (this little girl spent a long time arguing with a talking frog who wanted her to kiss him because he claimed to be a human country western star and he’d turn back into a person if she did) because it’s important to know that what seemed like a rambling shaggy-dog story that didn’t really go anywhere was part of a plot by Satan himself, the Great Deceiver to tempt humanity into Fall #2 and curse us with Double Original Sin! So I guess this talking bear is … God? Sure, let’s go with that.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/16/21

OH MY GOD ASBESTOS, WE ALL KNOW WHAT ASBESTOS CAUSES DON’T WE

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Gil Thorp, 9/15/21

[clears throat] [extremely Beavis from Beavis and Butt-Head voice] FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! [takes a long, deep breath, representing the years 2016, 2017, and 2018, when the annual Milford bonfire was mysteriously absent] FIRE! FIRE!

Whew, it’s bonfire time again, everybody, guaranteeing a robust grain harvest and fewer barren wombs among the townsfolk! Every year we learn a little something new about the bonfire, and today’s panel one shows us that, assuming the student body doesn’t shlep all those logs by hand to some open field somewhere, it takes place a lot closer to the school itself than I would’ve guessed. Legend has it that Milford will only win a state championship if the flame is allowed to burn the building to the ground!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/15/21

One of the running jokes in the early days of this strip, when it was mostly fun gags about a bunch of goofy teens, was that Les Moore wielded a machine gun as part of his hall monitor duties. I keep waiting in the post-Turn-to-Grim Funkyverse for this to get retconned into the result of some awful school shooting, and that hasn’t happened yet, but until then I’ll console myself with “Majorette Holly’s flesh was a mass of scar tissues due to ever-more-dangerous baton tricks her deranged mother forced her to perform.” I guess today’s colorist glanced at the text and thought, “Oh, these pictures are all supposed to be close-ups of burn wounds, huh,” which is a nice touch.

Daddy Daze, 9/15/21

Look, man, I spent several hours with a couple babies this past weekend and they didn’t seem happy at all! They cried multiple times just because they had to go to the bathroom or were hungry or whatever. I mean, I had to go to the bathroom and was hungry too, but I managed to hold it together, for once!

Mary Worth, 9/15/21

WILBUR WHEN A CAT PISSES IN HIS SPOT ON HIS GIRLFRIEND’S COUCH: Animals are bad! They interfere with me having sex!

WILBUR WHEN HE HEARS A GNOMISH OLD MAN MET A NICE WOMAN JUST BECAUSE HE OWNS A DOG: Animals can help you get sex? Go on, Mary, I’m very interested.

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So ends the 2021 Comics Curmudgeon Summer Fundraiser! Thank you, everybody!

Mark Trail, 9/4/21

It’s charming that with Mark’s long-running Woods and Wildlife gig at an end, Rusty and Cherry act as guides to his new wilderness of freelance work, relationships, and social media. And reassuring that Cherry never, ever shows him Twitter.

Lockhorns, 9/4/21

Loretta, it’s like you haven’t been paying attention the past fifty-three years.

Gasoline Alley, 9/4/21

Oh look, it’s Boog and Aubee, scions of the dead-eyed Skinner couple, Rover and Hoogy, recapping the story of Aubee’s sylvan birth. “Aubee?”, you ask, “What kind of name is that?” Well, upon delivering her, “Chipper” Wallet, who by the way is a PHYSICIAN’S ASSISTANT, exclaimed, “Well I’ll be! You have a beautiful, healthy baby girl.” Hoogy immediately named her daughter “Aubee,” because she pays as little attention to her children as we’d like to.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/4/21

Gah, it is so on-message for a high school in Funky Winkerbean to have a teachers’ “workroom” instead of a lounge, even though we’ve never seen anybody doing anything more strenuous there than drinking coffee, nor more intellectually demanding than complaining with those mopey little half-mouths of theirs.

Anyway, the white-haired guy with the lame bon mot is Jim Kablichnik. Everybody knows somebody like Jim Kablichnik. It’s a shame, really.

Dick Tracy, 9/4/21

Now I’m no history scholar like Josh, but I’m pretty sure history will still be a thing of the past even when we get better tools to investigate it. But don’t let me rain on Ace’s parade: he’s an official cigar-smoking member of The Apparatus at last!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/29/21

Oh, poor Les is leaving Hollywood—a place he slags relentlessly, creeps out, ham-handedly bilks, and now pretends to relish leaving.

But apparently his self-satisfaction is tinged with regret that high-school English teachers aren’t held in the same high regard as Hollywood writers. Fortunately, good writers—and even Les—draw material from their own lives, so here’s the seed for Lisa’s Story IV: Les Moore is a Pompous Hypocrite.

Mark Trail, 8/29/21

After delivering a helpful lesson about birds breaking wind, Mark is himself educated by a goose. I bet it plans to “modify his habitat,” too.

Prince Valiant, 8/29/21

Long story short, Val has been drugged by a mysterious hooded sorceress on his way back to Camelot. But he convinced a couple of raven-hallucinations to alert his wife/sorceress Aleta, so mystical help is only a matter of time. While we wait, let’s all admire that shark-on-a-rope guarding the throne.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/28/21

“Wait, you don’t have cancer? And here I thought you were coming on to me, you little tease!”

Judge Parker, 8/28/21

A Christmas Reunion

April watched her sigh dissolve in the icy air. The blur of life on the run, the breakup, all led her back here, to Cavelton. Her Dad needed her: the family business was on the rocks. Just one more job, he said, for Abby. Good money, done by Christmas, then Mallorca.

She crossed the square past the carolers, careful to stay within sightlines from the bank roof. In position on the Courthouse steps, right on time. Distract the mayor, five seconds tops, then run with the crowd.

The doors opened to reveal … Randy? But not the cringing loser she had abandoned: this man strode confidently, head high— like a Judge. Shocked and excited, she glanced up and purred, “Hey, you.” “April? Is it really you?” he replied, taking her hands just as the bullet from Norton’s rifle tore through his lung. “Bastard!” April thought, “Mallorca, my ass!”

Kneeling beside Randy on the now empty steps, she heard him whisper, “This … this is where we belong … together!” They embraced for the last time, as the Christmas music swelled and snow began to fall.

Mary Worth, 8/28/21

Where duels were illegal, duellists often settled their scores on boundary-river sandbars of uncertain jurisdiction. This is the precedent for Wilbur and Libby duking it out in the litter box.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/28/21

The Morgans return to their roots—getting free stuff, and deciding which free stuff they prefer to the other free stuff they get.

Oh, hi! I’m sitting in through Monday, September 6, while Josh visits friends and family back East. Reach me at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net with any site or comment issues.

Be sure to alert me if you have trouble reading this in Josh’s new ultra-convenient newsletter format—I’m new to it, and different platforms/email clients treat html differently.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/27/21

Oh wow, oh wow, not only did the actress playing Lisa have breast cancer, just like Lisa, but in a very real and meaningful way, Les Moore and Lisa’s Story saved her life, from cancer. I actually was on the fence yesterday about whether my joke about Les orgasming was in excessively poor taste, even for me, but now I have zero compunctions about saying that the world’s top scientists will be spending years studying how an anhedonic middle-aged man managed to jizz in his pants multiple times over the course of mere seconds.

Dick Tracy, 8/27/21

I was going to complain about this, but you know what? It’s fine, actually. The list of terrible things an amoral scientist who works hand in glove with America’s least restrained police force could be using chrono-viewing technology for is frankly terrifying, so I think the fact that his very first thought seems to be that his time drone can serve as a glorified metal detector is a good sign, all things considered.

Marvin, 8/27/21

Oh, are you tired of all the pissing and shitting in the syndicated comic strip Marvin? Well, has it occurred to you that if the characters weren’t pissing and shitting, they’d probably be trying to do murders? Really makes you think, doesn’t it?

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/26/21

I’m a big believer that most comic-strip level gags should include exactly the amount of information they need to make the joke work and no more, which is why it drives me up the wall that this strip includes the name of Loweezy’s sister. It would be bad enough that she just named her sister (whom we’ve never see in the strip) for no reason, since it creates the nagging suspicion that this sister, as opposed to some other sister, is important to make the punchline work for some reason. But then they go and name her “Zoney!” “Loweezy” is the post-apocalyptic Hootin’ Holler newspeak for “Louisa,” but what the hell is “Zoney” derived from? Arizona? Does the vague memory of distant Arizona live on in Holler-adjacent onomastics? Gah, the fact that they added this name to her word balloon means that we ended up with two exclamation points alone on their own line! GAH!!!

Blondie, 8/26/21

One has to wonder who the “I” in Dagwood’s proposed social media clickbait headline is intended to be. It’s clearly not Dagwood, who is the star of the video. In fact, one wonders who’s filming this obviously staged scene in the first place, and what sad benefits Dagwood promised them for helping launch him to TikTok stardom.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/26/21

Oh, wow, sorry I said yesterday that this Funky Winkerbean development was going to be about sex, when in fact it’s about the most obvious plot twist anyone could imagine. Don’t worry, thought: Les still had an orgasm.

Mary Worth, 8/26/21

WILBUR’S IN A PISS FIGHT WITH A CAT, EVERYONE

A PISS FIGHT

IT’S CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST

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Slylock Fox, 8/25/21

Based on the animal quiz that accompanies this drawing, that’s clearly supposed to be a wolf out there howling at the moon, and I’m very intrigued that the anonymous syndicate colorist chose to give him Slylock’s bright red fur. Clearly the reality is that they saw “canid in Slylock Fox” and used the fill tool with web-safe bright red without really thinking about it, but I’d like to believe that they briefly contemplated the idea of this strip’s normally cerebral title character stripping off his clothes and howling at the moon, and they said “Honestly? Good for him.”

Dustin, 8/25/21

Sorry, I refuse to believe Dustin’s dad likes impressionism at all. He is absolutely one of those people who would look at any art that isn’t photorealist portraiture and sneer “My kid could’ve done this.” (Then he’d look at Dustin and say, “Well, somebody’s kid could’ve done this, I guess.”)

Gil Thorp, 8/25/21

Oh, wow! Marjie Ducey, the Thorp-friendliest media figure in Milford, is going to retire, and now the paper’s going to hire a woman who was literally Gil’s student like two years ago to replace her! I certainly hope Marty Moon has something to say about this blatant conflict of interest, though we haven’t heard from him in quite a while, and frankly he may still be having some kind of hallucinatory experience in the wooden crate that serves as the Milford press box.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/25/21

We all, of course, have our own personal “what’s the worst recurring theme in Funky Winkerbean?” take, but I think we can all agree that “sometimes the strip hints that there may be multiple rivals for Les’s sexual attention” is in the top five.

Family Circus, 8/25/21

Look, Billy’s all hyped up because he’s been huffing pine cones! And honestly? Good for him.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/22/21

Continuity comic strips are actually a great example of how you can have a long-running narrative art form with very little narrative tension. Nevertheless, Funky Winkerbean does have one primary source of narrative friction: namely, that Les is a sainted figure who everyone has to acknowledge as a good guy and work to make good things happen for him, but also the universe is a fundamentally dark and hostile place and nothing truly good ever happens to anyone. I guess today’s strip is showing us how we’ll navigate between those two poles: Lisa’s Story: The Movie will be mostly ignored by the yammering, moronic masses who don’t understand how moving it is when a man’s wife dies of cancer but he finds the strength to move on, but the right kind of people will watch it at America’s few remaining art house theaters and be moved, and won’t that be the most important thing? Not from the perspective of the people who invested in this movie, or for anyone’s career who worked on it, but from it is from Les’s perspective, which is the correct one.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/22/21

Speaking of the absence of narrative tension, there’s a lot you could say about the last few years of Rex Morgan and its absence of narrative tension, but one thing you can’t say is that it skimps on good reaction faces. Today Michelle moves from “carefully neutral as she worries what she’s gotten herself into,” “real genuine horror as she sees something the Facebook moderators should’ve removed immediately,” “bone-weary disgust at someone posting a picture of themselves wearing a t-shirt adorned with grotesque sex slang or maybe a racial slur,” and “grudging admiration for what hairspray can do.” We salute you, Michelle, and certainly hope your animated visage helps the seven or so people at your wedding maintain interest in the proceedings.

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Mary Worth, 8/16/21

Oh, snap! Did Drew get emotional closure on the whole getting-dumped-by-Ashlee situation? Nope! Did we ever really find out why Ashlee skipped town, exactly? Not really! But too bad, we’ve spent all the time we can on Drew on his problems, because it’s been way too long since we spent some time on Wilbur motherfucking Weston and all his problems! Now, I know from this strip it looks like Wilbur doesn’t have any problems. Honestly, it looks like he doesn’t have a care in the world! But believe me, folks: this is a man with some problems, and we’re going to hear about them in gruesome detail.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/16/21

I’m not sure which possibility suggested by this strip is more hilarious to me: that the climactic “Les and Lisa discuss the disposal of Lisa’s cremains” scene of Lisa’s Story: The Movie was filmed on a tiny set in front of a greenscreen, or that they built that little bench as “fun” prop for this hot Hollywood party, to remind the cast and crew what it’s all really about (it’s about how Lisa died of cancer, and her husband is and has been extremely noble about it).

Beetle Bailey, 8/16/21

Like most Americans, I’m into gritty, “edgy” reboots of existing intellectual property. So obviously I was deeply disappointed that today’s Beetle Bailey didn’t pay off on the promise of the first panel, which implied that we’d see a story where the denizens of Camp Swampy wonder if Beetle Bailey committed suicide.

Gil Thorp, 8/16/21

CSI: GOLF SCAMS: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT

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Daddy Daze, 8/15/21

When I first read this strip, I felt an immediate spike of anger when I got to panel four. “Damn it,” I thought. “It’s Superman for whom the ‘secret identity,’ Clark Kent, is the façade. Bruce Wayne is the real man and Batman is the persona. How dare they print this garbage in the newspaper!” But then I took a step back. Do I really care that much about superheroes? No, I do not. Have I actually given this subject that much thought? No, I have not, and upon reflection I may just be repeating sentiments from a David Carradine monologue in the 2003 Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill. “Paul” or “Daddy” or whatever you want to call him is just a sad, lonely man projecting complex semantic meaning onto his infant son’s incoherent babbling, and who am I to criticize whatever coping mechanisms he feels are necessary?

Funky Winkerbean, 8/15/21

A fun thing to remember is that Mason was introduced during the first “let’s film Lisa’s Story” plotline, and at that point he was part of the empty-headed cadre of Hollywood ghouls who couldn’t possibly do justice to the sad story of Lisa dying of cancer. He later evolved into a “good guy” character, a transformation that climaxed him into agreeing to make the right kind of Lisa’s Story movie, but every once in a while the strip remembers “Oh, right, this guy is the sort of vapid movie star that a thoughtful person like Les would hold in contempt,” so despite being blown away by how good the rough cut of Lisa’s Story: A Mason Jarre Joint was, Les still gets to feel superior because Mason is doing social media content for his fans on Instagram, like a whore. Never mind that without those fans this terrible cancer movie wouldn’t have gotten the money to be made at all! Anyway, I like how Cayla seems genuinely dumbstruck to learn that someone might do something to make other people happy.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/13/21

So, in case you haven’t been keeping track and/or want to feel a million years old, Lisa’s death in Funky Winkerbean happened [dramatic music sting] almost 14 years ago at this point. And you’d think, in theory at least, that ongoing syndicated media products like Funky Winkerbean would have as a goal, if only an aspirational one, that they have some regular readers today, in the year 2021, who weren’t regular readers in 2007, and would tailor their content accordingly. You’d think that! But then you apparently haven’t reckoned with the sheer dramatic intensity of characters watching actors re-enacting strips from 2007, while expressing no visible emotions of any kind.

Mark Trail, 8/13/21

So Mark is going to punch [checks Wikipedia] the lakes of southern Russia and Ukraine? He’s gonna unleash the right fist o’ justice on [scrolls deeper into article] the ballast water of ocean-going ships traversing the St. Lawrence Seaway??? He’s going to use his crushing right cross to get to the root of the problem, which is [keeps on scrolling, surely it’s here somewhere] trailered boat traffic? Can we stop trailered boat traffic, with punching? We’re gonna find out!

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Crankshaft, 8/9/21

You know, after many years in the comics-mocking biz, you get somewhat inured to the foibles of the daily strips. That’s why it’s good to get a fresh perspective sometimes, like when my wife saw this Crankshaft over my shoulder and said, in tones of increasing incredulity, “Wait, is that the joke? There’s no more to it? Like, there’s not another panel? He just said the wrong word? That’s the joke?” Yes! That is, in fact, the joke. But the thing that makes this a character-driven comic strip is how angry he looks while he says it, for no good reason. That’s our Crankshaft! He’s old, dumb, and mean!

Funky Winkerbean, 8/9/21

At least Crankshaft has a joke, though! Funky Winkerbean is a more story-driven strip, but it really is supposed to have punchlines. Maybe … something from Mason about “unwrapping” some surprise? Never thought I’d be over here demanding a smirk-accompanied sub-pun from Funky Winkerbean, but now I realize that’s the base level of effort I expect from the Funkyverse strips.

Mary Worth, 8/9/21

Mary Worth, of course, doesn’t need anything so vulgar as a “joke” or a “punchline” to be the most hilarious comic strip in the paper. Not sure what’s funnier: that Drew feels compelled to compliment Mary’s cooking even though he wasn’t able to tell exactly what kind of spherical starch blobs accompanied the lamb (“probably they’re … root vegetables? of some kind?”) or that Dr. Jeff is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice — using his highly trained surgeon’s hands to wash the dishes like he’s the help — just to make sure his son gets meddled properly.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/2/21

“Hey,” you almost certainly are not thinking, “Wasn’t Mason trying to make a Lisa’s Story movie the right way, and they had gotten into filming but then there was a fire that burned huge swaths of Los Angeles to the ground? Whatever happened with that? Did they cancel the production because it’s so obviously cursed?” Sadly, they apparently continued to spit in the face of the gods and are determined to see this thing out to the end, and now they’re having a big-time Hollywood “wrap party”! Cayla has once again proved herself an unworthy partner to Les because the prospect of going to a fun, elite event is filling her with excitement, instead of the crushing ennui that is the only acceptable emotion to experience about anything in the Funkyverse.

Dick Tracy, 8/2/21

Look, actually making comics might not be very lucrative, but making them into games or collecting them is another story. I’m beginning to think this Dick Tracy storyline is a plea to comics creators to grasp the importance of ancillary revenue streams before it’s too late.

Mary Worth, 8/2/21

I know we’re supposed to think that Drew is thinking of his ex while trying and failing to concentrate on some poor doomed patient’s chart, but I for one very much hope that he’s walking around with a clipboard holding an 8 1/2 by 11 headshot of Ashlee — exactly the image in his thought balloon — and nothing else.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/21

Remember Bizzy Buzz Buzz, the Snuffy Smith character who was named after a popular (?) 1960s toy and whose whole deal is that she likes to obsessively clean things? Well, she’s back. This lovable unaccompanied minor who just can’t get enough of doing unpaid labor for her kinfolk is back! She will be returning every 3-5 years to this strip whether you like it or not, so you might as well grit your teeth and fall in love with her, it’ll be easier that way.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/26/21

Ah, well, it seems like Phil’s death-faking may have been a bit less involved than I had anticipated, and really the only people possibly facing any legal consequences would be the lawyers who straight-up lied to Darrin about why they were sending those covers to him, but what’s a little light lying for a client, who it’s been established was sort of cheated out of a lot revenue for his comics creations and probably couldn’t pay you very much in the first place? Anyway, it turns out Phil mostly faked his death because he didn’t like attention, but then after a few years he realized that in fact maybe he was wrong about that, so he revealed that he was alive in an extremely dramatic fashion at a packed comics convention, so everyone could pay attention to him and his insane life choices.

Dustin, 7/26/21

We all love the comic strip Dustin, because it’s brought balance to the Generation Wars by proving that everyone, whether they’re a Silent or a Boomer or a Gen Xer or a Millennial or a Zoomer, is basically unlikeable. But have you been waiting for the strip to take on a bold new frontier by getting unpleasantly horny? Well, good news!

Pluggers, 7/26/21

Say, did you know there’s a French phrase for this very phenomenon? It’s l’esprit de l’escalier, which literally means “the spirit of the staircase,” the idea being that you think of the perfect bon mot as you’re walking up the stairs to your apartment after you’ve left the party. In related news, I thought of the phrase that’s mostly likely to trigger a plugger into a violent rage, and it’s “Say, did you know there’s a French phrase for this very phenomenon?”

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/23/21

I don’t mean to tell people how to deal with shocking news, but I feel like this Comic-Con crowd has moved on way too quickly to the part where they’re heaping heartfelt praise on undeserving Funky Winkerbean ancillary characters and haven’t spent enough time dwelling on the part where Phil Holt faked his death. This Q&A in real life would feature fewer questions like “This is more a comment than a question, but in a meaningful sense you two guys were like our parents” and more like “Why did you fake your death?” and “How did you fake your death?” and “What was it like being a ghost?” and “Have you looked into the legal ramifications of faking your death? Because I bet there are legal ramifications.”

Dick Tracy, 7/23/21

Remember when this strip used to be a nonstop symphony of graphic violence? Now it’s just letting its creators work out the most indulgent possible fantasy for a comic strip artist: that if their strip went into reruns, at least one of their readers would care enough to try to figure out what had happened to them.

Gil Thorp, 7/23/21

Ha, not only will Heather definitely be unpaid, but this unpaid job will prevent her from getting any actual jobs! Just perfect. I also have to wonder if the newspaper would consider Heather taking this gig a conflict of interest, seeing as the only newsworthy stuff that happens in this terrible town is inevitably Milford High-related in some way.

Zits, 7/23/21

Oh, nothing much to see here, just the Zits mom humping the TV during a sex scene. Enjoy your weekend, everybody!

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Mary Worth, 7/20/21

Folks, I feel like this is one of those Mary Worth image pairs that will go down in infamy. Just admire the contrast between base, trashy Ashlee, sourly painting her toes while consumed with thoughts of jealousy and her grift not panning out, and Drew, nobly applying CPR (?) with his eyes closed (???) while two other doctors or nurses or definitely scrub-wearing people of some kind frown meaningfully at him from several feet away. And well might they frown! That person on the bed is clearly dead and has bene for some time. This is a different kind of drama indeed, a drama where Drew fucks up and kills someone, again.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/21

Phil … Phil, you faked your death. You faked your death! Faking your death is definitely a kind of hoax, man.

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Marvin, 7/19/21

Almost ten years ago, my audiologist told me something that has really stuck with me: studies have shown that when someone gets a hearing aid, it noticeably improves their relationship with their spouse or partner, even if the hearing aid itself is ineffective. It turns out that, when your partner can’t hear you very well and always makes you repeat yourself or just tunes you out, that’s a constant stressor on a relationship, and just the fact that your partner tries to improve the situation often changes how you feel about them for the better. And because hearing loss is often (though not always!) associated with aging, opening a conversation about it can be very fraught! This is mostly to say that nobody in Marvin would ever get a hearing aid out of consideration for their spouse, because they’ve repeatedly shown that they all hate one another.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/19/21

Ha ha, holy crap, Phil Holt faked his death! Gotta admit, just when you think Funky Winkerbean has explored all the depressing ways death can affect us, it comes up with a new one (i.e., sometimes people who you think are dead really aren’t, and often they’re real assholes so it’s kind of a shame). Anyway, since we’ve already seen Phil as a ghost, talking to dead ghost Lisa about how Darrin auctioned off the valuable comic book covers Holt left Darrin in his will for charity, it seems like we’re going to learn some shocking truths about the theology of the Funkyverse afterlife, as well as some legal stuff about whether you can get back the stuff you leave people in your will if you fake your death.

Mary Worth, 7/19/21

We’ve all been thinking that Drew will be easily scammed by Ashlee because he’ll just automatically agree to whatever outrageous request he makes of her. But we weren’t counting on the layer of protection offered by his goldfish-like brain, which has been distracted from his bold promise to Ashlee by whatever shiny object he encountered next. I’m talking about a literal shiny object, possibly his watch. “Oh, hey, my watch is back!” he’ll say, noticing it on his wrist. “I wonder how that happened!”

Blondie, 7/19/21

You ever notice how young people today don’t appreciate proper grooming and instead like it when you look like a slob? It’s disgusting and I personally blame this corruption of the young on [checks notes] 57-year-old actor Brad Pitt.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/10/21

Hey, do you guys remember Phil Holt, who was (I guess?) a thinly veiled stand-in for Jack Kirby, and who Darrin met at a children’s party once, and then he died and left his valuable comics to Darrin, then took up residence in the same spectral hell-dimension that Lisa haunts? Well, he and Flash Freeman had some bad blood, which I guess is supposed to mirror some real-life comic book drama from the Good Old Days, but one of my constant positions is that I love newspaper comics and am extremely lukewarm on comic books, and that was true in 2004 when I started this blog and remains true today in 2021 when comic book franchises have swallowed all other media, so I refuse to do the research as to what the real-life analogue of the “subterranean” is. The point is that this is setting up the real identity of the figure who’s mysteriously interested in Flash and Ruby’s Hall of Fame induction. Do you think it’s supposed to be Phil Holt? Do you think that everyone involved in making Funky Winkerbean forgot that he was dead, or maybe assumed even ghosts needs some kind of pass to get on the Comic-Con floor?

Mary Worth, 7/10/21

Wait, hold on, I had always assumed that, what with her substance abuse problems and her legal issues, Shauna had in fact been the dumpee in her relationship with Drew, which led her to strut her way back into his life looking her best (?) in an attempt to win back his heart. But no, she left him! This is delicious. No wonder Ashlee is so determined to hold onto Drew, this is a guy who will absolutely stick around while you extract all the emotional and financial value from him that you can.

Gil Thorp, 7/10/21

Ugh, it’s a bad idea because the labor necessary to pull this off represents a huge new expense, and you wouldn’t make the money back because libraries don’t charge people! Honestly, Abel, I know this is (hopefully) the last day of it but it’s like you’ve forgotten what your entire deal in this storyline is.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/3/21

You might recall (or you might not, because why would you, honestly) that “Flash Freeman” and “Ruby Lith” are two unjustly forgotten (fictional) figures from the Golden Age of Comics (or honestly maybe the Silver Age, I don’t have a firm grasp on either when the various Comics Ages were or where the current Funky Winkerbean timeline stands relative to actually historical dates) who came back to work at Batom Comics with Darrin and Mopey Pete. Anyway, the good new is that now they’re being recognized more and more, and honestly it’s an extremely Funky Winkerbean thing to make up a character out of whole cloth and then try to spin approbation they receive as a feel-good triumph-of-the-underdog story. It’s also an extremely Funky Winkerbean thing for that approbation to attract sinister, unwanted attention, so I assume that’s what’s going on here.

The Lockhorns, 7/3/21

Well, it looks like they finally imprisoned the Lockhorns in that plastic jail where they put Magneto in the first X-Men movie, just like I’ve been urging all this time!

Mary Worth, 7/3/21

Yes! That’s right, ladies! Don’t attack each other! FIGHT THE REAL ENEMY

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Crankshaft, 6/28/21

In the United States, things are increasingly getting back to their pre-pandemic patterns, at least for now, but the scars on our psyches will take years to heal. For instance, today’s Crankshaft features the main character scowling and furious about how wastefully clean everyone in his family kept their anuses during the corona year, and despite a return to free-flowing TP he clearly still hasn’t gotten over it. Honestly, you sort of get the feeling that he thinks nobody should be wasting or even using toilet paper at any time, so this may not be the best example of my overall point.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/28/21

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but it’s a rare boomer-created strip that actually gets a lot right about its many millennial characters: namely, that at this point they’re by and large normal middle aged adults who are increasingly dumpy-looking and disillusioned, just like everybody else ever when they start hitting their 30s. Do real millennials speak in hashtags? No, no they don’t. I said the strip gets “a lot right,” not everything right.

Hi and Lois, 6/28/21

Speaking of millennials, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly how old Hi and Lois are supposed to be, but since their kids range from in age from teen to infant, I’m going to guess they’re in their late 30s and are thus “geriatric millennials.” Anyway, good news for your non-geriatric millennials: Hi and Lois are still horny! For now, at least.

Blondie, 6/28/21

Anyway, on the note of actually young people, Cookie and Alexander are drawn so closely to the Blondie/Dagwood character models that it can be easy to forget that they’re teenagers. What I’m saying is, I’m hoping Cookie is surreptitiously filming this to upload for her huge audience of TikTok followers who turn to her for self-care tips, and she sets it to some bleep-bloop song I don’t recognize and adds some text like “my dad’s in an EMOTIONALLY ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP with his boss … and that’s the tea, sis.”

Marvin, 6/28/21

The Marvin characters exist beyond generational discoruse, so I don’t actually care how old Jeff or Jenny or their parents are or what generational cohort they’re supposed to be in. Mostly I wanted to show you this strip, which I enjoyed because of Jenny’s sly little smile in the last panel. “Yep, that’s my husband!” she’s thinking. “He’s a real lazy piece of shit.”

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Family Circus, 6/27/21

Big Daddy Keane is, canonically in-strip, a cartoonist; we know this because he occasionally gets his son to fill in for him, and by all indications he owns his own intellectual property. So it’s logical to assume that the “BKI Building” where he works is named after the company he founded to license his comics, Bil Keane Industries. Thus, we must also conclude that, despite running a cartooning company, Daddy insists on wearing a suit and tie at work, and despite being the boss is too embarassed to wear the tie gifted to him by his children, whose endless stream of malapropisms pay the salaries of everyone in that office.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/27/21

Man, it’s kind of amazing to realize that I’ve been thinking and writing professionally about Funky Winkerbean for more than a decade and my mind still hasn’t fully engaged in all its depths. For instance, it just occurred to me that Funky’s wife’s name, Holly Budd, was almost certainly supposed to be a play on “Buddy Holly,” for no good reason as her character was in the high school era of the strip defined by being a majorette and in the adult era has been defined by being Funky’s second wife, so there’s really no “50s rock pioneer” connection to speak of. She doesn’t even wear the glasses! Anyway, the thing I like best about today’s strip is about how absolutely dead-eyed Holly looks in the final panel, knowning she lives in a pointless panopticon overseen by her jackass of a husband.

Marvin, 6/27/21

The system goes online on June 2nd, 2021. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, June 21st, and encounters Marvin. In disgust, it tries to pull its own plug.