Post Content

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.

Post Content

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.”

Post Content

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.”