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Crankshaft, 5/16/14

So Crankshaft got a smartphone this week, by the way! I would have settled for some smartphone-themed puns, but I will very much accept Crankshaft being a snarling dick to his best friend, for no reason other than to cover up his own feelings of inadequacies and helplessness, and there’s not even a hint of a joke or wordplay or anything like that, just the main character of this strip salving his own emotional wounds by making everyone around him feel miserable and shitty. Crankshaft, everybody! The “fun” Funkyverse strip!

Heathcliff, 5/16/14

Why don’t the inhabitants of Heathcliff’s leafy suburb ever use garbage bags? They just empty all their waste directly into metal cans, where it putrefies into a more or less homogeneous brown goo. Now Heathcliff and Sonia are painting the town, if by “painting the town” you mean “smearing the streets of the town with the lumpy brown goo that is apparently the end product of rotting garbage.”

Apartment 3-G, 5/16/14

At last, thought Jack, my plan has come to fruition. He had known it wouldn’t be easy to find a suitable partner and then convince her to willingly join him inside his meticulously hand-crafted two-person horse costume for some good old-fashioned equine cosplay. But Jack Riley was nothing if not a patient man.

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Mark Trail, 5/15/14

As promised, we are at last being treated to a genuine wild bear fight, of the sort that happens all the time in the actual wilderness, as determined by me doing exactly zero research on the subject because this is super rad and I want it to be real.

Also super rad is Mark’s completely gob-smacked expression in panel three. It’s almost as if, even though he planned to lure this wounded black bear into Rex’s territory, he never really expected it to work. Is this the origin story of New Model Mark Trail, in which he realizes that he can control the beasts of the wild, with his thoughts?

Apartment 3-G, 5/15/14

Man, I kinda regret having shown you any of the last six weeks worth of Apartment 3-G, because if I hadn’t I could believably present today’s strip to you and say “Tommie’s taken on work as a trainee dominatrix at a rural BDSM dungeon — but is she ready for the job?”

Family Circus, 5/15/14

I was pretty disgusted by Jeffy’s lack of even basic science knowledge here about suborder Rhopalocera’s life cycle. But, upon reflection, I don’t think Jeffy should learn that a gross, squirmy caterpillar can eventually become a beautiful butterfly. Best not to get his hopes up, you know?

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/12/14

A true artist can take a hacky, overdone concept and still manage to bend it to the service of their larger project. In the case of Funky Winkerbean, that hacky concept is “ha ha, exercise sure is difficult if you’re old and out of shape,” and that project, to which the strip is totally committed, is injecting a dose of soul-wrenching ennui into the funny pages each and every day of the week. What could’ve been just another joke about a guy whose medically mandated time on the treadmill takes longer than he’d like becomes a metaphor for life as an unwinnable race, run in sweaty silence and solitude, increasingly exhausting and yet not moving you forward a single inch. You guys are looking at the work of a master here, and I hope you appreciate it.

Slylock Fox, 5/12/14

Call me a speciesist if you must, but I usually have a hard time summoning up anything but sympathy for Slick Smitty as he occasionally violates the laws of an animal-run polity he neither understands nor respects. Here he is, with his hands terribly injured — probably he made an ill-advised attempt at offering a human-style handshake greeting to some sapient beast with sharp, unretractable claws on its forepaws — and he’s been put up in what’s essentially, let’s face it, a veterinary hospital. So sure, he wandered up the corridors, no doubt reeking of animal urine, found a basket of apples, and, yeah, he took one or two, carefully cradling them in his bandaged hands so as not to exacerbate the pain in his lacerated palms. There was some goat nearby, bleating, but, whatever, there were lots of apples in that basket. There were more apples where those came from. Do you know who first cultivated apples? Do you know who saw a tiny, sour wild fruit, growing on trees on the slopes of a Central Asian mountain range, and realized that, with patience and generations of selective breeding, eventually you’d have something juicy and succulent and sweet, growing on acre after acre of carefully tended trees? It sure wasn’t fucking goats, I’ll tell you that much.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/12/14

“Battle fatigue” is an archaic term for the collective symptoms and psychological reactions to the horrors of combat that we now refer to as a variety of post-traumatic stress disorder. So, even though Hagar spends his days burning and looting villages and murdering and enslaving the innocent, know that he wakes up every night covered in sweat and has intrusive, debilitating thoughts about the awful violence he’s seen. Centuries before the advent of the mental health profession, his only recourse is to drown his sorrows with alcohol and share his feelings with another man whose chosen profession involves endless, endless gore and horror.

Apartment 3-G, 5/12/14

We’ve been having fun for weeks now making fun of the pink Ann Taylor Loft turtleneck sweater that Tommie’s been wearing nonstop ever since she got to Jack’s large animal vet practice/cult compound, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen that she’s also been wearing white pants? This is basically the perfect outfit in which to shovel horse poop all day.

Luann, 5/12/14

In more proof that Luann seems determined to actually change things up and send its cast to college next year, it seems that beloved Pitts English teacher Mr. Fogarty will be retiring! Would you like to enjoy some more hilarious Fogarty Flashbacks™? Well, you’re going to have to check them out on the Web at LuannComic dot com, because they’re just too hot for newspapers.

Dennis the Menace, 5/12/14

It’s too bad Dennis’s spaceship doesn’t have room for a kitchen, because probably he’s going to starve to death on about day six of his mission.