Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 10/6/15

Welp, I guess we’re done with Lisa smugging from beyond the grave and have moved on to … Cindy’s love life! Did you know that Cindy was supposed to be significantly (?) older than her new hunky Hollywood boyfriend, Mason Jarr? I sure didn’t! I mean, I guess her whole shtick is complaining about getting old, but the narrative time jumps haven’t transformed her into a stooped, balding potato-person like her fellow main cast members, and honestly I have no read on how old Mason is supposed to be anyway, so I sort of figured they were roughly in the same ballpark. Anyway, I kind of enjoy how Cindy starts off in panel two making a dumb Funkyverse-typical metaphor about, like, tires, I guess, but immediately gives up and just starts talking about how pretty soon nobody’s going to consider her attractive anymore, haha, the patriarchy, amiright people? Mason’s last-panel smirk is pretty great too. “That’s right, babe! The inevitable passage of time brings death to us all, and we think we’re ready for that, but first it takes away the good looks on which we’ve founded our entire self-image.”

Family Circus, 10/6/15

The “Billy, age 7” panels of the Family Circus definitely present some of the most complex layers of narrative and metanarrative in the comics today. You have the strip being drawn by the real-life Jeffy, but deliberately done all crappy so that it can be credited to a seven-year-old version of his real-life older brother who in this fiction is filling in so his real-life deceased father can watch baseball. The look on Billy’s face really says it all here. “Please,” he seems to be thinking, “release me from this convoluted web of puns and artifice. It’s exhausting.”

Apartment 3-G, 10/6/15

“You know, I’m one of Margo’s best friends and know her parents pretty well and also am part of the team responsible for her care, so they’re definitely not going to want to hear this from me. Why don’t you, a total stranger, go over to their place in the middle of the night and tell them about it? I’m not going to tell you anything about their weird family backstory or dynamic, but you should definitely fill them in about how you used to be Margo’s boyfriend but then let everyone think you were dead for five years while you hung out with some Tibetan nuns, they’ll love that.”

Marvin, 10/6/15

This is 100% the facial expression of a woman whose grandchild has stolen her credit card and gone on a spending spree at a toy store.

Post Content

Spider-Man, 10/3/15

As is my wont with Newspaper Spider-Man characters plucked from the depths of Marvel’s intellectual property vault, I have gone out of my way to learn basically nothing about Prince Namor because I want to learn to love him in whatever hilariously dipshitty way that Newspaper Spider-Man chooses to portray him. I’m not even sure what his biological deal is — he lives underwater, but clearly breathes air and stuff and his people inhabit pressurized undersea environments? But they’re not just humans who moved beneath the waves centuries ago, what with the ears and the eyebrows? And also perhaps their hearts are oversized, to adapt to the oxygen-starved nature of their artificial atmosphere, which leaves then particularly vulnerable … to love? Anyway, the thought that Prince Namor would, if not for his heartbreak, be chowing down on an entire tray of “seaweed royale” is definitely one of the funnier things the comics has taught me this week.

Apartment 3-G, 10/3/15

“The most important thing is that you hover in the room and think good thoughts at her and be there when she wakes up, especially considering she didn’t recognize you before and thinks you’re dead. Don’t get in the doctors’ way! That will be extremely easy, in whatever spacious hospital room she’s in! Stay there all the time, even though you’re not legally related to her! If anyone complains, tell them I said it was OK! I’ll be somewhere else, somewhere far, far away.”

Post Content

Herb and Jamaal, 9/28/15

Pretty sure the word you’re looking for is “beneficiaries,” there, my friend! Or maybe not? Maybe this poor fellow has become ensnared in some diabolical scheme that he agreed to when he was young and foolish, when sinister figures offered to lavish gifts upon him so long as he named them in his life insurance policy, knowing, through devilishly accurate actuarial science, that their investment would be profitable. Now he’s a living financial product, the revenues arising from his demise already securitized and sold as tranches to overseas investors in China and Dubai, and everyone is just waiting as his clock ticks inevitably down.

Apartment 3-G, 9/28/15

This is amazing. I am genuinely in awe of this. Imagine that you had asked me, “Hey, Josh, this storyline, where Margo crossed a psychic and was behaving erratically and didn’t recognize her former fiance, who had sensed that she was in danger with his psychic Tibetan mind powers — can you come up with a super boring resolution for it?” Never in a million years would I have settled on “I dunno … something glandular, maybe?” I wouldn’t have had the nerve.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/28/15

I also would never have predicted that the “Other Woman” DVD would feature Lisa telling Les’s future partner that, yeah, Les is going to shout “LISA!” while you’re fucking, and that Cayla would watch this and smile a little smile and think, yeah, he does, that’s classic Les. I mean, it’s pretty obvious in retrospect that this was how this might go down, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to force myself to think about it long enough to reach that natural conclusion. I’ve barely been able to hold it together and type this paragraph.

Momma, 9/28/15

You know, the Met has very little contemporary art, so look on the bright side, Momma: at least your son isn’t some kind of eternal undead demon.