Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 2/24/14

After being told that she was old and apparently analog last week, Cindy gratefully took her corporate masters’ offer of a job as a newscaster in Cleveland, which is close enough to the Westview hell-nexus that I assume that she’ll now be back as a member of the regular cast. The abrupt transition to Funky declaring his intention to sexy up his body would imply to me that we’re about to get treated to the strip’s title character as a the fulcrum of a love triangle with his former and current wives, because scientists have finally figured out how to top the sense of disgust you felt when you saw two women fighting for Les Moore’s affections. Anyway, it’s good to have workout goals and all, but those goals should be realistic, and thus Funky should forget about “looking better than people my age” for the moment and concentrate on “looking like my actual age and not 10-15 years older.”

Crankshaft, 2/24/14

Meanwhile, in the “fun” Funkyverse strip, the actual, literal spectre of Death is strolling through Crankshaft’s suburban neighborhood, looking for souls to reap. Crankshaft gets over his momentary startlement rather quickly, of course, because he knows he’s safe for the moment: his destiny lies in a broken husk of a body in a nursing home, ten years in the future. “Huh, wonder which one of my family members is about to die,” he thinks idly, before returning to his shoveling.

Archie, 2/24/14

The mid-90s Archie strips in syndicated reruns are in fact pretty dire, but it’s kind of sad how little faith in themselves they seem to have. Look at how Reggie’s punchline has been broken up over two panels! It’s like they think if you got to the end of a sentence in panel two, you’d say, “Enh, I don’t think this is going much of anywhere, think I’ll go take a nap or something.”

Post Content

Archie, 2/13/14

Good lord, Pop’s facial expression in that last panel chills me to my very core. “That’s right, Archie, Mr. Lodge doesn’t like you,” he thinks. “None of the adults in this town like you. Your time as a teenager, during which social convention demands that we be halfway pleasant and encouraging to you, is almost over. Prepare yourself for adulthood. Prepare yourself for … the shunning.”

Judge Parker, 2/13/14

So we’ve finally met April’s mysterious dying-of-cancer dad and he’s … one of the greatest things Judge Parker has ever seen? I’m not sure if he’s based directly on Hunter S. Thompson or if he’s been filtered through Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke, but he’s fantastic and I want him in every panel from now until the heat death of the universe finally brings this storyline to a close. My only regret is that April has actually drawn attention his tarantula companion; I sort of wish that it had just sat there on his shoulder, unexplained, for the next few weeks’ worth of strips, with everyone he meets reacting to it with silent but visible disgust.

Mary Worth, 2/13/14

Yep, Tommy’s coming back to Charterstone, all right! By the expression on her face you can tell Mary is almost as excited as I am.

Post Content

Archie, 1/28/14

The setup for today’s Archie is a bit contrived — why is Dilton, a fairly marginal member of the Archie gang, hanging around reading the newspaper in whatever venue is providing this private snuggle couch for Archie and Veronica? — but turns into an effective character piece. Of course poor socially awkward Dilton would immediately latch onto this dubious teleportation article — it combines his two loves, science and the idea of getting as far away from Riverdale and everyone in it as quickly as the laws of physics will allows. Meanwhile, Archie, in the midst of a love haze that he hopes will never end, is vaguely aware that his life is peaking at this precise moment and adulthood and the outside world hold nothing for him but disappointment. And yet it’s Dilton who looks at the happy couple with sadness all over his face: no matter how much he knows intellectually that his future is bright, emotionally he feels like high school will last forever, and the prospect of escape seems like the most unlikely science fiction.

(In other news: having an extra joke in the first panel was definitely a thing in these late ’90s/early ’00s Archie reruns; usually the gags are pretty execrable, but I deem Archie’s “I bet they’re beaming!” a solid pun.)

Gil Thorp, 1/28/14

Meanwhile, this plot where everyone wants to have sex with Wynn Wiley’s sister … is still happening, I guess! In today’s action, Wynn gets mad about it and punches someone in the face in the middle of the basketball game. Wait, did I say “action”? I meant “action that took place off-panel but was helpfully described for us,” more specifically. I understand the artistic choices being made here: Why show us a shocking act of violence in the middle of a high school basketball game when we could look at this referee with a weird little beard instead? That beard is what you get when you think, “I want to have a little mustache right under my nose, but it’s still ‘too soon’ because of Hitler or whatever! But what if … I moved that mustache … below my mouth? Hitler didn’t have a mustache on his chin, did he? Ref, you’re a genius!”