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Funky Winkerbean, 7/28/15

Well, finally! Lisa Crawford (décédé Moore), Funky Winkerbean‘s axis, muse, and paragon — and the only remotely plausible justification for this tedious time-travel story — puts in her appearance, and her friends handle it with their usual grace.

Lisa became quite the saucy gamine in the runup to her miserable death, but this is Original Lisa — mousy, hunched over, and perpetually chilly despite her enormous shapeless cardigan. After all, the Funky Winkerbean audience can easily buy into a high-school locker time travel story, but a hot chick going for Les crosses a line.

Judge Parker, 7/28/15

Of course Dalton has something for Sam — because no Judge Parker story can end before the Bestowing of the Gifts.

Archie, 7/28/15

Say, is that Jughead’s Dad, Jones père? I don’t believe we’ve seen him before! Anyway, Mr. Jones is a dead-eyed drone who wants to crush his son’s youthful exuberance and joy in a beautiful summer day!

That’s it for me — Josh will be back tomorrow with the very latest in newspaper comics mockery. Thanks for a fun time!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Slylock Fox, 7/6/15

Are we supposed to assume that our criminal dog, fleeing Slylock and his goons, got into this room one step ahead of the law? How did that work, exactly? He leaps into the unoccupied bed, starts feverishly wrapping bandages around his face, and growls to the actual patient, “You don’t say nothin’, see?” Or maybe it’s much more horrible: maybe he’s subjected the other dog to an involuntary Face/Off-style surgery, the better to escape justice. His victim is in a morphine haze, but the criminal refused painkillers; though he’s in agony, he knew he’d have to be sharp in case the cops showed up. Either way, the real tragedy is that the real patient didn’t receive a fruit basket.

Spider-Man, 7/6/15

This is a good question, because let’s be frank: even when he has his whole life ahead of him, caring about stuff isn’t Peter Parker’s strong suit.

Archie, 7/6/15

The way Veronica stares directly at the viewer in the final panel, inviting us into her world of gossip, is profoundly unsettling. “Do you miss the good old days? Sign up for an account on Gosspr, my new social app for gossip and rumors, and feel free to share what you know or have heard about your closest friends! #jointhecoversation”

Momma, 7/6/15

Ha ha, it’s funny because Francis and Marylou are slowly poisoning their mother!

Pluggers, 7/6/15

Pluggers have found that they hardest part of living is the seemingly endless slog through a meaningless existence that we have to endure until we finally feel the sweet embrace of death.

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Shoe, 5/20/15

If you’re like, me you saw the Perfesser’s statement that he attended a “1950s sock hop” and immediately thought, “Have the bird-men of Shoe invented time travel, and do they use it to travel back to enjoy the innocent entertainments of simpler eras?” But the answer is clearly no, as obviously the Perfesser wouldn’t have phone service in the days before the deployment of modern wireless networks. So instead, we’ll have to console ourselves with the deliciously depressing story of the evening that we can derive from this strip: the Perfesser, having finally worked up the energy to leave behind another grim night at home, went out for a social event with fellow bird-nostalgists, only to be overcome with social anxiety at the thought of actually interacting with others; he thus spent the whole evening staring at his phone screen, with eventually disastrous results.

Heathcliff, 5/20/15

Hmm, how many SynergyPoints™ should we award today’s Avengers-themed Heathcliff? Well, we should deduct some for the fact that it was published nearly three weeks after the movie debuted, but perhaps add some back because the colorists correctly did up Heathcliff in Hulk green despite the absence of explicit color or even name cues in the caption text.

Archie, 5/20/15

OK, Newspaper Archie, we know you’re just slumming it here on the comics pages and most of your money comes from those Double Digests on sale at supermarket checkout aisles around the country, but that doesn’t mean you have to be rude about the genre.