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Family Circus, 3/5/14

Haha, look at Dolly panic! She’s only beginning to grapple with the plight of the fictional character, who, despite the promise of “Happily Ever After” at the end of their tale, has no existence outside the narrative written for them, and is forced to relive it, ignorant of what awaits them, every time someone picks up the book. “Time is a flat circle,” as Rust Cohle said on True Detective. Dolly’s real fear is not for Snow White, who is barely real for her, but for herself, and that fear is fully justified.

Apartment 3-G, 3/5/14

Whoops, looks like we’ve gone from “Tommie has a fiancé” to “Tommie’s fiancé died in a plane crash” in a mere nine weeks! And since Tommie delayed Jim with “love-drowsiness” and caused him to miss his plane in the first place, there’ll be some nice guilt to motivate her character into epic fits of maudlin ennui for months and months! First up: Tommie’s story shifts from “My fiancé is a real human who exists” to “My fiancé died in a plane crash that was definitely not made up boo hoo hoo I’m so sad I can’t possibly do my share of apartment chores for the next several weeks.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/5/14

Right you are to “?”, Beetle! This is the focus for the strip today? Isn’t there something even vaguely zany happening anywhere else?

Hagar the Horrible, 3/5/14

Do you think Hagar had to kill everybody in the waiting room in order to get in to see the doctor? Or did he only murder a few, at which point his intentions were clear and everyone else just fled in terror?

Crankshaft, 3/5/14

Funky Winkerbean is spending the week focusing on the collapse of a longtime character’s dreams and sense of self. Crankshaft, Funky’s zanier sister strip, is more into physical comedy, like this gag, where the strip’s main character’s bad back is causing him so much physical agony that he’s reduced to crawling on the floor.

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/20/14

So hey, remember that lady from Monday’s Funky Winkerbean, who deflected a sexual advance by announcing with dead eyes that, despite the fact that she was beautiful, she was broken inside and she hated herself? Well, turns out she’s Cindy Summers, former Westview popular girl and current national news anchor and Funky’s ex-wife! The whole marriage took place during the period when I wasn’t reading the strip, but faithful reader/disturbing Twitter user name Bat Les Moore assures me that this cheery moment happened during their divorce:

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY! Anyway, the residual effects of having been married to Funky probably explain Cindy’s self-loathing, but at least she still has her physical beauty and high-powered job to sustain her! Haha, whoops, except her boss is telling her that she’s too old to be beautiful and that they’re going to fire her, which, while this is obviously the thought process behind a lot of TV news personnel decisions, I’m pretty sure that if you just say it out loud explicitly like this you get extremely sued for age discrimination.

Anyway, not to dwell too much on this strip (haha, who am I kidding, dwelling too much on strips like this are the entire reason why this blog exists) but let’s examine today’s punchline! “It’s the digital age, Cindy … and digital shows your age.” It’s typically Winkerbeanean in that it uses low-level wordplay to let a character know that their life is changing for the worse. But does it make sense? Is TV Executive Man saying that young people, who like computers and don’t watch TV news, will watch TV news if someone young is on TV? Is he saying that Cindy has repeatedly tried and failed to operate computers, smartphones, and other digital devices on-air, further alienating the coveted young person demographic? Is he making reference to the fact that high-def broadcasts, blown up on a 60-inch screen, reveal the slight lines and imperfections on Cindy’s fortysomething visage, forcing the network to hunt after ever younger and smoother-faced anchors? Is he just being a dick, in a way that, I can’t emphasize enough, is totally, 100% legally actionable? Yes, it’s probably the last one.

Beetle Bailey, 2/20/14

Plato’s subtle shift in his third word balloon is instructive here. At first, with fanciful metaphors, he implies that Beetle can never satisfy Sarge with his work ethic. But then he shifts to an idea that, while still out of the reach of a lowly private, is at least within the realm of physical possibility. Sarge, he implies, can be bought. Now we must discover his price.

Spider-Man, 2/20/14

Oh, yeah, so: J. Jonah Jameson is inside the old Iron Man suit, has rigged it up somehow so his crazed eyes and Hitler mustache are visible through the mask, has gone mad with power, is determined to kill Spider-Man, blah blah blah. As you can see in the final panel, he’ll use the one weapon against which Spidey has no defense: crumbling masonry.

Mary Worth, 2/20/14

MARY WORTH IS INVITING TOMMY TO EAT IN HER APARTMENT REPEAT MARY WORTH US GIVING TOMMY AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE EITHER THEATRICALLY CONTRITE OR HILARIOUSLY INAPPROPRIATE ON HER TURF, THREAT LEVEL: AMAZING

Better Half, 2/20/14

Oh hey let’s check in with the Better Half, probably it won’t be an Oedipal nigtmarAAAAUUUUGGGHHH

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Beetle Bailey, 2/16/14

Today’s Beetle Bailey is certainly one of the more crushingly realistic commentaries on the nature of work I’ve seen in the comics lately. Sarge, standing in for the cheerleaders of the capitalist order who don’t do much manual labor themselves, urges his underlings to think of work as a intrinsically morally uplifting act. Yet in the final panel we can see that the ordinary soldiers aren’t buying this at all. Killer, most optimistic of the bunch, at least imagines that his window-washing duties might lead to a window-washing career that involves a certain degree of specialized skill and, one would hope, cachet; still, it’s not like he can get excited about it. Plato, ever the philosopher, knows that performing an identical act in a different location isn’t really any kind of change at all. Beetle can only visualize his future life as a reeking expanse of garbage, extending endlessly to every horizon. And Zero has the most harrowing vision: he knows that nobody in the private sector will pay him even minimum wage for the menial tasks that he’s only half-mastered, and that he will certainly starve if he can’t elicit sympathy from cruel-faced strangers.

Panel from the Better Half, 2/16/14

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

ha ha but it can’t have really said that

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

no check again they wouldn’t dare put that in the newspaper

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

but but is he talking about my lips everyone has lips oh my god

“I suppose lips count as raw meat…”

[ENDLESS ENDLESS SCREAMING]