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Funky Winkerbean, 7/25/10

It seems my earlier suspicions — that this strip’s implacable torment has shifted from Les to Funky — has now been confirmed. Thus Les’s sheepish smirk in the final panel: he knows that every car accident or cancer diagnosis Funky is involved in means one less pregnant daughter or dead spouse for him. Holly is grinning like a maniac mostly because she knows Funky will be dead soon, and then she’ll be free, free.

Family Circus, 7/25/10

I think my favorite of the “Ma Keane is irritated by her children” panels here is the one at the lower right. In most of the other ones, she’s just intervening in momentary crises so as to prevent her arrest for child neglect and/or public nudity ordinances. But it’s when she’s forced to play some stupid ball-toss game with her feeble little daughter that the rage lines really begin to radiate from her head. “Damn it,” she thinks, “Does she never get bored with this inanity? I’ve been trying to work my way through this damn novel for the last eight years!”

Slylock Fox, 7/25/10

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen Slylock mediate in a human vs. human dispute. It goes to show how low the status of H. sapiens has fallen in this nightmare world of bipedal talking animals that the Josh family would be willing to turn to a canid law enforcement. If I were Slick Smitty, my defense would be that I was trying to protect the boy’s delicate mental health, as waking up every morning to find that piggy bank grinning at you like that is a guarantee of nightmares and insanity.

Meanwhile, in the six differences, a little boy has extorted some free cake out of the local diner by bashing one of the counter’s stools with a baseball bat. “Hand over the cake or this clown in the hat is next,” he growls.

Beetle Bailey, 7/25/10

As part of its atonement for years of making light of sexual harassment, Beetle Bailey has begun putting out a series of PSA pamphlets on social and relationship issues. This one is called “How to tell when you’re in an abusive relationship.”

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Dick Tracy, 7/21/10

Never let it be said that Dick Tracy phones it in. You could have been excused for thinking that Saturday’s strip was a the finale of the latest rambling, baffling plot that couldn’t be forced into some sort of coherent shape no matter how hard you tried; however, we’re clearly going to spend all of this week with the characters doing a half-assed attempt to explain it further, to no avail. Plus, that callous disregard for human life or dignity is the strip’s trademarked value-add. Yeah, Anja Nu, what a loser! Winners don’t get die in terror as they get cut in half by an airplane, am I right, people?

Dennis the Menace, 7/21/10

Well, if we can have Eli Roth-style torture porn in Crock, I suppose David Cronenberg-style biological anxiety in Dennis the Menace is fine. Watch in queasy fascination as Dennis crawls down an unwilling Mr. Wilson’s esophagus, discovering all manner of slimy, pulsating horrors within.

Gil Thorp, 7/21/10

Whoops, it turns out that Torrey Pines and Kemper Lakes are real-life golf courses, not made-up gated communities. It looks like my family was right and my aggressive refusal to learn anything about golf has come back to haunt me after all!

Meanwhile, this mustachioed golf impresario’s angry reaction to a “hronk” intrigues me. I’m not sure what a hronk is, but since to my knowledge “hr” sounds are generally restricted to Slavic languages, I think we’re all going to learn a valuable lesson about how wrong-headed it is to discriminate against Eastern Europeans. Will newspapers print racially charged but dramatically necessary dialog like “Get off of my golf course, you filthy bohunks”?

Beetle Bailey, 7/21/10

Ha ha, General Halftrack can’t smoke his cigars if he’s dead!

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Gil Thorp, 7/8/10

“Oh, hey,” you are almost certainly saying, “What’s going in Gil Thorp?” (Yes, you are definitely saying this, in your minds, don’t try to deny it to me, I know you too well.) Well, Milford’s star pitcher Slim Chance’s band got the “chance” to open for their alt-country heroes, Backyard Tire Fire (they are a real band who actually exists, and who apparently have spent some extremely ill-conceived product placement money), which gig happened the day before Slim was supposed to start in the team’s opening game of the playdowns, but the team van broke down on the way home, and Slim had to take a cab the last 150 miles, and he arrived just as the third inning was starting, ready to be the hero…

…and he lost, terribly. This is one of the reasons why I like Gil Thorp. It isn’t afraid to have plots that fly in the face of the sort of narrative arcs you’d expect! This is especially the case when such contrarian plotting ends with the Mudlarks having their hopes and dreams ground to dust.

Beetle Bailey, 7/8/10

The soldiers at Camp Swampy have any number of good reasons to hate and loathe Sgt. Snorkel (mostly involving their relentless physical abuse at his hands), but it does seem kind of cruel of them to mock the broken shell of a man that he’s become, thanks to his harrowing food addiction. “Oh, God, a delicious brown blob of some sort, right there on my tie … uh, it doesn’t count if I don’t use my hands, right? Come on, tongue…”

B.C., 7/8/10

There are a lot of puzzling concepts in today’s B.C., but let’s start with the most obvious: the phone, built into the tree. I guess much of the visual humor of the strip comes from putting modern things in ancient settings, but the tree-phone is a really baffling mishmosh. I mean, I get why you have to build it into a natural feature, I suppose, but why do the phone-parts look like they’re from the early 20th century? “Oh, they’re in caveman times, so it would make much more sense to have a phone that’s from 9,900 years in the future rather than 10,000 years in the future.”

Then there’s the question of whose phone-tree this is. The Cute Chick and the Fat Broad (gah, I know their names, their terrible, offensive names) just seem to be casually strolling by it when it rings. In this primitive era, did people not “own” phones per se, but rather just answer the ones that were scattered around the landscape, or, if they were feeling sassy, pick one up and dial a number at random, then start talking dirty to whoever picks up at the other end?

Mark Trail, 7/8/10

In addition to having a mustache and threatening cute animals, our current Mark Trail villain appears to be a dirty communist, or at least that’s my assumption based on his complete inability to understand basic market economics. Sassy only has value as a beloved pet to a lonely, malformed orphan boy; but the baddie’s “What he’s offering may not be enough” implies, wrongly, that there is some kind of market demand for this irritating, mewling pup. Someone is about to be very disappointed by the results of an eBay auction.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/8/10

With Toots and Brook’s problems solved by a little TLC and karate, we can at last move on to the next plot, which should be hilarious, as we find out how Rex’s “be a supercilious dick to everyone” bedside manner works out when he has to drop the c-bomb on the mayor. Whether you’re powerful and influential, or have a serious illness, or both, Rex will be a jerk about it, and by “it” I mean “pretty much everything.”