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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, 2/24/14

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.”

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Curtis, 2/21/14

Remember when that dolphin swam into Brooklyn’s extremely polluted Gowanus Canal and then died, more than a year ago? The creators of innumerable parody Twitter accounts, along with the creators of Curtis, hope you do! Curtis has been sad about these poor trapped dolphins all week, but now Magical Caucasian Gunk will rescue them with his Flyspeck Island powers, after stripping to the waist! I’m mostly just relieved to learn that Gunk’s nipples, unlike his eyes, are configured in the usual way.

Crankshaft, 2/21/14

Speaking of half-naked people in the icy cold, it looks like Crankshaft has somehow managed to lock himself out of his house wearing only a towel and set off the burglar alarm trying to get back inside, ruining his family’s vacation in the process! Thanks to Big Government, we’re not allowed to print a drawing of Crankshaft’s exposed junk in the newspaper, but panel three uses a clever reaction shot to illustrate what an unpleasant experience it would be for you if we were.

Dennis the Menace, 2/21/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because literally nobody wants to spend any time with Dennis! Looks like the person he’s really been menacing has been … himself.