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Crankshaft, 5/16/14

So Crankshaft got a smartphone this week, by the way! I would have settled for some smartphone-themed puns, but I will very much accept Crankshaft being a snarling dick to his best friend, for no reason other than to cover up his own feelings of inadequacies and helplessness, and there’s not even a hint of a joke or wordplay or anything like that, just the main character of this strip salving his own emotional wounds by making everyone around him feel miserable and shitty. Crankshaft, everybody! The “fun” Funkyverse strip!

Heathcliff, 5/16/14

Why don’t the inhabitants of Heathcliff’s leafy suburb ever use garbage bags? They just empty all their waste directly into metal cans, where it putrefies into a more or less homogeneous brown goo. Now Heathcliff and Sonia are painting the town, if by “painting the town” you mean “smearing the streets of the town with the lumpy brown goo that is apparently the end product of rotting garbage.”

Apartment 3-G, 5/16/14

At last, thought Jack, my plan has come to fruition. He had known it wouldn’t be easy to find a suitable partner and then convince her to willingly join him inside his meticulously hand-crafted two-person horse costume for some good old-fashioned equine cosplay. But Jack Riley was nothing if not a patient man.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/11/14

Whoops, looks like June is not being a very good mother on Mother’s Day! How is little Sarah going to get by without her “assistant”/terrified thrall? This is what June is going to get as a Mother’s Day gift: she will wake up suddenly in a panic at 3 a.m., only to find Sarah standing next to the bed and staring at her with those shadowed eyes. “I’m very upset with you, mommy,” she will say. “Very upset.”

Judge Parker, 5/11/14

She’ll still be having a better Mother’s Day than stepmother-of-the-groom Katherine Parker, though! Sure, she’s being held captive by a vicious mercenary with a score to settle, but … she’ll be fine? Probably? This crazed, terminally ill arms dealer/con man says so?

B.C., 5/11/14

Typically an adolescent queen ant takes off from her birth colony on a “nuptial flight” with a swarm of males, most of whom mate with her and then die within a few days. She falls to earth, loses her wings, and begins pumping out worker-slaves, who build a new colony around her; she does nothing but eat and give birth to new workers for decades, using the sperm from her long-dead lovers that she stored inside her body to fertilize herself. That’s a scenario that would make for an interesting Mother’s Day comic, is what I’m trying to say.

Crankshaft, 5/11/14

“Happy Mother’s day! You’re a terrible person and inept mother who scarred me emotionally! I don’t love you or even like you very much! This is not a joke! It’s very very real.”

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Gil Thorp, 5/9/14

Yeah, what’s with the hand? Or the hands plural, for that matter? Why is one of them all turned around at a weird, unnatural angle? Why is the other one flapping in the direction of the first one, fingers splayed, as if that’s a gesture that’s used by humans to convey information of some kind? What’s with the hands? It’s what we’ve wondered for years about this strip, so I’m glad someone’s finally worked up the nerve to ask.

Apartment 3-G, 5/9/14

Speaking as someone who writes dumb jokes about newspaper comics on the Internet for a living, I do sort of understand the appeal of “real work” that Tommie’s talking about here — not enough to actually do any of it, you understand, but I can sort of see it. But it’s worth pointing out that before she came out to the country to shovel horse poop in exchange for room and board, Tommie was a nurse, which strikes me as pretty real? You’re not supposed to get your hands dirty, though, what with the danger of deadly infections. Maybe Tommie was just tired of the relentlessly sanitary hospital environment?

Crankshaft, 5/9/14

This week Crankshaft has been poking a little light-hearted fun at golf by explaining the emotions a golfer experiences after a whiff in terms of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief one goes through after suffering the death of a loved one or other serious life trauma. Today we reach the Funkyverse’s natural level with stage four: depression. What’s more depressing than contemplating killing yourself? Why, contemplating what it’d be like to fail at killing yourself, just like you always fail at golf and everything else, of course!