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Heathcliff, 6/17/13

Lots of people like cake, you know. Really like cake. Very few of them use this like of cake as the ideological basis for an independent cake-empire, which declares its separation from the insufficiently cake-worshipping polity to which it previous owed allegiance and then presumably goes on to aggressively impose cake-adoration on its unwilling neighbors. Heathcliff, as ever, does not do anything by half measures.

Crankshaft, 6/17/13

Oh, goodie, it’s been months since Crankshaft journeyed to New York to make vaguely New York-themed puns! But first, in today’s third panel, we’re treated to the precise moment when Pam gives up on trying to make her dad love her.

Spider-Man, 6/17/13

“With the Kingpin in custody” is kind of an obscure way to say “Now that we’ve finished having surreptitious beach-sex, let’s talk loudly and ostentatiously about our supposed romantic entanglements with women,” but I don’t want to tell you guys how to live your lives.

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Apartment 3-G, 6/12/13

There are so many things I [love/am horrified by] (this is a single emotion that I trust is familiar to anyone reading this blog) about today’s Apartment 3-G that I can hardly stand it. Let’s start with the idea that Lu Ann lacks the rudimentary linguistic-cultural competencies necessary to parse the concept of a “famous stylist,” which would be pretty embarrassing even if she hadn’t fairly recently been on a reality TV show in the course of which she got a makeover from a famous stylist. Then add in the fact that what had on Monday been an ignorable peach-orange shirt has today suddenly become a peach-orange shirt insanely paired with an all white suit jacket, which, when combined with Lu Ann’s weirdly rubbery-seeming fish-lipped visage, makes her look like a villain from the Adam West Batman. Look, the governor is affectionally patting her mask-face! Haha, this is a [nightmare/delight].

Funky Winkerbean, 6/12/13

Man, Funky Winkerbean is really going there, if by “there” we mean “dragging one of the sad sack characters from Crankshaft ten years through a time-wormhole into the Funkypresent.” Things we’ve learned today: Jeff looks even more beaten down by life and depressed than he does in the Crankpresent; and, Crankshaft still lives, but has been banished to a nursing home, and thus presumably no longer endangers children by driving a bus. What about Jeff’s terrible mother? Has she finally shaken off this mortal coil? I’m legitimately on tenterhooks!

Crankshaft, 6/12/13

Meanwhile, back in the Crankpresent, my shriveled black heart twitched in delight at Crankshaft’s look of genuine panic in the second panel. Is this the moment when the school district decides to let him go from the job that lets him preserve a modicum of independence and dignity? Let’s hope!

Mark Trail, 6/12/13

Oh, man, I’ve been totally neglectful in keeping you up to date with the new storyline in Mark Trail, which involve otter poaching and otter traps and rescuing injured otters, and have been bubbling along on just this side of hilarity. But I think it’s safe to say that the sentence “How are the otters today, Rusty?” crosses that line at a pretty fast clip.

B.C., 6/12/13

The B.C. creative team apparently has only a vague idea of what the “internet” is or how one interacts with it.

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Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 6/7/13

So we’ve been wandering down Funkyverse memory lane this week, encountering of revelations about Lisa and Darrin and Frankie. This had been sort of already described by Funky scribe/puppetmaster Tom Batuik in an interview a few months ago, but: while in previous iterations of the Darrin origin narrative the story was that his conception was consensual if regrettable, we are now getting dark hints that this was not so much the case. This isn’t particularly unrealistic, honestly — as in, lots of people who are victims of acquaintance rape minimize it or don’t tell anyone due to shame or a feeling that other people won’t believe them — though it does also dovetail nicely with the strip’s overall plunge to the bottom of the deep pit of existential despair over the decades. I am a little bit unsettled by the smiles all around in the third panel. “Ha, so our downstairs neighbors stumbled upon your future biological parents right after your bio-dad raped your birth mother! What a kooky coincidence! So now he’s making a reality TV show, you say? How interesting.”

This all raises once again the somewhat awkward question of Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft’s relative chronology, i.e., Funky time-jumped and Crankshaft didn’t, so this incident took place around 30 years ago in Funky, but only around 20 years ago in Crankshaft, but the cultural references in both strips place them in the present, so if the Faircloths seek out Pam and Jeff will they be 10 years older than they are in Crankshaft or what, etc. Crankshaft could have tried to complement the Funky flashbackery, somehow, or it could have just ignored it, but instead it decided to go the most confusing route possible: launching its own flashback story to some indeterminate earlier period when Pam and Jeff had an entirely different downstairs neighbor lady who almost blew up the house.

Mary Worth, 6/7/13

Meanwhile, Mary Worth is about to launch into a much more fun and exciting scenario: a biddy on biddy battle. Mary’s overwhelming desire to see everyone in the world (except for her, natch) paired up in heteronormative couples is almost overwhelming. Do you think she’ll let anyone stand in the way of that? Even the mother of one half of the couple in question? You need to get one thing straight, Elinor: Mary will show no mercy.