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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/17/12

“Never mind June being left at home to manage a sexy, charismatic, half-naked drunk lady,” you’re saying to yourself. “This strip needs to focus on its core strengths. Has Rex been a dick about anything lately?” Well, good of you to ask! You might recall that, right after the sadly departed Foster changed his will leaving everything (including $25,000 nobody knew he had) to Rex, he (supposedly) fell down the stairs while under the supervision of (estranged? ex-?) wife Mabel, who was not wise to this sudden will-change. There’s a couple of strange things going on here, and guess which one has been exercising Rex’s mind more? “You’re not implying that Mabel had anything to do with it!? Because if the police decide that she did, that might slow down the implementation of the directives in his will, and obviously nobody wants that!”

Apartment 3-G, 5/17/12

“Do you understand? I killed her!! And once I tasted blood, I couldn’t stop! My mother was the first of my many victims. And now I fear that my baby will start the cycle anew … with me. You have to help me maintain my position as Satan’s High Priestess of Death!”

Ziggy, 5/17/12

Congratulations, Ziggy: You have baffled me. The only scenarios I can wring out of this that make any sense at all are “Ziggy lives in a dystopian future when all forms of life other than people have been wiped out, and it makes him said to see the biodiverse glory that once was” or “Ziggy is watching a show about evolution and is the last survivor of a short, gnomish species of nonhuman primates.”

Crankshaft, 5/17/12

I’ve spent most of my life avoiding golf and golf courses at all costs, so I’m not really familiar with the social mores that prevail in those contexts. Is the sort of angry mob justice that’s looming in panel two typical, or is it just a strong but justified reaction to Crankshaft’s behavior and/or personality?

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Mark Trail, 5/9/12

There is a famous rule of the Internet, and that’s Rule 34, and it goes like this: If it exists, there is porn of it — no exceptions. That means that somewhere out there someone has created a porn version of Mark Trail, by the use of advanced pornographing equipment that can break through the brittle shield of asexuality that surrounds the strip at all times. I’ve never had the intestinal fortitude to seek any such material out, but for two and a half panels I thought I was getting the setup to some canon in-strip Mark Trail erotica today. The mysterious call from the past on Mark’s bakelite handset that isn’t connected to anything in particular, the gratuitous use of “honey,” the sexy-for-Mark-Trail name “Trish,” the easy banter … and then bam, your arousal is crushed because this is about a young girl’s sick father, you pervert. And this is how that brittle shield of asexuality is kept in place.

Gil Thorp, 5/9/12

OK, let me preface the following by saying that I am fully aware that I am now someone who complains about the “good old days” of Gil Thorp, and that therefore I have become everything that I most despise. That having been said, remember the good old days of Gil Thorp, when they had a homeless kid playing on the team, and crowds at rival schools taunted him by dressing up like hobos, and it was amazing? That’s a pretty high bar when it comes to Important Social Issues-based taunting, and it looks like the Goshen girls aren’t going to reach it. “Hey, Darby, how many kids you got now? Because we heard you know how to have sex, and that’s how kids are made. Sex-having kid-maker! Go back to the obstetrics ward!”

Archie, 5/9/12

I don’t want to exaggerate too much, but I’m reasonably sure this is the greatest Archie ever made? See, Miss Grundy knocked the kids out of their thoughtless world of casual socializing, and just forcing them to change locations has caused them to re-evaluate everything they know about the world and each other, and now they’re just standing there, staring silently into the middle distance, terrified.

Crankshaft, 5/9/12

“Plus you know there’s nothing I loathe so much as buying gifts or otherwise bringing joy to others. My mind is so resistant to the idea that I always forget about it.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/9/12

“Haw, Lurleen, that is an amusin’ bit o’ wordplay! But still, you know the penalty for talkin’ to menfolk from other clans is death by stonin’.”

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Mark Trail, 5/5/12

Oh, man, you didn’t expect this Mark Trail storyline to end without a powerhouse moral lesson, did you? “Rusty, America’s landscape is lousy with marijuana, and probably most of your little school friends are dopers! It’s not safe out there for anyone, so maybe it’s better that you just stay in the Lost Forest compound, forever. Those friendly beavers won’t try to push a reefer at you, I can promise you that!”

Crankshaft, 5/5/12

Don’t Leroy and Loretta usually at least try to make their hostile asides about one other relate in a vaguely punny way to whatever situation they find themselves in? Like, Leroy should be stage-whispering this to a salesman as they shop for a new car. Just blurting this stuff at a party reeks of even greater levels of desperation than we’ve seen before. “Loretta’s hair isn’t factory color. I mean, she dyes it. Her blonde hair is a lie. A lie like our marriage. Oh, God, I hate every waking moment. Do you have a gun in the house? Can you put it to my head and pull the trigger? I’ll pay you!”

Funky Winkerbean, 5/5/12

Many of you may have already heard about the blockbuster Gay Teens Go To The Prom storyline Funky Winkerbean’s got lined up for the spring. I’m fully in favor of this because (a) I think gay teens should go to the prom together if they want and should be depicted as doing such in comics where proms happen and (b) any Funky Winkerbean strip time dedicated to gay teens going to the prom is strip time not dedicated to beloved characters dying in agony, leaving emotional devastation in their wake.

The mechanics of such stories are a bit tricky in comic strips like this, in that if you suddenly make an established character is gay it seems a bit deus ex machina just to make the plot happen, whereas if you suddenly introduce generic gay characters who only exist for the purpose of the storyline, it makes it very obviously an Issue Story rather than a story about the characters in your strip. Probably the best way to do it would be to introduce a new character who then becomes a part of the recurring cast (which is what Archie did), and who knows, maybe these two guys will stick around, though there are already so many Funkyverse teen characters that I can’t keep track of them all. Hopefully they’ll be given names at some point, at least.

But maybe they won’t! Because as the third panel reveals, the nemesis of gay teen happiness for the next several weeks will be Becky’s mom, who, if I’ve got my Funky history right, once launched a moral crusade to get Comic Book John’s comic book store shut down, because comic books are smut. Thus the important lesson that Gay Relationships Are Valid will probably just serve to make clear the real point of the storyline, which is that Becky’s Mom Is Terrible.

Crankshaft, 5/5/12

But maybe we won’t get to see any of this played out, because it turns out that the entire Funkyverse is really just a series of tales Grandma Rose is telling to her grandkids in order to scar them emotionally.