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Mark Trail, 10/25/12

How hard has everyone instantly fallen in love with Ol’ Pop, the kindly patriarch of this nest of heavily armed thugs? Very hard, I’m guessing! I’m looking forward to the fun as he and Mark get to know each other. “How long have you been in this guerrilla band, Pop?” “We’re not a band of anything, son! Certainly not anything political like ‘guerrillas,’ which implies some sort of political or ideological goals. We’re just poor peasants trying to get rich by seizing Americans at gunpoint if they happen to sail too close to our village and then holding them for ransom! Now shut up and don’t touch anything in my hut or I’ll slit your throat.”

Momma, 10/25/12

“Man, I sure wish Momma would cut it out with the gross Oedipal schtick and find another direction for its sexuality-themed jokes,” said all readers of the strip until they read today’s installment and then collapsed in gibbering horror.

Family Circus, 10/25/12

“I’m leaning towards angel, because to be a saint you have to be really, really good, but to be an angel you only have to be regular-level good and also dead.”

Spider-Man, 10/25/12

I may poke fun at the journalistic bona fides of J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker, and the Daily Bugle here, but you have to admit that they’re doing better than the people over at the Las Vegas Vista. “Holy crap, chief,” said the top political reporter, “There’s going to be a presidential election in just a few weeks! Let’s get a news story on today’s front page! I’ll do some research and have a feature on who exactly the candidates are for Sunday.”

Apartment 3-G, 10/25/12

“And I prefer to call it 180 pounds of confidence! Are you the one behind all those ‘Is Greg Cooper packing on the pounds’ items in Walter Scott’s Personality Parade? What the hell kind of publicist are you?”

Crankshaft, 10/25/12

Jeff’s mom has met a courtly gigolo, in what is probably the single most cheerful Funkyverse development in recent memory.

Marmaduke, 10/25/12

Do you know who else was a failed artist?

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Judge Parker, 10/13/12

Dear Judge Parker: I’m sorry I ignored you for, like, months while you winded your way through a boring fishing/vague hints of marijuana badness plotline! I’m not sure how we’re going to get from “horrifying, bloody chainsaw murder” to “our heroes will be handed a large pile of money and/or adulation that they didn’t deserve,” but I’m very interested in finding out and will be paying close attention from now on!

Crankshaft, 10/13/12

Wow, it looks like Crankshaft is even more death-haunted than yesterday’s strip led us to believe! The end is closer than it appears … much closer. Will Crankshaft die, say, tomorrow? Leaving entropy to slowly and silently advance in each subsequent strip, until we reach the heat death of the Funkyverse?

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Spider-Man, 10/11/12

OH MY GOD YES YOU GUYS KRAVEN THE HUNTER!!! Kraven was the villain in the very first Spider-Man plot I covered in this blog. Back then I was charmed by his outfit but eventually enraged by the plotline’s stunning lack of superheroics, which caused me to vent thusly:

When I did my first Spider-Man comic, almost a month ago now, I said, “Presumably the ass-kicking will begin in due time.” Oh, how naive I was! How, bitterly, bitterly wrong I have been proved to be! In that time we’ve had marital spats, a little aimless Web slinging, a press conference to announce the opening of new theme restaurant, and the firing of an incompetent waiter.

Haha, little did I know at the time that this represented more or less the most excitement the Spider-Man strip would ever offer. Now that I’m more in tune with the true nature of this strip, I’m really looking forward to Kraven’s wacky, camptastic antics.

Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 10/11/12

Never let it be said that the Funkyverse strips can’t cut loose and have some fun now and then! My only complaint about today’s Funky Winkerbean is that the colorists have once again failed to pick up on obvious textual cues, because I’d really like to see Les go chalk white in terror — proof that, despite the smug facade he presents as a defense against relentless tragedy, life still has the capacity to scare him to death. Crankshaft, meanwhile, is confronting the most depressing notion that modern science can muster — that the universe will end not with a bang or a cataclysm, but rather with a slow fading out to emptiness, with no life and no light. It’s almost a relief that Crankshaft greets this prospect with the exact same attitude of semi-informed grievance that he has about everything else.