Post Content

Crankshaft, 3/4/12

I’m always intrigued by the precise relationship between Crankshaft and its mother strip, Funky Winkerbean — not so much in terms of characters in common or mismatched chronology, but in tone. What thematic elements do they share, and what distinguishes them? Take this Sunday installment. All the old people are sitting around, talking in terms of mounting panic about the death of everyone they know, a fate that will find them soon enough. That’s basic Funkyverse fare. Then you get a dumb and tactless pun about the situation — also Funky-standard. But Crankshaft being a sullen, humorless jerk when he gets his pun taken away from him? That’s the Crankshaft value-add!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/4/12

Sorry, boys, nobody’s allowed to leave Hootin’ Holler! Loweezy’s doing you a favor: if you had managed to pilot your makeshift aircraft over the barbed wire fence, you just would have been shot by the guards.

Post Content

Pluggers, 2/25/12

When I was in college I had a big thing for a Catholic girl and one week I went to church with her (ROMANTIC PRO TIP: This very rarely works) and it was a typically crunchy collegiate parish and at one point the bearded priest busted out an acoustic guitar and we got a folk-rock version the Lord’s Prayer and all I could think was “Oh my God, Mel Gibson was right.” Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I feel you, my cranky plugger friend! And I’m not ashamed to say it!

Mary Worth, 2/25/12

More proof that Nola is being unfairly depicted as the villain in this story! Obviously in whatever badly decorated office this is the well-known rules of engagement are that one sleeps one’s way to the top. It’s probably right there in the HR manual! Our catty duo knows that they’d do the same if only they were endowed with the sexy gams and malleable face of their rival.

Crankshaft, 2/25/12

So Crankshaft was inducted into the local sports hall of fame to his great delight, but for some reason this week the plot took a turn and was suddenly about how this one-armed reporter we’d never seen before accidentally wrote and published an obituary for this other guy we’ve never seen before, which, weird and not-funny as it is, is surely better than seeing Crankshaft enjoy anything.

Marmaduke, 2/25/12

Don’t be ungrateful! It’s polite of Marmaduke to shake your hand before he brutally dismembers you, just as it’s polite of him to have dug graves for your various body parts rather than just leaving them strewn about the yard.

Post Content

Judge Parker, 2/14/12

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! Did you ask for a sexy, sinister assassitrix from your Valentine, the syndicated continuity strip Judge Parker? Well, you got it! Monique Zatari will almost certainly be the villain in the current confusing Judge Parker whodunnit; her character exists not only to stir America’s most erotic fears about Middle Easterners, but also to right a four-year-old wrong. Remember the last time the good white people of Spencer-Parkerburg were menaced by a lady of Islamic extraction? Remember how we never got a sense of the size or shapeliness of her breasts? Well, you won’t be able to say that about Monique Zatari, by God.

Crankshaft, 2/14/12

I know I’m on the record as publicly not caring about the chronological inconsistencies that arise from the various time jump shenanigans in the Funkyverse, i.e., why did everyone in Funky Winkerbean discontinuously get 10 years older but their world is still contemporary with ours, did Crankshaft jump forward with Funky Winkerbean, etc. But I do find a different kind of time-problem interesting: namely, when a strip’s essentially timeless nature (i.e., it’s always happening now, no matter how long it’s been running with the characters the same age) runs up against decisions to fix important bits of character development to real points in history. If Crankshaft really was a minor league player in 1940 whose career was cut short by the outbreak of World War II, that makes him at minimum 88 years old now. Which means he … probably shouldn’t be working as a school bus driver? I’m sure that there are 88-year-olds out there now who do a fine job of driving large commercial vehicles, but they’re few and far between. Kudos to the strip for sticking to its guns, I guess, but maybe a quiet retrofitting of Crankshaft’s service to Korea might be in order?

Mary Worth, 2/14/12

Soooo … much as I’ve enjoyed Mary’s Dinner With The Moral Abyss That Is Nola so far, it is starting to get a bit repetitive! And Mary’s offer of advice reminds us that Nola arranged this meeting to get Mary’s thoughts on whether her boyfriend is cheating on her; of course, Mary would have no real way to offer an informed opinion on the matter, since Nola hasn’t supplied any details but instead has gone off on a long discursis on how awesome it is to have sex with other people’s husbands and not care about anybody’s opinions about anything. I’m beginning to think that maybe Nola is just stalling Mary while her accomplices are kidnapping Dr. Jeff or clearing out Mary’s safe deposit box or something. You might not approve of that, but Nola only has it all because she’s determined not to let anything stop her!