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Mark Trail, 6/7/21

Mark is off battling influencers, and Cherry is about to do battle with an HOA over native plants, so where does that leave Rusty? Well, Rusty is about to have a sleepover pizza party with Oscar winner Robert Shaw! What do you think they’re going to talk about? Jaws or The Sting would be the obvious choice, but you never know: Rusty might want to hear stories about his time in the ’50s doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic. He’s not a baby, after all!

Mary Worth, 6/7/21

Oh, dear, it looks like we’re getting to that time in a great Mary Worth storyline where I just post every strip! Anyway, today Ashlee asks Drew if he’s bummed about killing someone on the operating table but it turns out he’s just sad about his fancy watch, which she stole, and I challenge anyone working in comedy today to come up with something funnier than this. You can’t, it’s the peak of humor and we’ll be talking about this day for years to come. (Drew did kill someone on the operating table, of course, but he stopped feeling anything about that sort of thing years ago.)

Marvin, 6/7/21

Speaking of people feeling things, Marvin’s grandfather’s stunned facial expression in the final panel here is wholly appropriate. “Gee,” he’s thinking, “I thought we were best friends, but I never guessed how bleak and loveless his marriage was! I suppose you truly never can know another person.”

Crankshaft, 6/7/21

Wow, pretty rude of Crankshaft and his girlfriend to be going on and on about how great drive-in theaters are just days after his own grandson’s movie theater closed due to lack of customers. On the other hand, maybe it was a sign of respect that Crankshaft never went and had sex and/or made terrible puns in Max’s place of business.

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Baby Blues, 6/5/21

Imagine that you were on the verge of experiencing some marital intimacy with your husband, when suddenly you realized your cheek was resting on his huge, fleshy proboscis, which is longer as his arm and twice as thick. Truly harrowing. You too would find whatever way you could to short-circuit the romantic moment as quickly as possible.

Crankshaft, 6/5/21

Were you worried that Max and Hannah (I accidentally called her Mindy the other day, apologies, Mindy is his sister with straight blonde hair and Hannah is his wife with wavy blonde hair, we regret the error) weren’t going to stay horny for one another now that their business has gone under and their dream has been crushed and they’ve been forced to move in with Max’s parents and his terrible grandfather, Crankshaft? Well, don’t worry. They’re still horny for each other! Funkyverse characters do not get less horny when confronted with despair, because otherwise their world would’ve been depopulated generations ago. If anything, the gloom just eggs them on!

Mary Worth, 6/5/21

A fun thing about Mary Worth is that it wants to depict Ashlee’s upbringing as unspeakably depraved and the reason why she’s a broken, amoral grifter, but it’s a newspaper comic strip and can’t get too dark so instead her dad just got arrested for unspecified reasons and her mom had a job where she had to bare her midriff to serve chicken wings to bronies. Seems perfectly wholesome, honestly!

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Crankshaft, 5/31/21

So Crankshaft has spent the last month dwelling on the Valentine Theater and how the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t done it any favors, financially, and because this is the Funkyverse, where not just people die but dreams as well, there’s not going to be some magical It’s A Wonderful Life ending where everyone chips in and the theater is saved. Nope, it’s going out of business! And apparently Max and Mindy live there too, oops, maybe in like an apartment upstairs but also maybe they and their baby just sleep in the seats at night and eat popcorn for dinner. A thing that occurs to me about this is that when there was the big Funkyverse LA-burns-to-the-ground crossover event in Funky Winkerbean last summer, one of the threads was that Max’s dad Jeff, ten years older than he is in Crankshaft, was obsessed with finding shooting locations from his favorite silent movie The Phantom Empire, aka Radio Ranch, and you’d think at some point during that whole drama he’d have had time to reflect about how his son’s movie theater had gone out of business a decade earlier, possibly because it apparently showed nothing but that movie all the time, who can say. Anyway, I appreciate that Max’s final act as owner of the movie theater aims to directly spite the neighborhood that quite frankly did not support his business enough for it to survive.

Beetle Bailey, 5/31/21

Speaking of our honored dead, it’s Memorial Day, when America mourns those who died while serving in the military. Today’s Beetle Bailey is here to remind you that this holiday does not just recognize those who were killed in combat. It also honors those who gave their lives to help along their commanding officers’ golf game. Maybe somebody should’ve thought this through? Maybe?

Blondie, 5/31/21

OK, look, I’ve come to accept that Dagwood has a real twisted thing with his boss where they obviously hate each other but also have a parasocial relationship and sometimes hang out outside of work, and in the course of that sometimes their long suffering wives are dragged along to make a double date out of it. But I refuse go along with the idea that somehow this makes Cora Dithers and Blondie friends! Refuse, do you hear me? There’s absolutely nothing about this joke that wouldn’t have worked with Tootsie! This was unnecessary and inappropriate and I resist it!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/31/21

“Also, I mean, have you talked to her? It’s probably pretty boring.”

Six Chix, 5/31/21

Ahh, wouldn’t it be cute to imagine that various dried pasta types are like a family, and they grew up together back at the factory, and they’re having a big reunion on your kitchen counter, right … before you …

oh no

oh no