Post Content

Judge Parker, 7/31/16

Finally, everyone Sam and Abbey live with is gone for the night, having sex responsibly somewhere, so now they can have sex, responsibly! Remember, the Spencer-Drivers live a palatial horse-breeding compound and everyone’s bedroom is at least a half a mile away from everyone else’s, so obviously thre is a lot of special pleading going on here on the importance of having everyone out of their hair. I think they’re worried about the last time they tried to have sex, when this horror-nightmare happened, and they want to make sure it never happens again.

Crankshaft, 7/31/16

I like the vigorous wink Crankshaft is giving Pam in the final panel here. He knows he’s making a little joke! He knows this jersey is an inanimate object, and can’t actually collect Social Security! Since this is the first time I’ve ever seen him do this, I have to assume that with every other mangled wordplay-chunk he comes up with — the punchlines of about 75% of Crankshaft strips, in other words — he has no idea how dumb he sounds.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/31/16

The first row of throwaway panels at the top of the strip, which don’t appear in every newspaper depending on how they lay out their Sunday comics, completely change the content here. Without them, we just have a harmless, sappy series of nicknames. With them, we have Loweezy stalling a Barlow, the hated enemy of her clan in a feud that’s stained the hills with blood for generations, until her husband can show up with his shotgun.

Post Content

Family Circus, 7/29/16

This whole week of Billy at camp, dangerously self-actualized and unwilling to put up with any degree of camp-related bullshit whatsoever, has almost transformed him in my mind into the hero we need. Look at the way he’s striding confidently out of the craft area! The best part is that he got most of the way through making his wallet, so his exit has maximum effect. Billy could make a wallet, he’s totally capable of making one, but he chooses not to, because it’s unnecessary. He’s like a damn Ayn Rand protagonist at this point.

Mark Trail, 7/29/16

At last, Mark Trail has unleashed the “Mark and Cherry are lounging around in swimsuits” strip to respond to the famous “Rex and June are lounging around in their underwear” Rex Morgan, M.D. strip. The Rex Morgan strip ran more than eight years ago, because soap opera strip feuds are just as slow-moving as actual soap opera strips.

Crankshaft, 7/29/16

Good news! Crankshaft’s dying!

Post Content

Mary Worth, 7/25/16

Oh man, it looks like the “June Brigman and Roy Richardson do Mary Worth art on Sundays but Joe Giella still does the dailies” era was shorter than we thought! Farewell, Joe, who got an excellent sendoff from Uncle Lumpy back when the new team made their first appearance, and here’s a lovely blog post from strip writer Karen Moy. I actually missed the tiny “bye” in Giella’s signature box in Friday’s strip. It heartens me that his last Mary Worth panel was Tommy’s sweaty Vicodin bliss-out, which I’m reproducing here in larger format, for posterity:

Anyway, I think we should all remember Giella the way he’d want to be remembered: as the man who drew Mary Worth as Wonder Woman. Enjoy retirement, Joe!

Meanwhile, the important thing about today’s strip is that it takes a village to create a pill addict. “Gee, I hope Tommy doesn’t bother me while I try to study for my big tests! I figure the more Vicodin he takes, the quieter he’ll be.”

Crankshaft, 7/25/16

Oh, hey, remember this guy, who we all sort of thought might be Crankshaft’s future vegetative husk? Well, last week we learned that he was actually “Beanball” Bushka, Crankshaft’s arch-rival back when they played on the Toledo Mud Hens literally before World War II (don’t try to make the chronology work, you’ll hurt yourself), and who exploited Crankshaft’s illiteracy to bump him from a game where scouts were in attendance, thus ruining his big league dreams forever, but then he wrote a letter to the Mud Hens confessing and now they’re … going to retire his number? This is not just happening in the funny pages, but in actual real life on July 29th, and thanks to faithful reader Aphthakid for pointing this out to me and no thanks to faithful reader Bill Peschel for linking to the picture of the officially licensed Crankshaft bobblehead that will be handed out to thousands of baffled minor league baseball attendees. Seriously, literally nobody there is going to have a clue what’s going on. Crankshaft’s own granddaughter does her best to forget who he is.

Spider-Man, 7/25/16

Ahhhh, it looks like the new Bugle owner is Jonah’s cousin-in-law, Egghead! As someone who writes about newspaper comics for a living but consistently refuses to read or learn about superhero comics, I immediately jumped to Wikipedia for a quick primer on who this guy is. Here are some sentences taken at random from his extensive bio:

• “Ant-Man tricked him into thinking the ants had betrayed him before revealing that the ants were his friends and would never turn against him.”
• “Arnim Zola later created a proto-husk of Egghead as part of his Corpse Corp.”
• “Although his original programming was ‘to respect all human life,’ a female neo-Nazi named Big Zero (who seems to have a relationship with this Egghead) has reprogrammed him to hate several minorities.”

Guys, I know they’re basically the foundation of all modern cultural production now, but … I think superhero comics are kind of silly?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/25/16

It’s been long established that Montoni’s is Westview’s only viable business, so this labor-saving innovation is going to double the local unemployment rate. But Montoni doesn’t care! He’s lived in Florida for years. See ya, sad sacks!