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Curtis, 4/23/15

When you create a character who is as unlikeable as oh, say, Ed Crankshaft, from time to time you have to fake up some appealing qualities or history so the audience doesn’t come to its senses and give up on the strip entirely. So here comes “Backstabbin’ Bedwetter” Barry Wilkins — who can singlehandedly make you feel sorry for his brother Curtis — totin’ Teddy and talkin’ tough, ready for redemption.

There’s no precedent at all for Barry’s altruism — he was just as bored/disgusted by his brother’s romantic aspirations in Tuesday’s strip as he ever was, and nothing changed on Wednesday. There won’t be any consequences, either — Barry will be just as hateful as ever the next time we check in on him. It’s just time for a quick karma rinse-and-run.

I’ll take it all back if Michelle falls hopelessly in love with him.

Mary Worth, 4/23/15

NO NO NO TERRY DON’T DO IT YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK. Aw crud – gave it up, and for nothing.

A small irony here is that Terry Bryson was introduced to the strip as a privacy consultant who helped Toby Cameron understand how to defend herself against intrusions into her confidential personal and financial information, and that people shouldn’t be dopes. Well, Terry, you can kiss your own precious privacy goodbye. Dope.

B.C., 4/23/15

Oh boy — the long-awaited B.C./Crankshaft crossover.

Shoe, 4/23/15

I know Shoe is sort of the go-to strip for avian reproductive humor, but eww.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Curtis, 4/10/15

Oh, give me a break, Greg. Facebook is for people who have a pathetic, insatiable hunger for the attention of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and people they met at a party once three years ago to feel like they matter. People who have a pathetic, insatiable hunger for the attention of strangers use Twitter. In unrelated news, did you guys know you can follow me on Twitter? I make tons of funny jokes there and sometimes post pictures of my cat! Follow me! Love me! I need this!

Gil Thorp, 4/10/15

Hey guys, it’s base/softball season in Gil Thorp! Trust me: you don’t want to know why they call Addison Radley “Boo.” It’s a story that starts twenty years ago … on a night, and a softball diamond, just like this one, when promising pitcher Addison Radley died in a tragic accident. Ever since then, her shade has haunted the field, pitching balls at superhuman speeds. You see, they call her “Boo” because, even though she doesn’t know it, she’s … a ghost. ADDISON RADLEY: TEENAGE GHOST PITCHER: SUNDAYS THIS FALL ON THE CW.

No, wait, they call her that after the character Boo Radley from the beloved classic To Kill A Mockingbird? Huh. Not sure why we wouldn’t want to know that, unless we’re trying to avoid falling afoul of Harper Lee’s lawyers.

Herb and Jamaal, 4/10/15

Oh my God, Eula is a reverse chrononaut, using dark magic or forbidden science to travel backwards along her own timeline! And she’s on the verge of revealing her causality violation to a time-standard individual! Chances of a class-three temporal paradox are up to 85 percent, we need an intervention from the Time Corps, stat.

Marvin, 4/10/15

This is your occasional reminder that, after decades of doing jokes about babies pissing and shitting, Marvin introduced some dog characters so it could do jokes about dogs pissing and shitting. I’m not sure which would be worse: if “go potty” were a euphemism imposed by the syndicate in a desperate attempt to impose some kind of sanity, or if that’s how the joke was originally written, too make it “cute.”

Spider-Man, 4/10/15

My number one biggest laugh in the comics pages today came from seeing Spidey wordlessly peacing out in the first panel of today’s strip. “Welp, I’ve put Mary Jane under the protection of the Black Widow, and probably nothing can go wrong! My fellow superhero certainly isn’t going to, say, push her off a building, that’s for sure. Later, everybody!”

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Curtis, 2/4/15

This week’s Curtis has features Curtis’s dad going on and on about this collection of music “I grew up with” as performed by extremely non-specific “legendary” artists, who, we learn today, are not rappers. One assumes that these legendary artists are never named so that this plotline can be trotted out every few years while keeping Greg the same age, but the whole thing already seems on the edge of believability: with a couple of pre-teen kids and a wife not notably younger than him, it seems unrealistic to have Greg be much older than his mid-40s, which would mean he hit his musical stride right as hip-hop was starting to enter the musical mainstream. Ten years from now, it will be actively strange if he grew up not listening to rap, although who knows, maybe it’ll be just as strange if Curtis is listening to it.

Pluggers, 2/4/15

See, Curtis? Even Pluggers is admitting that most people in the plugger demographic in 2015 were filthy hippies in their youth. Just admit that Curtis’s dad likes old-school rap already.

Judge Parker, 2/4/15

Any chance that this angry fellow, who claimed earlier to have some pull with important politicians, might actually have pull with important politicians has just gone out the window as he used “the fed” to refer to some random non-Federal Reserve government agency. Sam, whose returns on capital vary between the staggering and the completely flabbergasting based on Fed decisions on interest rates and quantitative easing and such, is very much not impressed. It would be fun if this guy really were talking about the actual Fed, though. “We need the Fed working on this! Do you think fiat money can clear that road? Only a strong gold-based currency can restore our nation’s highways!”

Crankshaft, 2/4/15

In today’s fractured media landscape, there are still specialized audiences who aren’t being catered to — fans of watching angry, unsympathetic old men being sexually humiliated in public, for instance. One bold comic strip aims to meet this need.

Momma, 2/4/15

For a brief moment, Francis catches a glimpse of what it might be like to feel real human joy — and sees just enough to know that the experience is completely beyond him.