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Funky Winkerbean, 10/21/19

OK, here’s the deal: in general, I like it when the characters in Funky Winkerbean suffer, because I find them all morally and personally repellent. However, I don’t like it when they use their own suffering as proof of their nobility, and I actively despite it when everyone falls all over themselves to praise the sufferers for being amazing. Sure, Mason could play a dumb “action hero,” like Starbuck Jones, a character millions of people love and want to see on screen, or, as panel two shows suggests, like Wally, a guy who fought in a war and was held captive for years and now works at a depressing pizza parlor for a living, but he’d rather be remembered (by Oscar and Golden Globe voters) as a real hero: a guy who stayed married to his wife when she was diagnosed with cancer and was more or less supportive of her until she died, after which point he started cashing in and never stopped. At least when people gave the characters in Woody Wilson-era Judge Parker undeserved praise and cash, it was funny.

Gil Thorp, 10/21/19

Chet, I’m pretty sure that once you’ve achieved the rank of don within the mafia, you pay other people to act out, pull teachers’ hair, and throw scissors at classmates for you. I’m gonna need you to come back with a better metaphor for this one!

Dennis the Menace, 10/21/19

Not sure what I find funnier here: the idea that Dennis has some elaborate curtain/roller-shade window treatment in his room, that he uses his roller-shade for his “bad boy” art (a picture of a child with his tongue stuck out), or that this self-professed “menace” is too cowardly to let his mother know about his vandalism/budding art career.

Mary Worth, 10/21/19

Hot on the heels of discovering that Iris is fucking herself into a state of exhaustion with her new boytoy, we now learn that Wilbur is focusing on just singing with Estelle because he, too, worries about his own sexual stamina, as he idly stares at this bottle of “VIGOR VITAMINS” at the sketchy supplement store at the mall and wonders if they’ll be enough to restore his declining libido. There has been lots of talk in the comments about Iris and Wilbur improbably ending up back together, and finally we have a good reason why they should: they’re both just too tired to do it anymore, and honestly it would be kind of relief to be with someone who doesn’t expect anything from them, sexually.

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Pluggers, 10/18/19

The point of Pluggers, it seems to me, is that it’s meant to draw a distinction between pluggers and … the rest of the world, defined however you want (liberal elitists? big city folk? the young and the hip?). We might disagree on what exactly those distinctions are, on what communities the plugger community defines itself as not being, but I think we can all agree that today’s panel — “A plugger uses an extremely common slang term in an everyday situation” — is terrible, just terrible, carrying almost no semantic content to speak of. The good news: this means we’ve run out of meaningful things to say about pluggers, and can shut down this strip forever.

Dennis the Menace, 10/18/19

Wow, this is the Dennis the Menace that’s going to be haunting my nightmares! “What if he was your son, George?” asks Martha — his wife with whom, of course, he has no children — while George looks down at Dennis with a sort of detached contemplation. I have so many questions about this! Is this some weird little game they’re playing? Is Dennis already a participant in this fantasy, or do they hope he’ll catch on and play along? Why does she say “your” son instead of “our” son??? I guess the “punchline” is supposed to be turning that back on her — he’s not my son, I just married into him when I married you — but it’s such a weird way of doing it! What the hell, man? Seriously, what the hell?

The Lockhorns, 10/18/19

Honest to God, the first time I read this, I thought Leroy was talking to Loretta, and that he really had missed his trial and was going to jail soon. Which would be good, honestly! He should go to jail, for his crimes!

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Mark Trail, 10/4/19

I don’t exactly blame Mark for not being active on social media, what with it being a terrible nightmare cesspool that broke humanity’s collective brain, but as a guy who has a bit of a social media presence myself, I have a word of advice for Mark: you can’t just join Twitter and then immediately start tweeting about how you’ve got exclusive photos of the yeti, because nobody’s going to believe you! You should have spent years tweeting out links to your boring diatribes about lizards or whatever, in order to build up credibility.

Dennis the Menace, 10/4/19

I’m assuming that this young guy is a relatively new arrival in the neighborhood, and that upon meeting him Mr. Wilson was like “Oh, watch out for the Mitchells … they have too many kids” hoping that the guy would ask how many they have, but he instead he just changes the subject because that’s actually an incredibly weird and rude thing to say to a near-stranger and it made him uncomfortable to hear it, and probably Mr. Wilson repeated it several times and the guy just never bit, and now, finally, despite the new guy’s best efforts, they’ve bumped into each other by the Mitchells’ fence, and Mr. Wilson says, smugly, “There’s Dennis, the Mitchells’ only kid,” and finally the guy has had enough, and he sighs heavily then says this. You’re all with me here? That’s the only logical lead-in to this exchange, right?

Beetle Bailey, 10/4/19

“But he asked for it,” Spc. Gizmo yelled, being dragged from the courtroom after he was found guilty at his court martial for crimes against humanity. “He requested the procedure. He requested the procedure!”

Mary Worth, 10/4/19

Oh no, oh no, the Mary Worth creative team is aware of the concept of “Netflix and chill,” threat level alpha, repeat, threat level alpha