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So ends the Comics Curmudgeon Spring 2014 Fundraiser! Thanks, generous readers one and all!

Phantom, 3/22/14

Oh hey it’s time for Uncle Lumpy Reads Comics that Even Josh Won’t Read, So Nobody Has To Except for Poor Sad Me, a regular feature. Spunky reporter Lara Bell recruited lowlife adventurer Rick Grubber to take her into the Deep Woods, where they were set upon by the Bandar and brought to the Phantom at his Skull Cave. Phantom gave Lara an interminable tour of his Treasure Rooms, interspersed with braggy vignettes illustrating his complete awesomeness and coy little asides to Guran about how they were going to amnesiate Rick and Lara using Powerful Bandar Medicine®.

So Lara got all “You’re so hot, let us wed!” but the Phantom was like “Nuh uh I’m all married ‘n’ stuff”, and that night Grubber tried to steal stuff but it wasn’t even the right stuff and [WHOOSH!] the bush pilot went back to Bangalla and surrendered to the Jungle Patrol, and the mysterious aeronaut reappeared in his balloon to thank the Phantom for saving his descendants.

I feel much better, somehow.

Dennis the Menace, 3/22/14

Oh, Dennis – I knew Buckaroo Banzai. Buckaroo Banzai was a friend of mine. And you, kid, are no Buckaroo Banzai.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/22/14

Oh look – wordplay. “I wasn’t making a considerate comment about my father’s condition. I was making a commonplace observation about my own reaction to it. Um, ha ha, see?”

Judge Parker, 3/22/14

Ooh, we’re in the lair of the Hat Guys, Flico and Flaco. Flico jerked on the stick and spilled his drone upon the ground, so now he and Flaco will have to make contact up close and personal at the party tonight. They’ll probably run into Randy, who will chat them up for hours waiting in vain for his bribe.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/22/14

If you won’t listen to your own daughter, Rex, your readers would like a word with you.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Mark Trail, 3/13/14

Haha, so, obviously I was right about Marlin being a terrible nogoodnik, and since he’s a Mark Trail villain he’s also a moron, keeping meticulous photographic records of him and his buddies doing illegal things. It seems Jessica isn’t implicated in the nefariousness, though; presumably this sinister, silent army of pelicans that she’s nursed back to health has been trained to obey her every command and will unleash hell on the boyfriend who betrayed her trust.

Heathcliff, 3/13/14

Wow, so Heathcliff’s dad isn’t the only one in the family who’s an actual convicted felon! It actually minimizes my respect of Heathcliff as a notorious badass that he feels like he needs to kiss his parole officer’s ass like this. Look how badly he’s sweating! Is he afraid he’s going to fail his drug test?

Slylock Fox, 3/13/14

The relationship between sapient predator and prey animals in this strip is not, in my opinion, adequately explored, though today’s Six Differences offers some tantalizing hints. Based on that wolf’s facial experession, I’m guessing he’s watching some kind of sleazy porn for carnivores. “Oh, my,” says the pig, as he slowly unbuttons his tuxedo, “I certainly am feeling plump, juicy, and succulent today.”

Dennis the Menace, 3/13/14

Wow, congrats, Dennis, you’ve actually summoned up a fairly disturbing scenario I hadn’t contemplated before! If I had to guess, I’d imagine something like this?

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Pluggers, 2/27/14

After all these years of mocking this strip, I still can’t tell if the central conceit is supposed to be “pluggers are lower-middle-class exurban reactionaries” or just “pluggers are old.” Honestly, I think it wavers from day to day. Today’s panel I’m tentatively putting into the second of those two buckets, because while I wasn’t aware of this particular joy of aging, I also can’t imagine that it has anything particularly to do with anybody’s socio-cultural position within the American mosaic. So, leg-baldness is a thing? A thing that I’m going to have to look forward to? Greeeat.

Dennis the Menace, 2/27/14

Dennis has a known hatred of books and learning, so I guess it’s no surprise that his distorted, terrified vision of his own literate future involves hours of slogging through endless words in dull, aniconic tomes. Still, you can understand why he’s sad about giving up his current reading material, since it looks super rad. Is it about lions driving cars? Lions attacking cars? Just a bunch of lions, stone-cold flipping over cars, and mauling any panicked passengers attempting to flee?

Gasoline Alley, 2/27/14

Gasoline Alley has always been a strip of gentle, low-stakes whimsy — it once had a plot about trying to get a DVD player working that lasted for more than a month — and so it’s always thrilling with the action suddenly bursts into insane violence. When Slim hired a mercenary to drop tons of space-rock on some basketball-playing teens who annoyed him, the story was at least kind of cartoonish. Today’s strip, in which, as predicted, society has completely broken down into chaos due to rumors of the existence of an immortality elixir, seems much more realistic. The foregrounding of the actual jackboots of the billy-club wielding police charging into the melee to brutally restore order is a particularly vivid artistic choice.