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Funky Winkerbean, 12/06/22

It probably shouldn’t surprise you to learn I have been a daily comics reader for more or less my entire life. But until I really got started on this blog, that meant that I read the daily comics that were printed in whatever newspaper I was reading at the time, which meant there was a decade-long gap in my daily Funky Winkerbean readership straddling Y2K, a period during which the strip made its now-infamous Turn To Grim, and even now I’m still putting together the pieces of what all happened in the strip during that stretch. Like, someone bombed the Westview post office? Sure, why not!

One thing I do know happened during that period is that Lisa had breast cancer, then went into remission, then her cancer came back, but the hospital mixed up her lab results so she was told she was fine and the whole thing wasn’t figured out until it was too late. In the real world, this is the sort of mistake that would have resulted in multiple lawsuits, and in a world where a janitor from the future was subtly manipulating things behind the scenes, it seems like it would be a very easy mistake to fix, certainly easier than convincing a top neonatal physician to keep living it a shitty town like Westview. But you have to remember that Lisa was primarily important as the Birthing Vessel for the Chosen One, so once Summer was born, all extraordinary or indeed ordinary measures to keep her alive immediately ceased.

Dennis the Menace, 12/6/22

What exactly is Alice forbidding Dennis from doing in the first panel here? Is she telling him that, as five-year-old children, he and Joey are not allowed to just wander out into the wintertime by themselves? Because it doesn’t seem to have worked.

The Lockhorn, 12/6/22

You have to respect how big a production Leroy and Loretta make out of passive-aggressively trying to destroy each other emotionally, like with props and everything. That’s how they keep things fresh!

Mary Worth, 12/6/22

Look, I understand the dramatic reasons why we’re spending today’s strip on Iris’s inner monologue, but frankly I’m much more interested in finding out whether or not Nan is making airplane noises as she feeds Zak.

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Mary Worth, 12/2/22

Now, I’m just a simple country blogger, not a fancy math wizard, but if I’m counting right, Nan is around 12ish years older than Zak, whereas Iris, who has noted that Zak is Tommy’s age, is closer to 20 years her beau’s senior. We may be on the verge of a spectacle in which a woman feels threatened by the youth and vitality of her fiance’s former babysitter, which is a truly amazing sentece to write about an ostensibly dull comic strip like Mary Worth. And where is Tommy’s actual mother in all this Oedipal jockeying? I assume she was absent, both physically and emotionally, during his childhood, so if she bothers to show up for the wedding, things could get even more weird and fraught, which is how I like my newspaper soap opera comic strips.

Dennis the Menace, 12/2/22

I kind of enjoy the fact that we’re getting this limp gag as Alice gets Dennis dressed up in an adorable little suit and tie, even though their conversation is about a different topic entirely. Like, we know they’re heading for a fancy dinner with Henry’s coworkers where Dennis is going to blurt out something to the effect of “My dad says you’re a drunk,” but until then we’re going to kill time with a little Family Circus style darndest things saying, just as a warmup.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/2/22

Wow, it turns out that the book Summer is going to write will lead to a future where our allegiances to individual nation-states are replaced by a worldwide algorithm-driven form of governance. Sounds dystopian, sure, but probably all memory of Lisa’s Story has been purged from humanity’s collective consciousness, because Summer’s book is the Only Book that the drones of the 22nd century will need, so maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty in judging this new age.

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Gil Thorp, 11/25/22

Gil has dug some old game tape out of a box to give us the supervillain origin story of his hated coaching rival, and the truly shocking information we learn is that (a) back in 1987 ,Marty Moon had a Fu Manchu mustache, and (b) back in 1987, football broadcasts used to just cut to commercial in the middle of some of the most exciting plays in the game.

Dennis the Menace, 11/25/22

Dennis’s grandfather always looks smug, but he’s really turned it up a notch here. “That’s right, George,” he’s thinking, “You have to put up with this little brat’s bullshit 24/7, and I get to come visit occasionally, get all the credit and affection, then fly back to my ‘active seniors’ community in Palm Springs just in time for the weekly key party. Suck it, loser!”

Dustin, 11/25/22

Dustin’s pal Fitch hasn’t really had much of a personality developed other than “is dumb,” so it’s quite striking to learn today that he’s a problem drinker with a great deal of self-loathing about it. Fitch, I hope you draw comfort in knowing that all of us have our struggles! For instance, I experience quite a bit of self-loathing because I’m able to remember the names of secondary Dustin characters without looking them up.