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Funky Winkerbean, 11/23/22

Oh my God, Mr. Davidson the janitor is some kind of near-immortal being, charged with subtly guiding the world under his care, just like the characters in the MCU movie Eternals (maybe? like all normal people, I did not see that movie or read the comics it was based on). Anyway, it turns out that despite his apparent old age, in the context of his own kind he’s just a beginner, which explains why the Funkyverse is so deeply fucked up.

Dick Tracy, 11/23/22

I guess the glory days of Dick Tracy really are behind us: instead of having his skull exploded by powerful magnets, Steelface just got mildly burned and then left the hospital in a huff over the substandard medical care they provided, and instead of being shot in the back for “resisting arrest” by Dick and his goons, he’s just going to learn through irony that stealing cars isn’t very nice, and so he’ll wind his stolen car ring up post-haste and move on to more socially productive pursuits.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/23/22

Oh wow, look at how mad Truck is! He’s beginning to suspect that Mud Mountain’s whole binge eating/onstage pants-shitting bit was just a ruse that successfully promoted him from opening act to headliner! This is why you never found stardom, Truck: you have to be willing to endure any humiliation, public or private, if it advances your career. You never had what it takes and you never will.

Pluggers, 11/23/22

A fun fact is that on more than one occasion I’ve started to take a shower and realized I still had my hearing aids on, which is a much more terrifying situation vis-a-vis replacement costs than the one in which this plugger finds himself. But it turns out they’re pretty hardy gadgets and they came through OK! Anyway, I have out-pluggered a Pluggers and now I need to go take a long shower (without my glasses or hearing aids on) to cry.

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Dick Tracy, 11/17/22

Look, I know, we’re never getting back to the glory days of “guy in gimp suit gets eaten alive by rats,” but you have to admit that we’re coming pretty close with a Dick Tracy villain named “Steelface,” whose whole thing is that he has a steel plate in his face that’s magnetic, and you’d think that he’d be know about situations where such an arrangment would be dangerous, like, say, getting into an MRI machine, and also you’d think the medical techs would ask questions like, “Say, you don’t have a steel plate under that bandage, do you?”, but it turns out nope on both counts and now he’s going to get his skull ripped apart by the MRI machine’s powerful magnets. He only ended up at this hospital because he hit his head fleeing from a police raid on his stolen car operation, so we can basically credit this grisly death to the cops, or at least that’s what they’ll be telling themselves while they stand around watching the poor hospital night shift guy scraping what’s left of Steelface’s face off the inside of the MRI machine with a putty knife.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/17/22

If you were really at a concert like this and a performer made this kind of announcement, everyone in the audience would chuckle knowingly and understand that “ice cream” and “tummyache” were code for “drugs and/or alcohol” and “unconscious.” Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where literally everything is exactly as it seems on the surface, all the time.

Hi and Lois, 11/17/22

Sure, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has somehow managed to survive and even thrive in a declining newspaper industry as their readership ages, but I’m hoping that this comic means they’re about to go all-in on crypto at the worst possible time.

Crankshaft, 11/17/22

Look, not every Crankshaft has to be a big “event,” you know? Sometimes it can be something quiet and delightful, like Crankshaft falling face-first up a flight of stairs.

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Slylock Fox, 10/31/22

The thing I absolutely love and respect about Slick Smitty is that every time we see him, Slylock and the animal cops have him absolutely dead to rights, yet he still has the shit-eating grin on his face that says that he doesn’t believe he’ll receive any consequences for his actions or simply doesn’t care about them if he does. That’s true even in circumstances like today’s, when he’s dressed in an extremely stupid costume in order to pull of an even stupider crime, and hooked up to one of those lie detector machines that the animals have advanced from the current level of “not a lie detector, just a detector of elevated heart rates and other physical activity” to “detects lies, but unable to understand low-level ‘truths’ and ‘falsehoods’ as part of a larger semantic context.”

Dick Tracy, 10/31/22

I’ve had my differences with Vitamin Flintheart in the past, but I respect his theater company’s total commitment to verisimilitude. They have access to an extremely lifelike robotic dog that can talk, and yet they’re still trying to find a trained real dog for the non-talking scenes! You don’t want the human actors to start worrying about getting replaced by robots, now do you.

Gasoline Alley, 10/31/22

Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, but as its name implies, it began as a strip about people talking about motor vehicles, so I have to respect the amount of panel space it’s dedicating to people going into great detail about the different kinds of garbage trucks in use today.