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Funky Winkerbean, 2/10/18

Hey, did you know that Les isn’t the only writer in the Funkyverse cast of characters? Harry Dinkle dabbles as a wordsmith as well, except instead of churning out endless paeans to his dead wife, he’s writing a novel about fictional musical pioneer Claude Barlow, and by “writing a novel” I mean he’s just stringing together a disconnected series of terrible and increasingly incomprehensible puns. This has been going for several days, and while today offers no respite from the onslaught, it at least provides a little visual interest, with panel three offering a terrifying vision of what it would be like to actually be a bunch of unpublishable and unfunny beats in a never-ending shaggy-dog story about someone named “Claude Barlow.”

The Lockhorns, 2/10/18

Shoutout to the Lockhorns for being the second syndicated comic to make a reference to a classic scene in the Bela Lugosi Dracula in less than a year, I guess? Anyway, my take here is not so much that Leroy is insulting his wife and mother-in-law’s singing or ever comparing them to ravenous wolves, but that he’s instead trying to impress his houseguest, who, with his deep widow’s peak, black-and-red ensemble, and odd overbite, is clearly a vampire himself.

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Gil Thorp, 2/5/18

Ahh, it looks like our Puerto Rican refugees are integrating into Milfordian society! Jorge is learning how boys on the mainland roughhouse (by … throwing towels near each other in the showers, I guess???); Paloma, meanwhile, is falling in with the “political” girls, who hold a wide and divergent group of beliefs but still hang out together because being nonspecifically “political” is a group identity that real people have in real life, sure! They’re also blending in via another important technique: becoming white! Sure, the population of Puerto Rico encompasses a wide variety of skin tones, but most people generally stick with the one they have rather than becoming paler after spending a few weeks in whatever Great Lakes-adjacent state Milford is in.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/5/18

Most of the depressing plots in Funky Winkerbean involve death: death from cancer, or CTE, or what have you. But Harry’s stricken face in the final panel reveals that for a Funkyverse denizen, the prospect of continuing to live indefinitely is terrifying in and of itself.

Crankshaft, 2/5/18

FUN FACT: the actual reason is that the Kansas City Federal Reserve decided to start an annual conference in 1982 and wanted to convince then-Fed chair Paul Volcker to come, and so decided to put it in Jackson Hole because Volcker loved fly-fishing! This has been going on for 25 years just to cater some old rich dude’s hobbies, even though the rich old dude has been in that job since 1987! The world is dumber than even Crankshaft can imagine

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Mark Trail, 1/29/18

Meanwhile, a camping trip is happening not far from Lost Forest, but not, presumably, so close that this cozy domestic scene will soon be disrupted by trained circus beasts or whatever, so I guess this is a new storyline, or a new thread in the ongoing storyline involving bankrupt circuses and Dirty’s plans for revenge and such. The important thing is that this couple is not emotionally prepared for whatever hijinks are about to ensue at them, since they’re clearly hoping for a little R&R — drink beans out of a bucket, hit a log with an axe, that sort of thing. It makes a nice change of pace from the dental lab! I assume that the dental lab in question is where dentists send blood draws and the like for analysis, so it doesn’t even supply the go-go thrills of on actual dental office, where at least you might get to hear a patient try to suppress a scream now and then; but based on their weirdly prominent lines around this lady’s jaw and cheekbones, it might also be a secret laboratory where renegate dentists conduct experimental mouth transplant surgery.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/29/18

Bull’s CTE companion’s “Not in this universe!” rejoinder doesn’t make a ton of sense on its face, but I think the fact that it appears in a panel immediately after a patented Funkyverse photo album flashback is relevant here. After all, while I talk about the Funkyverse all the time, we really know that there are two Funkyverses: the whimsical high-school one that we enjoyed in the ’70s and ’80s, and the much darker one that has emerged over the past two decades. Perhaps some tiny event, as imperceptible as the breeze from a butterfly’s wings but crucial to the nature of reality, caused the original Funkyverse to diverge into two different timelines. In one, the one of joy and happiness, Bull played out his football days and his cartoon skull never felt any ill effects from repeated, cartoonish dings, any more than Wile E. Coyote ever suffered lasting harm from plummeting off a cliff. But that’s not how it works in this universe. Not by a long shot.