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Shoe, 9/21/16

You know how you can look at something for every day for years and never really notice it, until one day a slight shift in perspective totally blows your mind? Well, I read this dumb joke about how Shoe, the title character of the strip Shoe, spends a lot of time at strip clubs, and I was starting to work myself up to a joke about how the very idea of sexy live nude bird-women really brings to the fore the uncomfortable realities of how the bird-people of Shoe have both avian and mammalian characteristics, when suddenly I realized:

Shoe doesn’t wear clothes.

Every other bird-person in this strip wears clothes! Not Shoe. He wears white low-top sneakers and smokes cigars but otherwise goes around fully nude. And everyone just goes along with this! What … what is going on here. Why is he naked all the time. WHYYYYY

Mary Worth, 9/21/16

I’m kind of surprised that this SAMHSA-approved substance abuse counselor is doing his intake with his newest adult patient with his mother sitting right there in the room with him, or that he seems to be taunting him for his inability to score Vicodin. I’m not that familiar with the treatment modalities for opioid addiction, though. I’m learning just like you all are!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/16

Becky’s wordless emotional arc here, as she goes from hope that her husband’s obsessive geekery might actually improve their family’s financial situation for once to mingled anger and crushing despair, is legitimately the best-executed thing on the comics pages today.

Pluggers, 9/21/16

Pluggers haven’t had sex for years, guys. Years.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/16/16

Wait whoops it looks like I personally haven’t talked about Rex Morgan, M.D., on this site since July? Maybe it’s because it’s honestly been kind of dull; artist Terry Beatty, having taken over the writing duties, seems to be quickly wrapping up some storylines (as covered by Uncle Lumpy) while the new ones haven’t quite gotten into gear and/or been ludicrous enough for me to feature here. That changes today though, as Rex is gravely concerned by some extremely mild flirting between Nurse Carter and Jordan The Avery Family’s Manservant, for obvious reasons. (The reasons are that Rex finds genuine human emotional connection repugnant and doesn’t like it when other people “ram it down his throat.”)

Spider-Man, 9/16/16

Be careful, Jonah! Sure, it may seem like helping Ant-Man is your shortcut to seizing back control of your beloved Daily Bugle, but just think: if you do this, you’ll help set a precedent that it’s somehow “wrong” for the publisher of a major daily newspaper to kidnap or otherwise harm a superhero! This would be a grievous blow against our nation’s sacred First Amendment, as well as several of your active vendettas.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/16/16

We make fun of the gloom of the Funkyverse around here, but I think it’s worth pointing out that the actual conflicts in the strip tend to be not amongst the actual main cast, but against unstoppable, impersonal forces like “cancer” or “the war,” or strawman outsiders or designated villainous recurring characters like Becky’s mom; our heroes generally have a sort of we’re-all-in-it-together solidarity. But now, Comic Book John, a long-standing “good” character, has pieced together the plot of Starbuck Jones from publicity stills and posted it to the internet, which interferes with the publicity plans of the creators of the movie, some of whom are also long-standing “good” characters. I am very excited for the new, Hobbsean phase of Funky Winkerbean, the war of all against all, in which the misery will be flying fast and furious from all sides, dished out and suffered in equal measure.

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Six Chix, 9/1/16

There are 67 days left until the U.S. presidential election, and one of the few things I’ve been thankful for is that there haven’t really been any politics-related blowups in the comments of my site yet. I’m actually not against political discussion per se, but I like to think that my comment section is the last actually good comment section left on the Internet, and that’s because people don’t get into fights there, and if there’s one thing that causes people to get into fights, it’s politics. So maybe steer clear? For more guidance, please see the posting and discussion policies, which basically boil down to, “Don’t start fights with people, and don’t be a dick,” and know that I will ban people on the slightest provocation, I don’t even care. I used to give more leeway on this, but now that we all have access to a million different social media sites on which to fight about politics, I don’t feel like people have even the slightest need to do it here, so, sorry, but not sorry, don’t do it.

I’m actually a fairly political person myself (you wanna hear me make jokes about politics? come to Twitter!), but I try to avoid jokes specifically about electoral politics here precisely to avoid getting people riled up. I also try to avoid non-specific jokes because then you get into fairly toothless “ha ha, the election, it is bad” territory like today’s Six Chix. But honestly, what really bothers me terribly about this strip is that the labelling: it makes it look like the ice bag is the headache, and that you’re causing the headache by putting it on your head. Which, since most people today have never actually seen one of those bags outside of an old movie or TV show, maybe that’s … how the artist thinks headaches work? That’s not how they work, Six Chix!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/1/16

I’m having a really hard time following the stream of thought in today’s Snuffy Smith. My best guess is that the Barlows, with whom the Smifs are engaged in a generations-long feud, stole Bessie. Loweezy and Snuffy talk about this in code: she wants Li’l Tater to remain innocent just a little longer, but Snuffy knows that in Hootin’ Holler, disputes over property are settled in blood, and the sooner a Smif learns that, the better.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/1/16

This is the part of a new Funkyverse descent into misery where I stop resisting and just enjoy the fresh pain the plot is visiting upon longtime characters. In that spirit, I’ll say that I’m very pleased that Bull’s abortive, failed attempt to live out his greatest dream also contributed to the condition that, years later, would destroy his mind before killing him outright.