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Family Circus, 4/5/22

I’ve been doing this blog for many, many years and my attitude about many of the comics has evolved in ways I never expected, and one of the ways I least expected is that I have come to respect some of the subtle dry wit in the Family Circus. In today’s panel, for instance, Mrs. Crisp is giving Billy a semi-defeated “is this little moron shitting me” look, which, once you learn to recognize it, a surprising number adults use when interacting with the Keane Kids, including their parents.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/5/22

Funky Winkerbean has accrued a truly epic amount of lore over its decades of existence, and I was about to apologize to you for not having it all at my fingertips, but you know what? It’s good and normal to not remember Funky Winkerbean plots from decades ago and I’m not apologizing for practicing self-care by refusing to retain information about them! Anyway, the last few weeks of this strip have been about Crazy Harry’s teen days as an arcade-based video gamer, and how his arch-rival was a person who wore a helmet and was known as “The Eliminator,” and that person turned out to be … the woman he would later marry. I have no idea if this was how the storyline actually played out way back in the early run in the strip or if it’s been retconned in a “What if a great video game player … were a girl, really makes you think” way, and I don’t care to do the research to find out. What’s important is that Crazy Harry has put on “The Eliminator”‘s helmet, and it’s apparently now some kind of VR/metaverse thing, only instead of taking you to a fantastic world beyond your imagination, it just plops you down right next to Les and Lisa’s special park bench, where you too can experience your wife dying of cancer in vivid 3-D.

Dick Tracy, 4/5/22

Ah, it appears that “Coffyhead,” using the clever alias “Moka,” is about to tangle with Vitamin Flintheart’s manager “Coffee Grounds.” I usually find “Don’t talk to me till I’ve had my coffee!” jokes pretty dumb, but I’m beginning to think that the Dick Tracy creative team should in fact not talk to anyone or start working on Dick Tracy until they’ve had their coffee.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/5/22

Oh, I’m sorry, are you still griping because the comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D., doesn’t do medical-themed storylines often enough for your taste? Well, they’re just going to spend weeks on the most boring injuries you can imagine until you beg for more stuff about “roots country” or whatever the fuck.

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Slylock Fox, 4/1/22

In the Book of Genesis, there is a moment, immediately after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, when their minds shift before their habits: they’re still naked, as they had happily been before, but now they have a moral code that deems that nudity shameful, so they immediately have to lurch into action and create makeshift clothes for themselves. So too did the animals of Slylock Fox move haltingly from their previous, brutish existence into the post-animalpocalypse world we know. In today’s strip, these birds know that the old ways, in which the momma would simply vomit those worms down her child’s throat, are no longer acceptable, but they have yet to realize that their ability to manipulate tools like pails and silverware means that they can simply abandon that nest and forcibly evict the hapless humans from the comfortable house below.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/1/22

Ha ha, the “tin ceiling!” You know, because the video game was located in Montoni’s. And in Montoni’s the ceiling is … made of tin? Oh, you don’t know that? You’ve read Funky Winkerbean daily for years and you would never in your life make that connection? Well, screw you, man, today’s strip is for the real fans, who definitely exist.

Gil Thorp, 4/1/22

Say what you will about Gil Thorp, but the strip always manages to come up with new odd combinations of characters and traits for their storylines. Did any of us have “kid obsessed with baseball trivia with a dad who ghostwrites terrible CEO ‘leadership’ tomes that get sold at airport book stores” on their bingo cards? No, but I for one appreciate that we got here.

Mary Worth, 4/1/22

Speaking of unique new storylines and/or the lack thereof: hey, Toby, remember when your husband had a vague flirtation with a student that boosted his ego but didn’t go anywhere, and when he was given the opportunity he declined to dispute your description of it as an “emotional affair”? Well, I don’t know about your job, but marriage-wise, that’s what we call a “get out of jail free card.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/16/22

Harold Russell, a double-amputee Army vet with no previous acting experience, starred in The Best Years Of Our Lives, an (extremely good!) 1946 movie about WWII combat veterans coming home to the United States and the difficulties they had adjusting to civilian life, and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for it. (Earlier in the same awards ceremony, he had been given an honorary award for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures,” because the Academy Board of Governors assumed that he wouldn’t win the award he’d been nominated for.) He never found consistent work as an actor after that, though, and years later, he ended up auctioning his Best Supporting Actor statue off — he said at the time it was to pay for his wife’s medical care, but a later story put out by the Academy’s executive director was that “his wife wanted to take a cruise. He had a new wife who knew he had a spare Oscar.” Anyway, the point is, this has always struck me as a pretty sad story about why someone doesn’t have the Oscar they won that represents the high point of their career, but it’s clearly like a BAZILLION times less depressing than Marianne, whose win for a role in a commercial flop that nobody liked should be one of the most surprising in Oscar history since, well, Harold Russell’s, cheerfully showing up at the house of the man who sullenly refused to write this movie and just handing it over to him.

Dick Tracy, 3/16/22

Maybe my brain just doesn’t work as well as it used to but it took me way too long to parse the name of this establishment as a whimsical misspelling of “[Coffee] Bean House” — I guess I kept trying to make be “Bean How’s,” for some reason. Anyway, I still feel like it’s kind of an uncanny valley coffee shop name, like the place I go to near me that’s called “Coffee Memes” that just has a generic Instagrammable minimalist LA coffee shop aesthetic with exactly zero memes on display. What I’m saying is, probably this guy is a deformed villain named Tayste Budd whose whole thing is that anything but the most exquisitely prepared food or drink disgusts him, but I’d be willing to believe this is just a real half-assed coffee shop where even the best espresso is extremely bad.