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Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/15

The current Funky Winkerbean storyline has involved Les being reluctantly drafted into helping run his graduating class’s high school reunion, and it’s been duller than most, but I’m kind of intrigued that any work at all has to go into contacting Westview High graduates, since one of the running themes of the strip is that nobody ever escapes the black hole of doom that is this horrible hell-town. I guess some people do? And they’re never spoken about aloud? Because it’s too depressing to imagine that you could leave but then for some reason don’t? Anyway, today we learn that everyone Les graduated with has a Facebook account but him, and I certainly hope they use their social networking time to all talk to each other about what a gloomy and yet somehow also insufferably smug ass he is.

Apartment 3-G, 6/2/15

Haha, I’m loving this out-of-nowhere slam on current James Bond director Sam Mendes. “He’s the worst kind of hack! You tell him American Beauty was the crappiest Best Picture winner in the last twenty years! Worse than Crash, d’you hear me? Worse than Crash!”

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/5/15

I vaguely remembered that this “band box” business has been in the strip before, though I’ve apparently never discussed it on my site. A little Google searching to try to find out more led to a pretty horrifying discovery, though: Luigi’s is a real pizza place in Akron, Ohio, and it’s not only the model for Montoni’s but actually boasts about that on its web site. Luigi’s mentions the band box on its site, but for a picture, you need to go to the Funky Winkerbean Wikipedia page, where it’s under the “comic book connections” heading, for some reason. Anyway, the band box presumably plays old-timey music, and it’s probably gotten more and more wobbly and off key over the years as Funky has desperately tried to keep its archaic mechanisms functioning. Just imagine its tinny, irritating background music adding another layer of unpleasantness to your visit to Westview’s Only Viable Business™! Do you think Funky can get it to play mariachi music for people to listen to while they eat their Cinco de Mayo pizza special? (The Cinco de Mayo pizza special is a pepperoni pizza with a jar of store-brand salsa dumped on top of it, or maybe a jar of store-brand mayonnaise.)

Mary Worth, 5/5/15

“I must’ve seemed like a stalker! You know, the way I tracked you down, years after our relationship ended acrimoniously, once I decided to win you back at all costs, and then I found out where you lived without asking you, and then rented an apartment there, and showed up right outside your door with no warning! Just doing the sort of things that stalkers do! I must’ve really seemed like one! I didn’t plan on coming on so strong! It was just a powerful reaction that I couldn’t or wouldn’t control!”

“And I didn’t plan on being so emotional! I should’ve been more rational. Methodical. Say, let’s drive far into the woods where nobody can hear you scream, shall we?”

Archie, 5/5/15

How are you celebrating National Cartoonists Day, everybody? Cartoonists are celebrating National Cartoonists Day by drawing their favorite characters having hot three-way makeouts. Some of them are even getting those drawings published!

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/15

Guys, I did not have a particularly fun time socially for a lot of high school. At one point I got voted out of my lunch table. Once I did start making friends, as a senior, many of them were kids I met through debate who went to other schools. When I was 28, I got an email via Classmates.com (haha, remember Classmates.com?) from my graduating class’s power couple, who were somehow still together and organizing the 10-year-reunion; even though I didn’t have any interest in going, my girlfriend at the time told me to write back and ask to be put on the mailing list in order to get all the good gossip. Despite my request, I was not, in fact put on the mailing list.

So you’d think I’d be primed to identify with Les in the current Funky Winkerbean storyline, in which the most popular girl from his graduating class is skipping town and strong-arming him into taking her place and organizing a reunion for a bunch of people who used to hold him in contempt. The fact that I feel not an iota of sympathy for him is a testament to his true unlikeability as a character. Even if this today’s strip is your first exposure to him, I think you can get a sense of this. Look at that face! That face is a smirk so intensely smug that it’s crossed the line into full-on muscle spasm.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/1/15

Seems that today’s Snuffy Smith was determined to do its own version of the classic “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” gag, only to end up grappling with the fact that the only job in this impoverished subsistence-farming community that requires any degree of formal training is the lone clergyman’s post — and sadly, the current parson is a theologically unlearned grifter.

Mark Trail, 5/1/15

Oh, hello nice bureaucrat lady! Did you think you could defeat nature with some well-meaning government programs? Well you can’t. Nature is full of floods and flames and it will not obey you.

Wizard of Id, 5/1/15

Meanwhile, in the Wizard of Id, the king is going to fuck some money.