Post Content

Gil Thorp, 12/19/14

There’s a great Gil Thorp plot storytelling tradition that’s been ignored for the past few plots, in which random non-Gil, non-Kaz people end up taking over coaching duties, allowing our heroes to do even less work than usual. It’s been so long since we’ve seen this that I’m down with seeing it play out in this case, even though Robert “Bobby” Howry is the team manager and thus on the border of being an official coach! He’s also on the border of several potential DSM-IV diagnoses, if his obsessive nickname fixation is any indication.

Mary Worth, 12/19/14

Oh, man, Hanna’s glare is just lasering into the side of Sean’s head in panel two! He’s not interested in a private two-person flute concert at all; he wants to assemble an cultish harem of sexy ladies of a certain age. Somerset? More like Allareset, as in all the women who live there are set up as Sean’s sex thralls, amiright?

Funky Winkerbean, 12/19/14

Oh, look, Funky has one of those “smart” phones, as in it’s smart enough to know that any email from a doctor has grim plot significance and needs to be put in a larger font than an email from a wife or a loved one or whatever. The good (?) news is that Dr. C. Hill wasn’t the one who picked up Funky’s prostate cancer, so maybe this is just about his impending heart attack. It sure must be “chill” being a doctor in the Funkyverse, in the sense that your soul is icy and numb after years of constant failure to keep your patients out of death’s clutches!

Post Content

Hi and Lois, 12/16/14

I’ve never been entirely clear on how we’re supposed to understand the Thurstons’ class position relative to the Flagstons. I mean, they live in identical houses next door to each other and Hi and Thirsty work in the same office but Thirsty and Irma’s lives just always seem a little shabbier, somehow. Anyway, I own a number of thrift-store clothing items and feel that nobody should be ashamed of shopping at such places, so I’m pretty resentful about Lois’s super-smug facial expression in panel two. “Haha, guess you wouldn’t have to wear my grubby hand-me-downs like a poor person if your husband weren’t a drunk, eh, Irma? We’re ostensibly best friends!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/14

Oh my God, you guys, Rex Morgan is finally following through on a plot it set up literally five and a half years ago: Becka’s husband Peter worked with a sexy nutritionist, and Becka was jealous! Her suspicions were apparently fully justified despite Peter’s attempt to convince her otherwise. So see, she never particularly cared about academic independence over at the old community college or whatever the dumb faculty intrigue plot was about; she just had her heart broken! Also, in case you’re not reading along at home, Becka is telling all this to June as a way of explaining why she’s quitting her job at the clinic. A good thing to do when you’re emotionally devastated and restructuring your financial life after separating from your spouse is to give up your main source of income!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/16/14

Let’s say that, years ago you named someone in your comic “Funky Winkerbean,” to denote the happy-go-lucky nature of the character and the strip. It was the ’70s, so maybe drugs were involved. I’m not gonna judge! And then say that over the decades your strip became a charnel house of sadness and your character became a bloated, angry jerk. I think it’d probably be a bad idea to have anyone in the strip refer to him by a nickname like, for instance, “The Funk Man.” It’d just make everyone think about the name more, you know? You don’t want people thinking about the name.

Mark Trail, 12/16/14

“Say, Justin, this gives me an idea: what if you still built your titanium mine near the swamp, but then once you got the titanium out of the ground, you just admired it for a bit and then put it back? That’s a reasonable centrist compromise we could all agree on!”

Momma, 12/16/14

So Santa is an immortal magical being whose lifespan lies outside of time as we know it, and Momma is … roughly forty years younger than him? Sounds about right.

Heathcliff, 12/16/14

I like that, even in the iconography of his terrifying cult of personality, Heathcliff looks pretty bored.

Six Chix, 12/16/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because her mother died from melting, and they’re never going to hear from her again!

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 12/13/14

One of the Peanuts plots burned most intensely into my memory involves Charlie Brown’s baseball team advancing to the league championship through a series of odd circumstances that cause opposing teams to forfeit. The team wins the championship game outright — except that later they have to forfeit due to a gambling scandal: Linus and Lucy’s little brother Rerun bet Snoopy a nickel that the team would win. Anyway, this is just my way of saying that one of the Mudlark teams has actually won a championship for the first time in the decade I’ve been reading this strip, but panel two might cause everyone’s joy to unravel.

Blondie, 12/13/14

“These movies all depict the warm family togetherness that is the true meaning of Christmas. If anyone wants me, I’ll be sitting here by myself in the living room, staring at the TV and not talking to anybody.”

Funky Winkerbean, 12/13/14

Just in case you had forgotten, Funky Winkerbean has a character with PTSD that it occasionally does Very Serious Stories about!