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Blondie, 9/8/14

Wait, wait, Dagwood, I want to hear more about your line of food-themed children’s books! Like Beauty and the Beef: does a simple peasant girl fall for a handsome prince who’s under a witch’s curse and has been turned into a succulent, mouth-watering plate of roast beef, and the girl must lift the spell before her love for the prince is overwhelmed by her hunger? Or Three Little Pigs In A Blanket: is this how the story should’ve ended, with the Wolf victorious and the pigs devoured, though not before their (still living?) bodies are wrapped in flaky, delicious biscuit dough? And “Wee Willie Twinkie” — clearly an anthropomorphic Twinkie, but a child, younger than Twinkie The Kid, trapped eternally in a prepubescent state like a boy vampire by Hostess Brands LLC’s devilish formula of shelf-stabilizing food preservatives. “Please eat me!” Wee Willie begs the reader. “I cannot decay over time! I’m an abomination against all that is natural and good! I long for death!” Anyway, these sound like they wouldn’t be traumatizing at all and I think Dagwood should spend a lot of time and money trying to get them published.

Dennis the Menace, 9/8/14

I originally saw the quotes around Dennis’s sentence here and assumed he was repeating something he had just heard on TV, while looking over his shoulder at his mother and presumably showing a creepy lack of affect: vaguely menacing, I thought. But I went back and looked at older panels and nope, it turns out the dialogue for Dennis the Menace is always set out in quotes, meaning that this is something he’s saying to his mom about … the fact the he’s watching people on TV making out, maybe? “Look, Mom, maybe this is several years earlier than you expected me to start looking for ‘Adult Situations’ in the television listings, but let’s establish a policy now of never talking about it, OK?” Menacing level: extreme.

Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 9/8/14

One thing that’s fun about the Funkyverse is when women in stereotypically attractive professions (newscasters, personal trainers) are drawn with heavy-lidded, half-dead eyes. Somebody knows what they like! They like it when you’re so beaten down by life that you can’t feel anything anymore. Anyway, Crankshaft controls the last viable bee colony in his county — and perhaps in the world? — giving him unprecedented power over agricultural production, and, by extension, our very existence. And also Funky doesn’t want to do his exercises! Wacky!

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Spider-Man, 9/7/14

Ox’s villain-schtick is that he’s pretty strong and very dumb, so Spidey’s taunt in the next-to-last panel seems needlessly cruel, since he’s making the guy feel stupid over something that’s 100% nonsense with no answer. I mean, is a human with the proportional strength of a spider stronger than a person who’s as strong as five normal men? Who the hell knows! What kind of “math” does Peter think would supply an answer? What does “proportional strength of a spider” even mean? Proportional to what? I’m hoping that five normal men is/are strong enough to break through proportional spiderweb and punch the heck out of Spider-Man, is what I’m saying.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/7/14

Did Hollywood’s starlet population find Les unfuckable because he chose a profession without much clout, or for other reasons more specific to him personally, like his repellent personality? These are the kinds of talks Cayla really missed.

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/4/14

Most unwelcome guests just make you feel old.

But when Les Moore’s wife Lisa died in 2007 and once before, Funky Winkerbean jumped forward in time and its spinoff Crankshaft didn’t. The charming though confusing result is that whenever a Crankshaft character encounters somebody from the Funky continuity, they age about fifteen years.

So here we have Old Pam, daughter of Really Old Ed, and her husband Old Jeff, son of Probably Dead Rose. I say Probably Dead because that appears to be a genuine smile on Jeff’s face in panels two and three, and Rose strictly enforced her rules against that sort of thing.

As for the third panel hey, doesn’t anybody say “you’re welcome” anymore? Old Jeff is grateful for Holly’s gift — why does Holly imagine that’s worrisome for him? Not long ago, Old Jeff’s daughter Grown Up Mindy gave Holly a comic, to her joy and satisfaction — why does she think Old Jeff would react differently? Maybe she’s releasing him from an obligation to reciprocate, to break the cycle of comics-transfer before it escalates into some insane suburban potlatch with skidloads of mouldering comics trucked endlessly between Westview and Centerville to lie rotting on porches? Or is it out of simple mercy to Funky Winkerbean readers who just can’t imagine grownups making such a godawful fuss about comic books?

Comic strips, on the other hand ….

Beetle Bailey, 9/4/14

I’ve been reading Beetle Bailey a long, long time, and I can’t remember Otto ever appearing, being treated, as or acting like a real dog — to the extent that at first glance I thought he was ogling the woman in the first panel. Even the artist has a hard time accepting Otto’s dog-nature: sure, the front limbs end pawishly, but the backs end in feet, making it look like he’s running on his toes.

Maybe its just a subtle send-up of socially-constructed gender roles, such as we are used to finding in the pages of Beetle Bailey: all poodles are girls, of course, as are all ballet dancers who perform en pointe. So what appears to be gender-normative attraction is in fact ambiguous or transgressive! Who’s on the leash here?! The patriarchy!

Mary Worth, 9/4/14

Mary surrenders to control by her abdominal ganglia, much like a dinosaur or cockroach.

— Uncle Lumpy