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Luann, 8/25/14

Luann‘s gimmick is to tiptoe right up to an interesting plot development, pull out the rug, and slam the door on the reader’s nose. To pick just a few recent instances, will Luann and Quill get it on in the costume closet, with ensuing romantic complications? No. Did TJ finally cross the line, blowing up both his food truck and his friendship with Brad? Nope. Is Bernice’s new roommate Dez with all the ambiguously sketchy visitors a drug user? Nosiree. Will Brad and Toni any verb in the English language? Hahaha.

When every single plot is a cheat, you have to fall back on “character” to sustain interest. In Luann, “character” means Everybody Gets a Trait. Thus Stoic Brad, Nice Guy® Gunther, Vain Tiffany, Smart Bernice, Plucky Toni, Cynical NancyMom, Clueless FrankDad, Shady T.J., Outsider Knute, Noble Stereotype Delta, and Whoops! The music stopped, but there doesn’t seem to be a chair for Rosa — had her eye on the “Noble Stereotype” seat, I bet, but Delta’s pretty damn fast. Sorry, kiddo, you gave up Yale for this and didn’t even get the t-shirt.

“It’s a small world after all.”

And so to Peru, or at least the version of Peru that tarts up Lima’s J.W. Marriott hotel with accessories from Epcot Center to make it look more international-like.

Already we see signs of trouble – Gunther’s loving the tourist life but dreads the filthy Ebola-ridden cesspit he imagines this ‘clinic’ may be. Rosa’s bored because she’s traveling with Gunther, duh.

There’s a chance this mess could still work out. After all, Uncle’s outfit seems to be a little less the “impoverished villager pays with a chicken” type of clinic and a little more the “Managing Director jets off to Madrid for a ‘big conference’ on the NGO’s dime” type. So perhaps Gunther will find contentment in the clinic’s ultra-modern Histology Lab, quietly and expertly preparing tissue samples under bright lights amid purring coolers and gently gurgling circulators. Rosa, of course, will learn that the interns are all Yale grads who ridicule her polysyllabically as she mops. Ay, insuficientemente rápido de remanentes chica!

Hägar the Horrible, 8/25/14

Hägar instructs his men to mock their dying victims as a public-relations move. Makes you wonder what they were doing before.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/25/14

Coach Bull Bushka angles for a pity hire from a place called “DUI” in full view of his current employer, who has absolutely no problem with that. Or maybe Principal Green’s just in a good mood because Les is off today.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Mary Worth, 8/21/14

Boy, I’ve really been dropping the ball on this Mary Worth storyline for the past few weeks, haven’t I? The short version is that Olive’s medical procedure went well and that pesky cyst was successfully removed from her torso! Today, we learn that she’s been carrying it around in a little purse ever since.

Dennis the Menace, 8/21/14

“Dad’s inability or unwillingness to really be present for me during these fleeting, precious moments is kinda ruining my childhood for me. Hope you don’t stay up all night despairing over what a terrible job you guys are doing as parents!” Menacing factor: strong.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/21/14

Les is super excited about the fact that the movie adaptation of his book (for which he’s already been paid handsomely) has now completely unravelled. The failure of the project will almost certainly damage the careers and finances of any number of people and companies who believed in it. Les is excited about this because he’s an asshole.

Judge Parker, 8/21/14

Hmm, in addition having her work as legal secretary at what he thought was a thriving practice, Sam also tasked Gloria with managing his daughter’s finances! NOPE NO IDEA WHY SHE’D WANT TO QUIT THIS JOB, NONE AT ALL

Wizard of Id, 8/21/14

You know, considering how often the Wizard of Id uses actual torture as a punchline, I’m kind of surprised that it would be the strip that really manages to boil Orwell’s ideas about how dictatorships control thought through control of language into a single, effective panel.

Spider-Man, 8/21/14

Spider-Man is going to use his superpowers to more effectively photograph one of his main antagonists successfully fighting crime, so he can sell those photographs at poverty-level freelance print journalist prices! I know there’s no TV watching involved, but we may have hit Peak Newspaper Spider-Man, guys.

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Blondie, 8/18/14

Blondie has always been cheerfully hostile towards contemporary pop culture and/or modernity, so it’s pretty impressive that the strip has actually managed to find a musical reference here that isn’t dated or just completely wrong-headed. If it’s being deployed in the context of Elmo aggressively demanding that Dagwood forge an affectionate note from a wildly popular 24-year-old songstress for his own inscrutable and no doubt sinister purposes, so much the better.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/18/14

So the whole point last week’s noir-ish reverie, at the end of which someone got killed, was to remind Les of the existence of his “kill fee.” In the normal world that humans inhabit, a kill fee is what a writer gets from a publication when they fulfill the obligations of their contract but then the publication decides, for whatever reason, not to publish what they’ve written; it’s less (usually substantially yet) than what they were originally promised for the article, but the writer keeps all rights to their work and can try to sell it to someone else. But in the cutthroat world of Hollywood screenwriting in the Funkyverse, it apparently refers to a fee a writer gets when he decides he hates working on movies and just up and quits, even though he’s already gotten a big check for his script, which sounds pretty neat. Looks like I made the right choice to go west and try to make my own way in the entertainment industry!

Pluggers, 8/18/14

A physically active plugger expressing unbridled and even manic joy rather than down-home smugness or vague unease with modern life? A plugger’s all-wheel-drive that doesn’t refer to a proudly retrograde smoke-belching motor vehicle of some kind? What the hell is this even? Was someone just really, really eager to draw a bear wearing roller skates and a helmet? Not that I can blame them, it’s a pretty rad thing to draw.

Six Chix, 8/18/14

While I’m not familiar with the specifics, I’m sure there are any number of belief systems in which the sea is regarded as a single, feminine entity. Over the millennia, she’s drawn tens of thousands of sailors to their doom in her watery bosom, so the idea that she might be constantly murmuring their final terrified blasphemies seems reasonable as well.

Spider-Man, 8/18/14

I swear I’m not just saying this over bitterness over my own botched attempt to get an academic PhD, honest: I find it really pretentious when people who have non-medical doctorates go around calling themselves “doctor.” Maybe Doc Ock wanted to call himself “Professor Octopus” but then he got an angry letter from the provost reminding him that he was only an adjunct lecturer.

Momma, 8/18/14

Hello, ladies! Have you ever left the house or had interactions or experiences of any kind? Well, Momma is sorry to hear you’re such a whore.