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Curtis, 2/16/22

OK, look, I don’t pretend to know everything about how other people live their lives, but I refuse to believe there’s a human who comes home from work and takes off his shoes and socks but not his tie, flops down on the bed, and calls a life insurance company. I refuse, do you hear me? I can only assume — especially in light of panel three — that some sicko tweeted often enough at the Curtis creative team and King Features demanding that Greg Wilkins show feet that they finally said, “Enh, what the hell.”

Funky Winkerbean, 2/16/22

Sorry for my objections from yesterday, everybody! In fact, the Lisa’s Story Oscar trajectory makes total sense. It’s simple: the movie was released to the art-house circuit in early 2020, and then theaters were shut down in the first wave of the pandemic, and in [checks notes] October 2021 Les got the first report that the movie had flopped, but then it found a second life on streaming so now it’s going to be nominated for an Oscar in [squints at calendar] February of 2022. This all adds up! There’s a persistent rumor that the Funkyverse strips are written a full year in advance and I haven’t always believed it but honestly that would go a long way towards explaining this sequence, especially considering that last year the nominees were announced in March whereas this year they were announced, uh, last week.

Mary Worth, 2/16/22

Toby knows just how to chase away those encroaching middle aged blues and recapture that feeling of being a little girl again: marrying a much older man who likes to give her condescending little pep talks while grabbing her by the chin.

Family Circus, 2/16/22

God damn it, Family Circus, I got halfway through this caption and was all excited to make a joke about how Whitney is lucky because she doesn’t get sent to the principal’s office for yelling that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by the devil to trick liberals, but now I have to live for the rest of my life with the awful knowledge that Dolly spends every day at school squirming and holding it in because the toilets at school are never as clean as mommy makes the ones at home, and I’m not excited about that at all!

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/15/22

Look, I have very little credentials to speak as a “Hollywood insider” of any sort, but I feel very confident in saying that box office failures that got zero promotion from the studios that produced them do not get Oscar nominations. They simply do not! Either the studio thinks there’s an Oscar-worthy performance in it, in which case it does promote the movie, at least as something art-house-y award-worthy, or the movie finds an audience perhaps unexpectedly and then the studios do some “for your consideration” lobbying as awards season approaches. Performances in movies nobody saw or liked (“nobody” here meaning both general audiences and film snobs/critics) definitely do not get nominations just out of the blue, buzz-free, no matter how moving they are or how much awareness of breast cancer they raise. Anyway, I guess Mason is saying she’s up for an Oscar nomination rather than she’s actually been nominated, so … maybe the studio is doing a late push, or something? But, overall, if the woman playing Les’s dead wife in a low-budget flop wins an Oscar, I will officially declare that less realistic than the time this strip burned down Los Angeles and created millions of refugees.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/15/22

The days in which people gave the Morgans heaps of money and free boats for no reason seem to be over, for the most part, but you have to admit that a jailhouse snitch derailing Rene’s likely-to-succeed lawsuit out of the goodness of his heart is functionally the same thing as giving them a bunch of money, if you think about it mathematically.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/15/22

Would I have ever predicted that Snuffy Smith would meet his end not at the hands of Sheriff Tait or an aggrieved member of the Barlow clan, but would rather be torn to pieces by a dozens angry squirrels? No, but I’m not complaining about it.

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/3/22

Look, whatever, I’m perfectly fine with the idea of beleaguered band parents getting bombed while at their kids extracurricular events, and I’ll even allow that this concept + [TOPICAL PHRASE] makes for a perfectly adequate mid-week daily comics punchline. My problem is that all these people have at their table is a bunch of pamphlets. What, are they just selling instructions on how to make Jello shots? Where’s the vodka? Where are the huge bottles of vodka? Parents may or may not get drunk at the parades and sporting events they have to go to in order to support their children, I wouldn’t know, but they definitely get drunk at conventions like this one, so these people are leaving money on the table.

Mary Worth, 2/3/22

Have Dawn and Estelle ever interacted with one another, socially? Has Wilbur ever even bothered to introduce them? Or did they just awkwardly run into each other outside the bathroom of the Weston condo one morning and each of them had to explain to the other who they were?