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Mary Worth, 2/17/14

YESSS YOU GUYS TOMMY’S BACK TOMMY’S BACK TOMMY’S BACK THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING

Tommy’s being all contrite now, but time will tell whether or not this is all just an charade to distract from his future meth-dealing activities. Frankly his hand gestures, culminating in the shirt-grip in panel two, seem a little showy to me. I do like the way even his hair (his sweet, sweet hair, always the source of his power) gets in on the act, his perky flip drooping submissively to show how very sorry he is for everything.

Anyway, Tommy’s back and this is going to be great so be sure to refresh joshreads dot com constantly for Tommy updates.

Apartment 3-G, 2/17/14

The other soap strips, realizing the world’s attention is focused firmly on Mary Worth, are just sort of going through the motions, though I have to admit that I’m actively charmed by what a nothingburger today’s Apartment 3-G is, plot-wise. “We went shopping and got some, uh, stuff! Look, these random multi-colored boxes! ‘They’ were giving things away! Isn’t that nice! Let’s have a good laugh! Ha ha ha!” Meanwhile, everyone ignores the piteous mewling of the baby deer, who hates the indoors but is woefully unprepared for life in the woods where Tommie’s going to dump her next week when she finally gets tired of cleaning up the deer poop.

Slylock Fox, 2/17/14

You know, the thing I always like about Reeky is that he could not possibly care less about you or what you think about him, when it comes to how he dresses or who he steals electricity from or whatever incredibly half-assed excuse he’s come up with about stealing his neighbors’ furniture and burning it for heat. That’s why this elaborately staged alibi is so disappointingly earnest, from my point of view, and it sickens me to think of Reeky stealing a bunch of newspapers from the coin-operated box, laying them out just so in front of his trailer, and setting the empty suitcase by the door with a grin, ready to pick it up and wave it about meaningfully at a moment’s notice. It all implies that he respects other people’s opinions, and also frankly reveals the limits of his abilities to plan anything more elaborate than busting open a mailbox with a baseball bat. We don’t even need to see the headlines to know this is a put-on, because we know that the only people Reeky finds more contemptible than the ones who travel to wussy non-America countries to go to museums or whatever are the ones who think they’re so smart about current events that they need to get newspapers delivered just to show everyone what big brains they have.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/17/14

Haha, wow, well, this is one way to deflect an unwanted cheeseball sexual advance! “My, you certainly are attractive!” “Yes, but my soul is fundamentally broken and repellant.” Naturally, since this is the Funkyverse, our lothario’s lust has only been inflamed by this response.

Family Circus, 2/17/14

“Oh, right, it was about the ‘home!’ Grandma already has a home, mommy, why are are we makin’ her move into another one?”

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Heathcliff, 2/6/14

One of the keys to the Heathcliff mythos is the title cat’s extreme sangfroid: despite the madness going on all around him, even when it’s madness he’s implemented, he keeps his cool. Whether he’s meeting the Garbage Ape’s new sidekick or being worshipped as a god, he tends not to get really worked up about anything. Thus today’s panel, which I assume to be some kind of drug-induced hallucination, makes total sense to me. Not only is Heathcliff himself largely unimpressed to discover that a hitherto inanimate ball of yarn has somehow sprouted a face and is speaking to him, but the yarn-face itself — which, I must emphasize for my own sanity, I believe to be a mere projection of Heathcliff’s chemically-altered subconscious — appears pretty blasé about its unexpected and horrifying existence. “Yeah, you should probably bat me around or whatever,” it mumbles affectlessly. “Hey, if I unravelled, would the individual components of my face become separated from one another, and each have its own eerie detached existence somewhere on the long string of yarn spread haphazardly across the room? Boy, that’d be a thing, huh.”

Better Half, 2/6/14

This seems like exactly the sort of dumb tchotchke financial services firms would give out to their lowest-profit clients, so I’m not exactly sure what the joke is supposed to be here, unless it’s that Stanley has taken the ham-handed metaphor seriously. And, honestly, wouldn’t some kind of time-travel device be the best investment aide you can imagine? Only the top customers get the backwards-pointing chrono-compass, which allows you to get in on the ground floor of surprisingly high-performing stocks; but by jumping ahead decades into the future, Stanley and Harriet can let compound interest create the sort of retirement cushion that they could never have otherwise hoped for.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/6/14

“Your precious Lisa dies at the end, right? You’d better believe I want some popcorn for this.”

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Mark Trail, 2/3/14

I don’t want to brag or anything but haha who am I kidding obviously there is NOTHING in this world I like more than bragging about my ability to predict Mark Trail plots! Anyway, I think it’s pretty clear from this strip that Jessica Canupp and her taxidermist boyfriend “Marlin” (they gave him a nickname based of the dead animals whose skins he fits over a rigid frame and then fills with sawdust!) are going to turn out to be bad guys. That’s because Mark stopped a guy from spearing an endangered turtle just off the shore of their private island and instead of being all like “THANK GOD YOU STOPPED THIS SENSELESS TURTLE SLAUGHTER” they’re eyeing him with suspicion and doubt. Probably Jessica’s seemingly benign pelican-rescue operation has a sinister purpose, like creating an army of attack pelicans for al-Qaeda, or illegally harvesting pelican livers, which are most delicious when wrenched from the guts of still-living elderly pelicans.

I do, however, want to make clear that I’m not showing you this strip just to prove that I’m right about everything all the time, but also to share with you Mark saying “Unless you want to end up in jail, buddy, you’d better stop killing turtles.” This sentence ought by rights to replace everything ever written in the history of English literature, and the accompanying depiction of the turtle-killer’s hat dramatically flying off his head should replace every work of visual art ever made.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/3/14

Normally I angrily rebel against every dumb “cutesy” wordplay punchline in Funky Winkerbean, but if Cayla’s quip here means that Les will literally die from exhaustion trying to churn out a terrible television movie script about his wife’s suffering, then I will revise my stance on the issue.

Apartment 3-G, 2/3/14

Nooooooo let it go on forever let the deer just keep pooping everywhere let it replace Lu Ann as the third 3-G roommate