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Funky Winkerbean, 11/13/13

I’ve settled into a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thing with Funky Winkerbean, where I’ve decided that, since I’m apparently going to keep reading it indefinitely, and it’s going to keep being an endless pit of misery and death indefinitely, I’ve got to figure out how to enjoy it. My current strategy is to enjoy it when the misery and death happen to characters I particularly dislike, so this week’s plot, which has been focused on Les’s inability to write a maudlin direct-to-cable movie about his wife’s death, has been pretty pleasing to me. You might recall that this story began months ago with Les getting a fat check and then getting smug about some of the clunkiest dialogue ever written. But now he’s realized that he can never write a script about his beloved dead wife, because he can’t really imagine what her thoughts were, probably because when she was alive he was too busy thinking about how her various life tragedies were affecting him emotionally to really get to know her. Somehow this didn’t prevent him from writing a best-selling memoir about her, of course, but to write a screenplay he needs to know her every thought, since obviously movies focus much more closely on characters’ internal emotional lives than books do.

Anyway, the Les-suffering is unfortunately about to end, because now he’s going to read Lisa’s diary! The diary he swore never to read, for some reason! This will solve all his problems and probably he’ll just take big chunks of prose out of the diary and use them in his screenplay and he won’t even have to pay Lisa for it, because she’s dead.

Apartment 3-G, 11/13/13

Speaking of death, I’m dying with laughter at Governor Sexy having his extremely public marriage proposal interrupted in one of the most humiliating ways possible. The YouTube video of this delightful moment will of course go viral, with the autotuned version “I Have To Take This Call (It’s Marty)” becoming a surprise novelty hit on iTunes.

Dennis the Menace, 11/13/13

Everyone in the Mitchell family takes on whatever chores need doing, dividing them up equitably without regards to outdated gender norms, and Dennis doesn’t care who knows it! He truly is a menace — to the patriarchy.

Momma, 11/13/13

Frankly, the whole “Momma was very cold outside” angle of this strip seems overly complex, don’t you think? I mean, Momma is haunted by the grim spectre of death at all times and would presumably be quick with a depressing quip in response to a “Isn’t it great to be alive” no matter what the circumstances, though she might lean less towards “Let me check to see if I’m still alive” and more towards “I am alive and it isn’t great at all; it’s actually quite awful.” Still, the way MaryLou is leaning on the question, combined with Francis’s sly look, makes me think that something more is up here, like maybe they dumped her a snowdrift a mile away and made her walk back home, and are now trying to subtly ask her if she’s dead or not.

Blondie, 11/13/13

Ha ha, it sure is hard to keep up with the slang that the kids today use! In unrelated news, Alexander suffered some kind of traumatic brain injury at football practice.

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Funky Winkerbean, 11/5/13

One of the downsides of the thick, suffocating blanket of omnipresent gloom that covers the characters in Funky Winkerbean at all times is that it’s often difficult to know how exactly how we’re supposed to be reading their facial expressions. I think “Maybe we should’ve known!” is supposed to be a light-hearted “Maybe we should’ve known that Cory would love old comic books, just like his dad, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, ha ha!” But with everyone looking so glum in that final panel, it comes across much more like “Maybe we should’ve known, oh God, we never knew our son at all, we wasted the sort time we had with him, and now he’s almost certainly going to die in some God-forsaken desert cursing our names, we’re monsters, we’re all sad, broken monsters.”

Family Circus, 11/5/13

The expression on the face of the checkout clerk here is a bit easier to parse. “Listen to how excited that little kid is about grocery bags! What a terrible bleak home life he must have, devoid of the ability to choose anything for himself, or have fun of any kind!”

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Mark Trail, 10/30/13

Good news, everybody! The weird, svengali-like power Johnny Walker held over the poor innocent senator has at last been fully explained, now that he’s a smear of human hamburger at the bottom of a cliff. Fortunately, Johnny’s death will immediately remove this pall hanging over our heroes. Once the authorities learn that Johnny was responsible for all the wrongdoing, and that he died under bizarre circumstances with only the senator and his close friends and family as witnesses, the case will be closed and everything will go back to normal, just like it was before!

B.C., 10/30/13

Normally I’d make fun of this strip for completely abdicating on actually drawing a Miley Cyrus costume and just leaning on “haha, it’s funny because they said ‘twerking'”, but then I thought: do I want to see Team B.C.’s idea of what a teen girl ant wearing a Sexy Miley Cyrus outfit would look like? Does anyone? Answers: No, and, I’m reasonably certain, no. Let’s just enjoy the bullet we dodged. Ha ha, those prehistoric ants just said “twerking,” everybody! They’re just like us!

Family Circus, 10/30/13

I love Dolly’s expression of vague disdain. God damn it, Jeffy, do you want to learn how to huff or not?

Funky Winkerbean, 10/30/13

Ha ha, those army guys sure have a sense of gallows humor and/or complete lack of historical knowledge! Anyway, Cory and his whole platoon are going to die.