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Funky Winkerbean, 1/28/22

Sad (?) news, everyone: it turns out Lisa didn’t fake her death after all. Instead, it seems that Les literally couldn’t tell the difference between his freshly dead wife and some neighbor lady (yesterday’s strip established that he saw her out by the birdfeeder), and also said neighbor lady decided that talking to Les would be a gross, unpleasant experience and so she didn’t bother doing it. That all is in fact extremely sad, but it also absolutely tracks.

Mary Worth, 1/28/22

Good (?) news, everyone: it turns out Wilbur is alive, which we knew, and that he managed to somehow shave and find a new shirt before he got around to letting all his loved ones know he wasn’t dead. Look how overjoyed and relieved they are! They’re in such a state of frenzied Wilbur-love that they’re about to group-tackle him and tear him to pieces, like the crazed Maenads at the end of Euripdes’ The Bacchae! That all is in fact good news, extremely good news indeed.

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Mary Worth, 1/26/22

I hate to say that Mary doesn’t understand even the basic outlines of the personalities of the people she spends all her time with, but I can guarantee you that, if Wilbur’s soul were looking down from heaven, he would very much not want anyone taking a stiff upper lip attitude about his death, but in fact would be achieving the angelic equivalent of physical arousal at the thought of various women weeping and tearing at their hair because they miss him so much. I’m reasonably sure that he’s taking his sweet time asking to borrow a cell phone from anyone on Party Island precisely so he can pump Mary for information about exactly how sad everyone was thinking he was dead. It certainly would be a shame if he overplayed his hand and everyone turned on him once he got back!

Funky Winkerbean, 1/26/22

Speaking of fake deaths, remember when Lisa called Les to stop him from getting on a plane, after she died, which was never really followed up on? What I’m trying to say is that Mary Worth couldn’t let us think Wilbur was dead for more than a week, but if it turns out that Funky Winkerbean has managed to fool us for 15 years, I will frankly be willing to forgive an awful lot.

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Dustin, 1/25/21

Dustin of course has a core mission of depicting the life of the shiftless, no-good kids today, as interpreted by someone who’s only heard anything about the lived experiences of any human being under the age of 35 second- or third-hand, which is how you get recurring bits like “Young people today definitely meet prospective romantic partners primarily at fern bar, right?” I was briefly intrigued that earlier this week Dustin appeared to have given up on his intermittent work through a temp agency and instead chose to join the “gig economy” in an actually Zoomer-appropriate storyline. But virtually all my interactions with people delivering for Grubhub and its competitors involve getting a text that they’ve left it on my porch, or at most waving at someone through my front window as they book it to their next delivery scheduled by their cruel algorithmic taskmaster, so I’m going to go ahead and say the Dustin creative team also thinks that “Those food apps the kids use today are just like pizza delivery, right? Probably you pay the guy in cash after he hands you the food?” Anyway, usually a strip like this would put a cutesy faux-app name on Dustin’s hat, so this is a really great opportunity for Grubhub to sue somebody.

Mary Worth, 1/25/21

I love the way that Dawn is grappling with the problem of evil — “why would God allow something bad to happen to someone good?” — and Estelle’s response is that “Oh, actually, your father’s a hair-trigger drunk, sorry if you were somehow unaware of this. It’s my fault, really, except not, if you think about it. I’m definitely crying for real though.”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/25/21

“Sorry, no, I was too busy dwelling on the fact that nobody has ever suffered the way I’d suffered, so I couldn’t be bothered to do a few minutes of token labor to keep alive some creatures that really brought a great deal of joy to your mother, the person I was ostensibly mourning, until I started having hallucinations. Anyway, in a related story, remember how you ate mostly cracker crumbs out of the couch cushions for all of second grade?”