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Funky Winkerbean, 4/26/07

I’m gonna speak up in sexually timid young Darrin’s defense here. Not all teenage boys want to go all the way with their sexy high school girlfriends … or, well, even if they want to, not all of them actually decide to do it. Sometimes they do talk about it endlessly in mysterious pitch-black voids while gently stroking said girlfriends’ hair. Someday they’ll be ready, if they aren’t traumatized somehow by the discovery of their birth parents first.

By the way, I think Darrin’s schnoz is getting bigger with each passing day. My wife suggests that his sexual frustration is leading to some kind of nose erection, but clearly that, while weird and bizarre, offers some outside possibility for fun, and thus it can’t happen in Funky Winkerbean. My diagnosis: nose cancer, duh.

Apartment 3-G, 4/26/07

Margo Magee: bad roommate, awful human being. And yet … and yet … I love her! Oh, God, why does it have to be this way?

Judge Parker, 4/26/07

And now, a little something for the ladies … and some of the fellas … and, well, anyone who enjoys seeing a pair of Parisian punks stripped down to their skivvies, tied up in a utility closet, and jabbering at each other in pidgin French, which I’m assuming is pretty much all of you.

My question for you all is: What do the comics have against that inoffensive creature, the male nipple? Punque Un et Punque Deux join Dagwood and Mark Trail in the Unsettlingly De-Nipped Hall of Fame:

Mark Trail, 4/26/07

Oh God, look at the body language: all the “bird strikes” this and “wildlife service” that and “visit some airports” what have you is clearly these two perverts’ idea of foreplay. About thirty to forty seconds of fully clothed, quasi-satisfying marital duties are about to happen on that rock.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/26/07

Oh, also: Hagar appears to have a crippling problem with alcohol abuse.

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Mark Trail, 4/15/07

Let it never be said that the Sunday Mark Trail strips aren’t educational and informative. Without them, I’d probably still view elephants as gentle, endangered herbivores rather than the murderous, yam-poaching menaces that they are. Today, I learned that, despite all my assumptions and common sense, great herds of squid can and occasionally do leap out of the water in precise, Olympic-synchronized-swimming-quality formation. It’s a good thing I learned this in the safe confines of the comics, because I think that if I had encountered a flying flock of squid in real life I would have been reduced to a quivering, urine-soaked lump of fear.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/15/07

The goofy, absurd punchline to this strip hearkens back to the days before Funky Winkerbean took The Turn To Grim, but with the shadows everywhere, the glum faces, and the general pall hanging like a black cloud over everything, there’s no mistaking it for anything but a product of this feature’s late ’00s bleakness. I particularly like Black Teacher Dude Whose Name I’m Pretty Sure I Never Knew’s attitude of slouched resignation in the second panel. He seems reasonably sure that this newfangled copier will somehow make his job obsolete and put him in a homeless shelter within the month. He’s right, of course, but what he doesn’t realize is that he’s standing too close to its radioactive core and he’ll leave his job with a nasty case of stomach cancer to boot.

Mary Worth, 4/15/07

As I think my visual annotations above prove pretty well, Vera Shields is either completely insane or very, very sarcastic. (For more visual evidence of Mary’s horrible cooking, check out this post on Subdivided We Stand, faithful reader Smitty Smedlap’s blog.)

Lio, 4/15/07

No snark on this one from me, just thought you’d all enjoy it. I particularly like the way Leroy Hateachothers keeps his cool and makes a wisecrack while everyone else panics.

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While you’re waiting for me to get my act together on Sunday and Monday’s comics, you all owe it to yourselves to read today’s Shortpacked!

It goes without saying that all of you should be reading David Willis’ Shortpacked! regularly anyway. In addition to generating an ungodly number of awesome comics, he’s also the brilliant genius behind the Finger-Quotin’ Warhol logo.