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Funky Winkerbean, 3/2/21

Oh, boy, it looks like the early coronavirus pandemic echoes in Funkyverse strips that were probably written a year ago have reached the mothership, everybody! It’s funny that Crankshaft used the opportunity to do some zany jokes about hand sanitizer and whatnot, whereas in Funky Winkerbean itself the key question is “How can we make this global pandemic, which is particularly dangerous to the immunocompromised, all about Les — specifically, how can we show that Les is the real hero in Lisa’s cancer story, and is also unpleasantly neurotic?”

Crankshaft, 3/2/21

Meanwhile, Crankshaft is just riffing on headlines like “How a superspreader at choir practice sickened 52 people with COVID-19” with bits like “Wouldn’t it be funny if in the middle of a choral performance, the old lady playing the organ just straight-up dropped dead? Right there in church? In front of everybody?”

Mary Worth, 3/2/21

Look, it’s all fun and games to claim, without evidence, that your dog is a “champion tracker” when you never go hunting and there are no real stakes to it, especially when your dog is a tiny dachsund with a comically large snout! How much tracking does anyone’s pet dog do on a regular basis, anyway? Hardly none, right? But just know that if you say this sort of thing enough, you might eventually be called upon to render actual tracking services, and that can get real awkward real fast.

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/1/21

What’s the worst thing going on here? Is it that Les thinks it makes him sound sympathetic when he says his first reaction to his wife’s cancer diagnosis was to become the smartest cancer knower that ever lived, rather than attempting to comfort her or whatever? Is it that Les made a joke about Dick Tracy “investigating” things, even though as readers of this blog well know, Dick rarely does any real detailed research and mostly just shoots at weirdos? Is it that this lady thinks that Dick Tracy is some obscure comics character known only to trufans and obsessives, rather than one of the most famous comic strip characters in the world? Is it that, right or wrong about that, she thinks that shouting “Got the reference!” at this reading of a sad cancer book will make her sympathetic? WRONG, TRICK QUESTION: the real answer is that the worst thing going on here is that Les is still, years and years after his wife’s death, doing endless publicity tours for his book about her illness, rather than writing another book or spending time with his daughter and his current wife or, like, doing literally anything else. Anyway, he and “Got the reference!” lady will definitely be having an affair by the end of the week.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/1/21

Oh, did you think we were done with Buck? You fool. You idiot. You sweet summer child. This plotline is going to consist of some very mild failure to adhere to diabetes protocols, some very swift compliance to said protocols in response to extremely minimal consequences to said failure to adhere, and endless, endless praises. All hail Buck! It’s good that your numbers look like that, Buck. Let’s all hear it for Buck!

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Dick Tracy, 2/24/21

A little sniff before she fixes dinner, if you follow her. If you get her drift. Her snow drift. She’s talking about cocaine! I feel like what with all the weird escapades with “Pouch” and his stolen balloon “Blue” that this strip has been going on for the past several weeks, we’ve lost sight of the true star of this storyline: cocaine, and the recreational consumption and illegal distribution thereof.

Blondie, 2/24/21

Look, obviously the Blondie strips where she’s taking notes on the “[Insert Profession/Hobbyist Group To Make Jokes About Here] Group Luncheon” are just excuses to make some easy jokes riffing on widely accepted stereotypes about the profession or hobbyist group in question, and that’s a perfectly valid joke template for a long-running legacy strip like Blondie to have. I’m just saying, though, you really should have your stereotypes correct if you’re going down this road. Like, when I see someone with a sweater tied around their neck like this, I think “leader of the rich kid camp across the lake about to challenge our protagonists to a snobs vs. slobs battle in an ’80s comedy,” not “theater kid.”

Dustin, 2/24/21

I get that this is supposed to be a joke where an adult tells a child about how things used to be, but: Dustin is canonically supposed to be boomerang kid who came home from college and never left, and his younger sister is still in high school, so I don’t think we’re supposed to think of him as much past his mid 20s, meaning he was born in the mid-to-late ’90s; meanwhile, Facebook opened to the general public in 2006 and surpassed MySpace as the most heavily used social networking site in 2008, so “likes” have been a social currency for basically his entire life. On the other hand, Hayden, age seven, probably doesn’t use social media at all and when he starts it will be on some app whose feedback mechanisms are entirely strange and foreign to the rest of us. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re doing an entire strip about generation gaps, you at least need to know what various generations are into.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/24/21

“I think I basically get the urge to have a place where you sleep indoors and spend time when you’re not at work. But why would you want that place to be nice?”