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Funky Winkerbean, 8/13/20

Oh, look, everyone! Les is saving Lisa twice! The “Montoni’s Burns Down” plot happened during the gap when I wasn’t reading Funky Winkerbean, but has anyone ever suggested that maybe Lisa got cancer because of breathing in the hazardous fumes formed when Montoni’s truly noxious pizza sauce caught flame? Just spitballing here! Probably Marianne will end up dying of cancer too for similar reasons not long after finishing filming Lisa’s Story (Mason’s hair product cabinet caught on fire, maybe?) and Les will accept her Best Actress Oscar. His sad yet smug self-importance will blot out the sun.

Beetle Bailey, 8/13/20

I was going to get absolutely enraged that this furry is clearly a wolf and yet his briefcase says “Grizz & Assoc.”, but then I realized he’s probably the “associates” and “Grizz” is his boss (a bear furry, obviously). Anyway, what’s your favorite thing about his outfit? When you answer, keep in mind that his outfit consists of a vest, a suit jacket, a bow tie, and nothing else.

Mark Trail, 8/13/20

Hey man, I was pretty sanguine about Tabby’s abandonment because I was 100% sure she would find a safe home with the Trails, but I am not cool with how cavalier Mark’s being about the packs of rabid feral dogs roaming the area! Sure, Rusty’s had his shots, so the worst that could happen to him is that he gets lightly-to-mediumly mauled, but we don’t want Tabby’s story ending in an Old Yeller scenario, or, worse, a Cujo situation, so let’s get moving on that rabies vaccination, shall we?

Crankshaft, 8/13/20

I really hope they get through to Jeff Bezos, and I hope he takes them seriously! I hope he pulls out all the stops and uses all the power that’s accrued to his trillion-dollar megacorporation to just absolutely crush this streetside lemonade stand, the illegal, unpermitted bookstore it’s attached to, and the entire Centerville economy, just to be on the safe side.

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Mark Trail, 8/11/20

So as anyone would’ve predicted, this abandoned cat was befriended by Andy, brought into the Trail household/menagerie, and dubbed “Tabby.” Mostly I’m showing you today’s strip because it seems wild to me that Cherry, whose father is literally a veterinarian, is shocked to learn that sometimes people abandon their pets. But if Doc has indeed sheltered his daughter, who I’m reasonably sure is now in her 30s, from the more sordid aspects of the life of domesticated animals, it could also explain how she apparently doesn’t really know what sex is, either. (Remember, this is what Cherry thinks sex is.)

Funky Winkerbean, 8/11/20

You know, I’ve always had a sort of unreasoning hatred of Tom Cruise as an actor, to the extent that sometimes I avoid movies he’s in that I otherwise might enjoy. But when Vanilla Sky came out in 2001, its marketing campaign teased that Cruise’s character would become hideously deformed over the course of the movie, and I was like “Tom Cruise? Hideously deformed? Hell yeah” but it turned out I hated that even more, somehow! What I’m trying to say is that Funky Winkerbean is trying to stop me from doing more rants about how this isn’t the way urban wildfires or LA geography works (are they driving from … Burbank? Hollywood? NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE) by at least teasing me with the prospect of Les and Mason becoming terribly burned, like maybe their whole faces will get burned off, but sorry, you’re not going to fool me again! I still hate it!

Pluggers, 8/11/20

I was going to complain that the whole point of pluggers is that they hold down honest, solid jobs in factories and on construction sites where literal equipment malfunctions are actually a workplace hazard, but then I realized that this is probably a half-remembered reference to “wardrobe malfunctions” and I think it means that we as a nation are finally, finally getting over the time where we almost but not quite saw Janet Jackson’s nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/9/20

Oh, God, sorry to be the insufferable Los Angeles geography knower but a week ago we were told this fire was called the Point Dume fire, presumably because it had started around Point Dume in Malibu, and today we’re told it’s reached the “Hills of West Hollywood,” by which I guess they mean the hills just north of West Hollywood, there are no actual hilly neighborhoods in the city of West Hollywood proper but never mind that. Anyway, there’s really only one problem with this, which is that if a fire had spread from Malibu to West Hollywood, probably no newscaster would be standing just feet away from it because it would be a thirty-mile wall of flame that managed to jump two freeways, destroy the Getty Center and several extremely wealthy neighborhoods, and just generally be an insane catastrophe that would send literally millions of people fleeing pell-mell from the destruction!

Anyway, this post is mostly for my mom, who’s very convinced every time there’s a fire in LA that our house is on the verge of burning down. Our house isn’t gonna burn down, mom! We’re way too far from any natural vegetation for that to happen. The way LA’s gonna kill us is from the car exhaust from the massive freeway interchange half a mile away, which is not as dramatic.

Curtis, 8/9/20

You know what filled me with absolute, unalloyed delight in today’s comics? Bugsy, the fly who understands what you say! This is insane and kind of out of character for this strip and I love all of it — the big cute eyes on Bugsy, the way he he gestures with all six of his limbs, the overwrought reactions from all his victims! I’d actually argue that he doesn’t just understand when you’re talking about killing him: he also knows what you value most, which is honestly much creepier.

Gasoline Alley, 8/9/20

As far as strips in today’s comics where the characters watch a deranged commercial go, Gasoline Alley is sadly a distant second to Curtis. What exactly is the implication of the exchange in the final panel? Is Rufus planning on shitting in the cans? Is that it?

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/9/20

Oh, finally, America’s #1 medical soap opera comic is going to actually grapple with the biggest medical crisis in the last century! Unfortunately, based on the “Lockdown Stories” title, I suspect we’ll be seeing less of Rex telling nurses from across the room to turn patients over onto their stomach and being given 10,000 doses of remdesivir without asking for or really needing them, and more Buck working from home trying to sell music and art from guys who were famous 30 years ago over the internet while his wife takes care of his newborn son and very quickly comes to loathe him.