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Curtis, 6/9/20

Obviously strips like Curtis where the focus is more on the kids’ lives tend to give short shrift to the parents, but it’s 100% true that we never see Greg interacting with any adults other than his wife in a non-work context. At least Diane has her church group friends to occasionally have meetings with so Curtis can disrupt them! It’s absolutely heartbreaking for Greg to say, without hesitation, that what he misses most is his friends, as he closes his eyes and smiles wistfully, contemplating another, better world where he was emotionally fulfilled.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/9/20

It’s funny because we’ve seen Mason Jarr play exactly two roles in his time in the Funkyverse: Starbuck Jones, in the big-budget Starbuck Jones production, who is some kind of superhero spaceman and thus could not be the subject of this kind of “get in his head” exercise, and Les Moore, in the first abortive attempt to film Lisa’s Story, at which point Mason wasn’t even aware that the guy he was playing was same guy as the screenwriter! But I don’t want to dwell too much on that, because I’m too busy dwelling on the image of a second, smaller Les Moore, possibly implanted in Mason’s digestive tract by some sort of facehugger creature who rammed its ovipositor down his throat while he was unconscious, bursting out of Mason’s ribcage during dinner, leaving Les and Cayla’s dining room a mess of blood and viscera. Would the pleasure we’d all derive from this gruesome scenario be mitigated by the fact that, at the end of the process, we’d have two Les Moores?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/9/20

Rex is telling Sarah the story of how he and June met, which mostly seems to be the story of how back when he first started his medical career he had to deal with a lot of patients and their illnesses and their human problems, gross. Now he runs his own clinic and he doesn’t have to do shit! It’s great!

Judge Parker, 6/9/20

“The honest truth is that I probably would’ve lost the mayoral race, and badly, but this mug? They can never take this mug away from me. Not without a warrant.”

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So today a lot of comics artists have inserted some symbols into their strips to pay tribute to essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic. And, naturally, there was a range of approaches to this!

Dustin, 6/7/20

You could, for instance, take the Dustin route, where the symbols are explicitly explained in text, and then used in the comic itself to further the cause of recognizing various heroes, sung and unsung!

Baby Blues, 6/7/20

Or you could take the Baby Blues technique, which is to integrate the symbols naturalistically into the comic itself, on the assumption that readers will pick up news stories about this campaign and understand what they’re looking at.

Six Chix, 6/7/20

Or — hear me out — you could do it the Six Chix way, by which I of course mean the most half-assed way imaginable, wedging symbols into a joke that’s already terrible by itself so as to make them fully incomprehensible. What’s the most insultingly placed of the icons here? Lotta people are gonna say the steering wheel at the bottom left corner, held by disembodied human hands, but don’t sleep on the picture (?) of the microscope that the pigeon is wearing (?) on its chest.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/7/20

Funky Winkerbean, of course, can not accomodate any misery that is not Funky Winkerbean, so it will not be acknowledging the coronavirus pandemic nor any of the essential workers ameliorating it, but I did enjoy today’s strip, in which Cayla desperately begs Mason not to try to get inside the mind of a madman, it’s too late for her, but he can still save himself, there’s still time, there’s still time.

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The Lockhorns, 6/6/20

Probably most people reading this blog know that syndicated newspaper strips have to be submitted some time in advance of publication; generally the minimum is four weeks but some prefer to work months in advance. And so it can be a fun game to play: how long ago was this drawn? That especially applies in These Troubled Times, with history happening so quickly. Can you imagine that just a few short months ago, we thought that we’d be enjoying ourselves this summer by heading down to the cineplex to enjoy Scoob! (which was released straight to streaming) or the live-action Little Mermaid (the filming of which was delayed)? I guess in the Lockhornsverse, the COVID-19 pandemic never broke out, possibly because Leroy and Loretta’s powerful rage-radiation has antiviral effects that scientists don’t yet fully understand.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/6/20

Longtime Funkyverse trufans know about Frankie, Darrin’s biological father, who in the original long-ago storyline had a consensual sexual relationship with Lisa that got later retconned to sexual assault. Frankie makes occasional appearances for no real obvious reason beyond causing misery, and Les seemed to think that he had come back and was stalking him, but it turns out it was [comical BOI-OI-OI-OING sound] Mason??? As yet it’s unclear whether he was trying to “go method” by observing Les in his natural habitat so he could really bring Les’s brand of depressing unpleasantness to the screen, or whether he was just planning to murder Les before Les decided to once again tank the movie project that Mason has inexplicably become extremely passionate about.