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Crankshaft, 12/17/19

I’m not sure who exactly this Generic Gloomy Businessman is supposed to be; presumably he’s a representative of the private equity firm that bought the anemic local mall, then juiced its cash flow by loading it with debt and raked in huge “management fees” as a prelude to declaring bankruptcy and shutting the whole thing down. But shoutout to him for delivering a setup line that doesn’t really flow naturally with either the thing Crankshaft thinks he’s saying or the thing he’s actually saying. Anyway, I for one am looking forward to next year’s Christmas sequence, where Santa-Crankshaft sits grumpily on the pile of rubble where Centerville’s primary retail center used to be, watching the twinkling lights on the cars driving fifteen miles away to the Wal-Mart over on Route 179 to do their shopping.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/17/19

Meanwhile, over in Westview and ten years in the future, Les is sitting in a dark room alone, obsessively watching cartoons, muttering to himself! Is this the result of some deep, underlying emotional issues which, despite his remarkable degree of self-absorption, he’s never really tried to address head-on? Or is it because his daughter abandoned him? Probably the second one, right?

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Dick Tracy, 12/15/19

Yesterday we learned that Splitface, who used to be Haf and Haf and who also used to work as a carny, also used to work at the zoo, and this alligator, to whom he intends to feed all of our heroes, is an old pal from the carny days. For a strip that generally rushes through things and doesn’t really supply a lot of motivation for what characters do, we’re getting, like, too much backstory on Splitface and his relationship with various reptile co-workers for my taste, honestly. Hey, did you know he used to be Haf and Haf? True story.

Mark Trail, 12/15/19

So it turns out that yeti do in fact whistle, so Mark probably heard one last night, which revelation has caused Dr. Camel’s mighty, braying laugh to echo off of the distant Himalayas! Anyway, I have fully forgotten what Genie’s deal is, since she first showed up spouting fun Kathmandu facts. Like is she Dr. Camel’s longtime assistant, who has finally come round to being sick of his shit, or is this expedition her first experience with him, in which case she’s gotten sick of his shit fairly quickly? I guess the important, and hilarious, thing is that she and Mark have become visibly sick of his shit more or less at the exact same time.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/15/19

God knows I would almost never take the side of a Funkyverse character doing wordplay, but I dearly wish Becky would say, “Hey, man, didn’t you go ironically deaf and quit as band director more than ten years ago? Pretty sure ‘music director’ was a make-work job they came up with to ease you into retirement and you’re supposed to be puttering around the Board of Education offices downtown, not sitting at a desk immediately behind me for no good fucking reason, right here, in the band room, during band practice, which, I can’t emphasize enough, you can’t hear well enough to be helpful.”

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Dennis the Menace, 12/13/19

Gotta respect the way today’s panel menaces our narrative expectations. Normally you’d think the punchline is going to be some wordplay on “spontaneous,” or that there would at least be some reason why that word was picked for the setup, but nope, it’s a red herring as Dennis just boldly devalues the very concept of “vocabulary words.” “C’mon, lady,” he says, “our brains don’t need to be walking around with so much data stored inefficiently; we can just look everything up in the cloud now! Try to keep up!”

Funky Winkerbean, 12/13/19

“Oh, but also, we don’t have any mozzarella now, and that’s, like, a pretty important thing a pizza restaurant needs, so in a larger sense, none of us are OK.”