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Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/19

I have to admit, this absolutely bonkers “killer chimp” reveal has at least gotten me seriously emotionally invested in Funky Winkerbean, event though my investment is basically in seeing how much more bonkers it’s going to get. Today Cindy posits that Zanzibar was “jealous,” which … hasn’t really been explored in the strip, as far I’ve noticed? And also Cliff let Butter leave town with a talking, thinking, murderous ape??? How did he know Zanzibar wasn’t going to kill again? Who would stop him? Certainly not Butter Brinkel! How many corpses did Butter and Zanzibar leave in their wake as they fled from state to state across the country?

The whole vibe this episode is a delightful (for certain admittedly very limited definitions of “delightful”) throwback not to the Funkyverse’s actual zany past but to the moment when the strip was shifting gears from its zany past to its ultra-depressing present. “There’s a chimp who can talk and also he murdered an innocent woman and ruined countless lives” definitely fits in with “There’s a zany dude who goes by ‘Plantman’ who dresses up as a plant and is also a murderous maniac.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/20/19

I have to admit it’s kind of charming how these two are talking frankly and cheerfully about their jobs as scam artist: giving professional praise, coming up with ideas for new revenue streams, brainstorming the details of possible strategies, and so on. I’m also intrigued that we have yet to see the sinister puppetmaster’s face, but, just like an actual puppetmaster, he’s always dressed in black. You know who else dresses all in black?

THAT’S RIGHT, BABY, IT’S RENE THE ART FORGER

HE’S NOT SATISIFED WITH FORGING ART, NOW HE’S PUTTING OUT FAKE MEDICAL SERVICES TOO

HE’S THE BAD BOY OF THIS STRIP AND HE DOESN’T CARE WHOSE TOES HE STEPS ON

BUT HE’S ALWAYS POLITE AND ENCOURAGING TO HIS ACCOMPLICES BECAUSE THAT’S JUST THE KIND OF GUY HE IS

Pluggers, 7/20/19

For most of us the facts of life are about sex. For pluggers, they’re about the lifetime of unacknowledged and unappreciated domestic and emotional labor their wives have put in to keep them alive. Ha ha, it’s funny because if the chicken-lady dies, the dog man won’t survive for six months without her!

Mark Trail, 7/20/19

Does … does Mark Trail know how mines work? I’m pretty sure this isn’t how mines work.

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/19/19

For the past few days of monkey madness in this strip, I’ve begun to suspect that the payoff of this Butter Brinkel storyline would be “Zanzibar did it!” This would be some classic Funky grimness: though a chimp has the opposable thumbs necessary to pick up and fire a gun, clearly any resulting death would be both an accident and liable to result in an innocent creature being put down, and so Butter instead refused to testify in his own defense and went to prison in order to save the life of his beloved pet.

What I didn’t expect was that the real solution to the mystery was that Zanzibar did it, and also Zanzibar can think and talk and reason like a human being, and Zanzibar thinks of Butter as his “father,” and the only reason Cliff Anger is still alive is because he didn’t have any actual firearms in the house. I’m looking forward to the vicious, desperate hand-to-hand combat between man and killer ape that will transfix comics readers across the nation for the next several weeks.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/19/19

I had sort of built up this image in my mind of Miss Galexia as a very woo-woo new agey type, an older woman who’s been in this game for years, and who believed in her own mysticism once before she turned it into a lucrative revenue stream, or maybe even still believed and managed to hold both the commercial and the spiritual in her mind at once. Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where everything is pretty much exactly as it seems and can be resolved very quickly, and so Miss Galexia is a petty con artist who likes to cackle about the rubes she’s fleecing with her boss while drinking a cup of what I assume isn’t even herbal tea.

Mark Trail, 7/19/19

I like how the composition here makes it look like Mark and Leola seem to have angrily turned their attention not on JJ, who I assume is thoroughly unconscious, but on Doc, who after all is the guy who got them into this mess in the first place. “Look old man, I’m not scared of some bestubblèd mining shop proprietor with a gun, but at the same time I don’t exactly enjoy having a pistol stuck in my face, so there’d better be some god-damned gold in this magic mine of yours, capisce?”

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Six Chix, 7/17/19

I really have to admire the amount of absurd world-building packed into this single panel. What you have here is a very small fishbowl, containing three fish, two of whom are mobsters (right? that’s what the implications of the dark glasses and the … hat and pipe … are supposed to be?), and they’re about to murder fish #3, for winning at cards. This just brings up a whole slew of other questions: What is the point of a criminal gang in a tiny community like a fishbowl, especially if two thirds of the inhabitants are members? What will the all-mafia society look like after poor Vince is killed? Is the (presumable) human owner of this fishbowl, the one who’s going to fish poor Vince out and flush him down the toilet, going to go out and buy a new fish to bring into the mix? Well the mobster-fish then bilk that fish out of its money at cards, by skill, cheating, or violence? What use is money in a society made up of three people (or three sapient fish) and no manufactured goods? Lots to think about, please email me your essays on the topic!

Curtis, 7/17/19

Nice try, Greg! The term “millennial” is slippery, but almost every definition sets the cutoff birth years in the mid-to-late 90s, which means the very youngest millennials are more than 20 years old at this point! Your son is “Gen Z” or whatever they’re going to end up calling themselves. You know who may well be a millennial is you, Greg, as the top of that cohort is in its late 30s at this point. “LOL,” as you kids say! (As a Gen-Xer, I personally can’t wait for the Generational Wars to end with Generation [Unpronounceable Glyph] refusing to interact with us in any way until it comes time for them to harvest the precious moisture in our bodies.)

Funky Winkerbean, 7/17/19

I don’t think I’d noticed before that Young Cliff Anger looks uncannily like handsome movie actor Mason Jarre. You’d think with a mug like that he wouldn’t have to be a writer to make it in Hollywood! Oh, wait, right, the Communism meant he couldn’t show his pretty face in polite company. Well, at least he has a simian pal to keep him company! Maybe Funky Winkerbean is just going to pivot to being a wacky strip about a happy-go-lucky Stalinist and his drunken chimp roommate, and I cannot emphasize enough how much of an improvement that would be.