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Judge Parker, 9/21/22

Oh, sorry, it seems the Judge Parker brain trust has heard your little diatribes about how Judge Parker is boring now because it’s all about its characters processing their mundane emotions in baffling and erratic ways. Well, that’s why we’re abruptly shifting gears and bringing back Steve the wounded special forces warrior to introduce this hard-hitting new storyline about the judge that replaced Judge Randy Parker, who cracked down on meth and fentanyl traffic … and whose whole family just got murdered. Or, sorry, assassinated. Assassinated! Will I be cancelled as a soft-on-crime lib if I point out that assassination is a kind of murder?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/22

Speaking of murder, I guess the Funky Winkerbean brain trust noticed they hadn’t pulled any grim shit since Bull Bushka drove off a cliff back in 2019. Well, here you go, you ghouls: Darrin and Jessica tracked down a real weirdo who hoards memorabilia from the TV station that employed Jessica’s father, John Darling, including the gun that a guy dressed as a plant used to kill him! Look at how Jessica and her husband are recoiling in shock at the casual way this guy identifies his ghastly trophy! Are you happy now, you sickos? Are you happy???

Curtis, 9/21/22

I appreciate the long game Greg is playing here — making an elaborate show of enjoying Curtis’s favorite music before cruelly lowering the boom in the final panel. I assume, like a master chess player, he anticipated multiple potential third-panel conversational gambits from his son, and had a sick burn in his back pocket for all of them.

Shoe, 9/21/22

Far be it for me to call a comic strip about talking birds who wear (some) clothes “realistic,” but I do think that its portrayal of life at a small-town newspaper has a certain truth to it, in the sense that it depicts a publication run with almost no employees, which almost nobody reads, and the few remaining editors can just use it to pursue their own personal gripes and vendettas as they kill time waiting for a hedge fund to buy them and immediately shut them down.

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Crankshaft, 9/1/22

“With no access to our XOR drive, we have to transcode the online IP to the optic matrix—injecting the form factor won’t scale unless we hack the primary FTP antenna, and our bandwidth visibility is sub-optimal. So our only choice is to connect the back-end mainframe unless you can tap dance. Seriously, we’re going live, grab a top hat and cane!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/1/22

Oh, c’mon—you guys were literally the entire high school back in the day. No amount of “acting like that” could “exclude you from things,” much as that would have been a better outcome for everybody.

Sherman’s Lagoon, 9/1/22

“Hairless” aside, I really enjoy when Sherman‘s artist exports a character model to a different species: Megan’s pearls, nose, and belligerence are a perfect match.

Gil Thorp, 9/1/22

Hoho, Gil Thorp is going all-in with “Gil and Mimi’s marriage is on the rocks,” and Gil better watch out. First, Mimi challenges her son to an escalating round of Love Declarations (“More than Dad—Say it!“), then deftly sets him up to ally with the younger son of Gil’s hated Valley Tech rival. Soon Gil, separated and jobless, will survey his sad motel room and wonder where it all went wrong. Right here, Gil, while you were sitting on your butt hoping it would all work out. The same way you coach.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Sherman’s Lagoon, 8/30/22

Sharks mate only rarely and in the murky ocean depths, so Megan is understandably fascinated by Make-Out Island. “But where do the claspers go?” she muses, “What? Oh my God ick, ick, ick, ick, ICK!“

Sally Forth, 8/30/22

While Flesh-Ted is busy with his existential terror, Psyche-Ted presents some interesting perspectives on Mind-Body duality. Which entity has agency for, say, body-leaving? Surely not the body itself; that leads only to paradox! So is Psyche-Ted here addressing himself, or instead Consciousness-Ted, an unseen third entity capable of a) falling and b) influencing Psyche-Ted in some unspecified way.

Perhaps we can resolve the issue empirically! Suppose Psyche-Ted lets go, taking with him all Ted’s whimsy, pop-culture trivia, and manchild traits. Will he leave behind a pragmatic, hardworking, down-to-earth adult (i.e., a plugger), or instead a soulless zombie? And who in this family could tell them apart?

Some ride, huh?

Funky Winkerbean, 8/30/22

Oh, here we go again. During her high-school years, Cindy Summers was the Popular Girl; it was her entire identity. She failed to “fit in” exactly once, when all the guys assumed she already had a date and didn’t ask her to the Big Dance, so she had to endure an all-night mope-fest choking down bad pizza with loser Les.

Yet during the Time-Travel Reunion seven years ago, Old Cindy tried to peddle “popularity is just a mask we wear to cover up self-loathing” to Young Cindy, who was clearly not in a self-loathing frame of mind. Now going-on-sixty looking-like-thirty, married to a young movie star and the envy of her peers, Cindy tries to retcon herself as an outcast? Sorry, girl— Les Moore is the Outcast. You’re the Popular Girl. Shoulder the burden and move on.

The Phantom, 8/30/22

“Mozz predicts the death of the Phantom again … and again … and again …” began back in 2017. And by now Diana, Babudan, Guran and the others have got to be questioning the old man’s motivations. I mean, he’s scribbling his “Death of the Phantom” fanfic directly into the Chronicles, the official historical record of Phantomry, in a desperate third attempt to make it happen.

Who’s bankrolling all this? My guess: Mozz is in league with The Cobra, The Nomad, and the criminal elite running Rhodia to return the Phantom dynasty—under son, heir, and 22nd Phantom Kit—to its birthplace on the Indian subcontinent, leaving Bangalla open to their predations.

–Uncle Lumpy