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Funky Winkerbean, 1/21/19

As I keep harping on, I know the time-jump got the details of Wally’s story all messed up, but I never realized that those details were, like, “Wally somehow never told his new wife that he had a daughter, and she reacts to having this information sprung on her by smirking sassily at him” messed up. Big shout out to Funky Winkerbean for always surprising me, and never in a good way!

Mary Worth, 1/21/19

OK, Jannie, see, you can spend your energy buttering up your professor in transparently nonsense ways and hope that the goodwill thus generated will predispose him to be generous when you half-ass your assignments, or you can actually sleep with him and use the resulting emotional connection/potential blackmail material to strongarm him into giving you a good grade when you stop doing work altogether. But to deploy the strategy you’ve chosen here … well, it’s bold, I’ll give you that.

Spider-Man, 1/21/19

Wow, it looks like the Newspaper Spider-Man Narration Box is comparing the exchange of currency for labor in a free-market system to an evil supervillain using supernatural powers to enslave his helpless victim into doing his bidding. You never know who’s gonna go full communist these days!

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Funky Winkerbean, 1/18/19

Hmm, I would argue that fewer foreign students getting H-1B visas to work in the U.S. is actually … literally the intended consequence of the changes to the H-1B program? Like, you can be for or against policy, but you would be hard-pressed to claim that people like Adeela not getting a visa to work in the U.S. was some kind of unintended consequence of it, unless you’re one of those people who supports policies in the abstract but then when those policies negatively affect people you know and like in exactly the way they’re designed to, you’re suddenly like “oh no, who could’ve predicted this!” I guess it’s sort of like if you punch someone and by punching them you injure them and then you think “oh no, I never intended this consequence at all!” In other news, if Wally was going around Iraq using punching as his primary weapon, that may explain why he was the only American soldier to be held as a POW for a multi-year stint there.

Gil Thorp, 1/18/19

As is probably obvious from my commentary on Gil Thorp and also my whole deal in general, I don’t know a ton about sports stuff. Like, is it typically the point guard’s duty to perform emotional labor for the team? Or is that a Gil Thorp coaching innovation?

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Sam and Silo, 1/5/19

I admit to being kind of charmed by my own inability to get a firm handle on what the deal is with Sam and Silo, exactly. Like, today starts off seeming like another in a continuing series of “Sam should see a mental health professional” strips, but then takes a turn in the final panel to horror! Or maybe just a turn from “Sam should see a mental health professional about his depression” to “Sam should see a mental health professional about his psychotic break.”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/5/19

You can forgive a long-running strip like Funky Winkerbean for reveling in its own lore a bit, I suppose, but things get tricky when you contrast its wacky, light-hearted past with its curren omnipresent cloud of grimness. For instance, I’m sure at some point it was hilarious that school budgetary cuts required the Scapegoats to tote injured players off the field using equipment that no medical professional would endorse. But the fact that one of the people reminiscing fondly about this episode has suffered permanent cognitive damage due to his high school football career casts a little bit of a pall over the whole thing.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/5/19

You guys, Sarah Morgan is just now hearing about this business where the climate can vary across differing geographies and she is not OK with it.