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Gil Thorp, 4/11/18

Well, it was bound to happen: the Social Justice Teens are feeling kind of bad about defeating Marty by goading him into cussing on-air. You’d think they’d take the attitude of “Yay, the sports radio guy who literally nobody liked even before we found out he was a racist isn’t going to be saying rude things about our friends on-air anymore!” But these kids sense, at the periphery of their minds, that they are in fact the current protagonists in an ongoing narrative; and while in real life we actually enjoy getting what we want, within a story a protagonist without an antagonist is dull and lifeless, and they know it.

Mary Worth, 4/11/18

Mary Worth, obviously, doesn’t feel itself restricted by such conventional narrative niceties. Sure, the current storyline of Wilbur’s mid-grade ennui appears to lack dramatic tension, drifting as it is from a little shower singin’ to some light shoe purchasing. But in fact the true interest to the reader is the nature of the story itself: is something actually going to happen one of these days? Or when we picture the future, should we imagine Wilbur thought-ballooning while shopping at various chain stores, forever?

Family Circus, 4/11/18

Generally speaking the circumstances in which you’d eat off a tray like this are that you’re eating dinner in front of the TV, which is literally every child’s fondest wish, so it seems weird that Billy is so outraged here. The prissy face really sells it, though. “Mother, not only are we watching televised entertainment rather than earnestly discussing our day over dinner, but the lack of a table means that there are no arbitrary rules of etiquette to enforce! This is sheer anarchy! Also, I dropped a lot of whatever this green goop is on the rug.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/6/18

The “friend zone” is a dumb concept promulgated by garbage people who think that you can and should be able to get sex from someone if you just subject them to the right sequence of stimuli, like a video game player using a cheat code, and the “punishment” for “losing” is a meaningful friendship. Thus, people who think it’s a useful idea generally use the phrase to mean the situation where you’ve tried and failed to woo a lady and have ended up friends with her instead. That’s … not at all what you’re talking about, Mopey Pete! The word you want for when you’ve been romantically involved with someone for seven-plus months and then suddenly aren’t is “dumped.”

Crankshaft, 4/6/18

John Henry is of course a folk hero who won a contest against a mechanical drill that was going to take his job, only to die of exhaustion in the aftermath, so it seems particularly cruel to use his name as a brand for a line of devices designed to obviate the need for manual laborers. I was somewhat relieved to discover that this isn’t a company name in real life, but it’s extremely well suited to the gloomy Funkyverse.

Gil Thorp, 4/6/18

DON’T LISTEN TO HIM MARTY

THE ANSWER TO YOUR PROBLEMS IS AT THE BOTTOM OF ONE OF THESE GLASSES

YOU’VE JUST GOT TO KEEP LOOKING FOR IT UNTIL YOU FIND THE RIGHT ONE

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/3/18

I haven’t really been checking in with the story of Justin who can’t stop puking up his food and yet is remarkably reluctant to seek medical attention for what’s obviously a fairly serious condition. The most anyone’s been able to get out of him (other than the vomit) is that he doesn’t like getting hit in the knee with a reflex hammer, but today we learn that since he was a little boy his mother has been filling his head with horror stories about his ancestor who died from an operation, and whom neither she nor Justin ever met. We also learn that, in addition to not realizing that surgery is safer now than it was during the Harding Administration, she also doesn’t know that morticians are happy to give your loved one a post-mortem haircut.

Gil Thorp, 4/3/18

“Loses his mind” may be putting it kind of strongly, but I do like the engineer’s fairly extreme reaction to a little mild on-air cussing. Presumably he swept his coffee mug aside while flailing wildly in the immediate aftermath of the incident, and has taken his headphones off so he doesn’t have to listen to further swear words from Marty, or perhaps so he doesn’t have to listen to his gentle sobbing.

Mark Trail, 4/3/18

“The way we’re hunting down this rhino reminds me of the days when Jim and I were on that television show, To Catch A Predator! Only this time the ‘predator’ metaphor doesn’t reflect quite so badly on us!”

Mary Worth, 4/3/18

I don’t know what’s sadder: that Dawn is truly enjoying herself in Florence only now, as massive flooding driven by catastrophic climate change puts even hilly Tuscany underwater, or that Wilbur has to cruelly watch ads for shampoo that feature long, lustrous manes of hair while he’s trying to eat.