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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.

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Gil Thorp, 4/2/18

Sorry, Marty: while all-high-school-sports radio is more than willing to overlook a little light racism, they cannot abide the ultimate sin in broadcasting, which is accidentally blurting out swear words on the air. Anyway, today’s strip contains one of the greatest things any Gil Thorp can present to us, which is a panel of Marty Moon looking desperately unhappy as he realizes that he is once again the cause of every major disaster in his own life. This is even better than the time he quietly wept in his car after being golf-grifted by a Ben Franklin lookalike, because you can get a much better look at his face. His crumpled, sad, devastated face.

Judge Parker, 4/2/18

Wow, for a strip that has traditionally moved at about the speed of plate tectonics, Judge Parker has leapt from Randy doing some extremely mild flirting to Randy doing some smug and blatantly post-coital smirking in lightning time! Anyway, the important thing is that unlike certain soap opera hunks we could mention, Randy has nipples, thank you very much.

Blondie, 4/2/18

I’ve been a daily reader of Blondie for decades and … I’m pretty much wholly unaware of Alexander’s sports career? I mean, he sometimes wears a letterman jacket but I just assumed that was an ossified visual signifier letting us know he’s in high school rather than some specific reference to his varsity status. The sad truth is that Blondie spends infinitely more time dwelling on Dagwood’s relationship with various fast-food drive through speakerphones than it does on his relationship with his own son — which means that by prompting this chain of thought, today’s strip is really just reaffirming its own thesis, so, well played, Blondie.

The Lockhorns, 4/2/18

Sorry, Loretta, take it from a guy who singularly failed to cash in when he had the chance: the blog-to-book deal hasn’t really been a thing since, like, the mid-late ’00s.

Beetle Bailey, 4/2/18

Beetle definitely murdered someone with that hammer, right?