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Gil Thorp, 4/12/18

Hey, guys, remember Aaron Aagard, the hero of last year’s basketball season storyline, who was inconsistent not because he was on drugs but because his mom was, and then he ended up living in a teammate’s basement? Well, he’s playing on the team again this year, it seems. I guess we’ll never know the details, since all media coverage of the Mudlarks has now ceased, which should hopefully break the spell the various high school teams have over Milford in short order and everyone else will get hobbies and Coach Thorp’s budget will get reassigned to the music department and Coach Kaz will have to mortgage his dojo.

Mark Trail, 4/12/18

Based on Mark’s grim facial expression in the final panel, I assume he knows that Jim was crushed to death under the jeep, and is going to allow Marlin to mourn in private. If there’s one thing Mark doesn’t like being around, it’s emotions.

Mary Worth, 4/12/18

I’m not sure what sort of stuff Rick’s sells, exactly, but I’m certainly hoping that Iris and Zak are here to buy, say, a hammock, talking loudly all through their shopping experience about how it’ll easily be converted into a makeshift sex swing.

Crankshaft, 4/12/18

Fun fact: True Crime Addict is a real book, and James Renner is a real person who’s been rendered here relatively faithfully, presumably because he owes someone a terrible debt, or perhaps because he lost a contest.

Spider-Man, 4/12/18

That quote is from the Bible, so in attributing the inerrant word of YHWH to some unspecified “they,” JJJ is proving himself a darn polytheist on top of everything else!

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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