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Funky Winkerbean, 5/21/16

When I was in DC for my book tour last month, at one point I found myself downtown-ish with time to kill, so I looked up the nearest Starbucks with the intention of parking myself there and soaking up the free wi-fi. It quickly became clear that I had in fact selected the Starbucks closest to the White House, and had to walk right in front of the White House to get there! Anyway, here’s some news if, like me, you haven’t been in that part of town since the mid-’00s: they’ve totally rebuilt Pennsylvania Avenue in that section as a very pleasant pedestrian mall, and you can actually get quite close to the White House now, at least as close as you could get in the ’80s when I was a kid, if not closer. Far be it for me to imply that Funky Winkerbean didn’t do the research here, so I’m instead going to assume that Toque Boy is just being extremely sarcastic, and Les’s look of crushing self-loathing at having just been publicly owned by one of his students is the real punchline.

Gil Thorp, 5/21/16

Hey, so, it looks like the girls softball team has been forced to play their games wearing their basketball uniforms! Clearly better funding is in order, by which I mean both better funding for high school athletic departments so that athletes can wear sport-appropriate uniforms and also better funding for comics so artists don’t just say “Enh fuck it” and drop in some clip art from three months earlier into their strips.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/21/16

Ha ha, it’s funny because the Smiths are so poor that not having the kids at home means they won’t go hungry for once!

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Mary Worth, 5/16/16

You’d think you that once you’ve graduated from high school and gone to college, you’re done with being bullied, you know? But nope, poor Dawn is just over here relaxing under a tree, probably texting fun memes back and forth with her dad or something, and then BAM! Up comes the three meanest girls at UC Santa Royale, ready to tear Dawn to pieces (emotionally). And while the “PC police” would have you believe that bullying is never justified, I think that when you’re a college-age young woman and you try to date your professor and he’s this dude, with this mustache, a certain amount of social opprobrium is fully justified.

Gil Thorp, 5/16/16

Ah, a solid Gil Thorp trope we haven’t seen in a while: “One of the Mudlarks is completely insufferable and everyone hates him but he gets redeemed, somehow.” They did with Andrew Gregory, who was a terrible braggart but then it turned out his parents had abandoned him and his siblings and Marty Moon had to pretend to be his dad so Social Services didn’t put them in a foster home. Anyway, Barry “Darth” Bader, not anywhere emo enough to be graced by the more up-to-date “Kylo” nickname, is really going to test our ability to eventually feel affection, or at least a frisson of empathy, for him.

Judge Parker, 5/16/16

Haha, Abbey has to get back to … what, exactly? Her non-job? Her sham marriage? Her horse farm, where all the actual horse farming is carried out by her absurdly uniformed underlings? I mean, I get it; she’s already put in about twice as much time and energy today on Neddy’s dumb factory and Rocky and Godiva’s sexual banter as I’d want to over the course of my entire life. The real power move is going to be if she just refuses to look up from her phone as she strolls away.

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Gil Thorp, 5/11/16

I think we’re finally figuring out the theme this spring’s Gil Thorp storyline, everybody. The Baders père et fil are going to learn the value of teamwork. For instance, it’s unseemly to get too excited about your individual performance in a game where your team got shellacked. Similarly, all of us on the public roads are on a team together, and a good way to let your team down is to get real drunk and swerve all over the road. Anyway, get used to talking to your dad through some kind of barrier, kid!

Marvin, 5/11/16

I have to imagine that one of the most satisfying things about being a daily cartoonist is your ability to get your revenge on anyone, at any time, as long as that time is the six-to-eight week publishing lead time after the thing you want revenge for has happened. “Oh, there’s going to be a comic about this. Maybe multiple comics,” you think, silently, in your mind, as you glare at the person you’re mad at. “You will be depicted in an extremely unflattering light!” The person never finds out because literally nobody reads the comics anymore, but you know. You know.