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Gil Thorp, 8/29/11

Call it foolish optimism if you must, but despite years of decidedly non-wacky Gil Thorp plots, my heart races a bit as each new season dawns, as I anticipate some glorious insanity to come. If I’m interpreting the first two panels correctly, I may be in luck: it appears that a pair of space aliens have arrived in Milford, determined to infiltrate the hu-man society via the high school athletics activity that seems so important to the Earth dwellers. These beings have chosen the name “Abro,” which is almost but not quite like one that humans would use. “Off to the junior high school?” asks the mother-unit, her use of definite articles just a smidge off. “Come back before the cows come home!” she adds, her use of folksy sayings significantly wider from the mark. “What cows?” asks her “son” “Brody,” who’s too busy fishing his football from the Plaything Materializer to grapple with the niceties of the locals’ English.

Meanwhile (or as the narration box would have it, “while”) at Gil’s, some poor kid who’s come looking for advice and mentorship has worn out his welcome. “Of course you have to go, Mark. Stop apologizing! Seriously, just get the fuck out.”

Slylock Fox, 8/29/11

And the best candidate for the long undersea mission is … the panda? Because he doesn’t mind loneliness? How about, oh, I don’t know, the damn fish? The Ocean Research Institute could save an awful lot of money on supplies if it hired a researcher who doesn’t require a separate oxygen tank. “Please, pick me!” the fish begs with its eyes. “Or at least throw me back in the water! For the love of God, I’m suffocating out here!”

Crankshaft, 8/29/11

As predicted, “Special Collectors Edition Crankshaft: Cayla’s Origin Revealed!” has in fact revealed the origin of Cayla’s baffling attraction to Les: She accidentally killed someone during a softball game, and, wracked by guilt as a result, came to believe that she doesn’t deserve any kind of happiness in life.

Narration box from Judge Parker, 8/29/11

This is pretty much the most believable narration box in a soap opera strip that I’ve seen. I too would be surprised to hear that someone likes the idea of buying a motor home!

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Crankshaft, 8/23/11

One aspect of the Funkyverse that is correctly only dwelled upon by a limited number of comics obsessives involves the question of intra-universe chronological continuity: what happened to Crankshaft when Funky Winkerbean jumped forward 10 years? I say “correctly” because really the timelines of all non-Doonesbury non-FBOFW comics, which generally run for years and years and yet the characters never get any older, is totally mucked up, so really, there’s no point in dwelling on it. The fact that the Funkyverse strips are permitted by a morally bankrupt comics industry and a loving God to continue spreading soul-killing gloom via the last few remaining newspapers is a Funkyverse dilemma that is incorrectly only dwelled upon by a limited number of comics obsessives, but that’s neither here nor there.

ANYWAY, for those of you who care, today’s Crankshaft confirms what we’ve all suspected, which is that Crankshaft’s universe never got time-jumped, and so the action in his strip is taking place about a decade before the current mopery in Funky Winkerbean. Here we see future Les romance victim Cayla, still sporting an Afro and still probably capable of experiencing joy. What event in the next decade will reduce her to the straight-haired, Les-proposal-accepting broken shell of a human that she is to become? Will it be because of something terrible Crankshaft is about to say to her this week? Yes, let’s go with that, it seems like a pretty safe assumption.

Spider-Man, 8/23/11

Another thing that’s only of interest to comics obsessives: changes in comics lettering style. More often than not this indicates that one of the dwindling number of holdouts who still hand-letter their strips have finally given up and start using a computer font. You can spend a bit of money and get a font based on your own handwriting that is almost indistinguishable from it, or you can make like Spider-Man and use the font that’s one step up from Comic Sans. Today our cyberletterer clearly was having so much fun playing with italics and bolded italics that they neglected that other great digital advance, the spellchecker, which probably would have helpfully noted that “copsin” is not a word in standard English.

Archie, 8/23/11

I actually completely love the middle two panels of this strip; Archie and Reggie’s mirrored angry faces together make a minor pop art masterpiece. The same could not be said for the hideous shirt that’s the source of the disagreement, which lends the whole dispute a certain air of absurdity.

Gil Thorp, 8/23/11

Guys, if you don’t find Kenny’s “‘Course not, mom. You were bombed!” response to his weeping, emotionally shattered mother hilarious, then I’m not sure if we can be friends anymore.

Marvin, 8/23/11

At last, the strategy behind Marvin’s constantly filthiness is revealed! By establishing an ever-expanding sphere of poop-stench centered on his person, he is marking his personal space.

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Gil Thorp, 8/18/11

So, just as Kenny helped Molly with her golf swing by filming her so she could see the problems with her technique, so too will he help his mother by showing her detailed footage of her drunken swoons. I like it! Because so far, Kenny’s mom’s alcohol problem has been strictly amateur hour. “See, mom, look at this … you made it all the way to the couch before you passed out, and you even set the wine glass down on the end table before you lost consciousness. If you had fallen just a few steps earlier, you could have spent the night on the carpet surrounded by broken glass; pick a red instead of a white, and you’d even have a permanent stain on the rug for which you’d have to come up with an embarrassingly transparent excuse. And here, in this video, you’re semi-conscious and clinging to the toilet bowl as you puke up all that merlot. If you had some guts, you’d have have just konked out the bathroom floor on your back, upping your chances of choking on your own sick. Are you committed to this drunken lifestyle or not?”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/18/11

Oh my God, I really thought at this little soliloquy, in which over the course of the last few days Les has described the good times he had in this park, like when he took summer strolls with Lisa, but also the bad times, like when Lisa told him she was date-rape-pregnant, or when she found some cancerous lumps, couldn’t get more insulting to Cayla, but then … this happened, holy crap. Les’s smug eyebrow-waggle is definitely the best part, if by “best” you mean “most urgently demanding a punch in the face.”