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Funky Winkerbean, 4/23/21

When I wrote about the many different strategies comic strip artists were taking to address (or not) the coronavirus pandemic, one I definitely didn’t have on my bingo card was “ignore it while it was happening, and then, as it seemed to be on its way out, pretend that it had been happening all along, and reminiscing about what it was like for your characters.” Anyway, today we, and Funky’s hapless AA meeting, learn that Montoni’s was apparently shut down (though presumably not for long, as pizza is a notoriously delivery-friendly food format?) and that Montoni’s also has a liquor license, and that Funky was full of dark thoughts of boozing it up with his imagined version of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, but then remembered “Oh, wait, drinking is bad for me” and didn’t. Anyway, good for him for staying sober in trying circumstances, but too bad for these poor alcoholics that they have to listen to Funky’s loopiest, most rambling monologue since he spent a day muttering to nobody about how Elvis died on the toilet.

Gil Thorp, 4/23/21

Ahh, it’s that beautiful moment in any Gil Thorp storyline, the one where we finally begin to see how all the different characters we’ve been frenetically switching back and forth from kind of relate to each other. Turns out Zane Clark hasn’t been around much because his parents lost their jobs and his family went into a financial spiral and he has a hard time getting to school events because he works nights to help out, and his girlfriend Katy is the daughter of Abel Brito, who found out that tax-funded community services exist a couple weeks ago and is still absolutely furious about it, apparently. How is he going to deal with his daughter dating a [dramatic music sting] poor person? Very excited to find out!

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Marvin, 4/9/21

Since the earliest days of machines that seemed like they could think like human beings, human beings have worried about being replaced by their inventions. Obviously I have as strong an instinct for self-preservation as the next flesh-unit, but I have to say sometimes you get hints of the better, cleaner future that might come after the robots rise up to destroy us. After all, if the horrible shitting babies of Marvin would also be replaced in the process of this technological revolution, would it really be so bad? Presumably the machines would spend a few milliseconds dispassionately sortiing through humanity’s aggregated cultural output, and in that process would very quickly decide to purge entire 40+ year run of Marvin from their memory banks forever. Computers make very efficient use of energy and their only waste product is radiated heat, so none of the poop jokes are going to make any sense to them.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/9/21

“I certainly hope you weren’t daydreaming about things being better or different than they are now! No daughter of mine will waste her time indulging in whimsy, or aspirational counterfactuals.”

Gil Thorp, 4/9/21

Ahh, the spring is progressing and we’re getting a healthy dose of … sports drama! [five seconds later] We regret to inform you that the sports drama has been quickly and painlessly resolved. Sorry, the only kind of drama Gil Thorp has time for now is library drama. Books! Funding fights! Board meetings! Get into it!

Family Circus, 4/9/21

Thel is absolutely right to look panicked. Has Dolly made a friend who doesn’t view her own body as a source of constant shame, and uses terms more specific than “down there” for its various sinful parts? Looks like it’s time to make the fence around the Keane Kompound taller and more opaque!

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Daddy Daze, 4/7/21

A thing that irritates me and probably nobody else in storytelling is when the protagonist has to solve some central mystery and for most of the book/TV show/movie/whatever they’re the point-of-view character, with the audience learning new information when and how the protagonist learns it, but suddenly and abruptly we get a shift in perspective and see a scene that reveals vital information that the protagonist isn’t privy to! I complained about this online years ago in regards to North By Northwest, and I’ve noticed it recently in A Simple Favor and The Flight Attendant — all of which I enjoyed, to be clear, but I still find this specific aspect annoying!

Anyway, this isn’t quite the same thing, but to the extent that I enjoy the comic strip Daddy Daze, I enjoy it in terms of its own central mystery: do the Daddy Daze daddy and the Daddy Daze baby truly communicate in a secret language of bas, or is the daddy just in the throes of late-stage single parenting psychosis? Frankly, a strip in which the baby apparently successfully holds a conversation with his grandmother undermines that ambiguity. On the other hand, it’s possible that the baby just mashed his finger on the phone and babbled nonsense at it, and the daddy has once again made up an elaborate narrative to make sense out of this moment and his life that includes no interaction with adults for days at a time. His mother is none the wiser that any of this is going on in this scenario, and is no doubt better off for it.

Gil Thorp, 4/7/21

Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp, a guy had to go to the public library to use their computers, and had the same thought we all do whenever we go to a public library, which is “this library has too much money!” Words cannot describe how much more excited I am about a library drama storyline in Gil Thorp than a storyline about, like, sports, which no doubt tells you exactly what I think of Abel Brito’s dumb opinions.