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Shoe, 4/30/25

I dunno, the genuinely freaked out expression on this guy’s face, plus the fact that he’s wearing makeshift combat gear, including an outdated helmet, right here in Roz’s restaurant seems less “Ha ha, this dummy joined the ARMY and he doesn’t know what the army is even FOR” so much as “the front lines have collapsed, the enemy is pushing towards Treetops at a rapid pace, the desk-job soldiers who barely remember basic training are allowed one last meal before being rushed into a last-ditch defense with inadequate gear,” so I really wouldn’t look so smug if I were the Perfesser.

Alice, 4/30/25

Oh, sorry, I realize I haven’t been keeping you up to date on what Alice has been up to. What she’s been up to is apparently yelling at her mother’s (?) grave, which has been carved at her mother’s request to indicate that she’d rather be dead than be around listening to Alice.

Heathcliff, 4/30/25

Hmm, I endorsed it when Heathcliff began to impose his will on others by forcing them to dress in uniforms that matched his own fur patterns. But donning such a uniform himself, over his fur? That just seems weird. Not sure I approve. I guess you can’t argue with results, but still.

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Daddy Daze, 4/28/25

One of my favorite little linguistic quirks is the existence of true homonyms: when two separate words with different meanings and different origins evolve in a language until they happen to be pronounced and spelled the same way. That’s what’s going on here with the word funk, or more accurately the two words funk(s): the “be in a bad mood” word derives from a Scottish and Northern English word of uncertain but possibly Flemish origin that means “become afraid,” whereas the “music to put you in good mood” word derives in slang from the sense (still in use today) of a funk as a bad smell, which in turn comes to English via French from the Latin verb for putting off smoke, fumigare. This is the sort of information I would convey to my baby, if I lived alone with my baby and had very little contact with the outside world and it drove me to a state of madness in which I believed that my baby’s incoherent babbling noises constituted meaningful attempts to communicate that only I could understand.

Andy Capp, 4/28/25

Nice try, Andy Capp. You think you can slip this kind of blatant falsehood past us because we’re dumb Americans who don’t know any better? We may be dumb but we do have access to Wikipedia, which informs us that the parliamentary constituency of Runcorn and Helsby has been vacant for nearly six weeks now. Sadly, the by-election to fill the seat is this Thursday, so it’s too late for Andy to throw his iconic hat into the ring. The sitting MP resigned because he got caught on camera repeatedly punching a man in the street, so it sounds like the locals would’ve been open to Andy’s whole vibe, frankly.

Crankshaft, 4/28/25

Remember “the burnings,” the apocalyptic event in the near-future of the Funkyverse that wiped out most printed literature? Well, it turns out Lilian invented them, as part of her cozy mystery series. And yet we know that her building-code-violating above-the-garage store survived them, which certainly is interesting in light of this new revelation, although we can at least take solace in the fact that she’ll eventually be replaced by a robot.

Heathcliff, 4/28/25

Heathcliff is finally starting a cult! And, you know what, good for him.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/18/25

The chronology of this Rex Morgan storyline flashback has now looped back around to the point where the beat cop who’s been summoned to deal with this inconvenient corpse is like, “Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice if I could successfully pin this on literally the first person I talk to, even if it is the guy who called it in to begin with,” and The Stalker Strangler: The Man Who Only Strangles Stalkers doesn’t like what he’s hearing. This was probably his first strangle, and he’s only now coming face-to-face with the dilemma of performing high-profile acts of righteous but legally unsanctioned vengeance: on the one hand, you don’t want to get caught, because you want to have more strangling opportunities, but on the other, you put all the work into strangling a stalker and then some other guy is going to get credit for it? Doesn’t seem fair, really.

Heathcliff, 4/18/25

I refer to our cats, who are both well into cat middle age, as “babies,” but that’s because they are not bipedal sapient comic strip cats but rather real-life cats who, like human babies, are tiny and cuddly and pretty stupid. The question of “is Heathcliff an adult” is complex, but the fact that he has a steady girlfriend and needs ED drugs in order to have sex with her is a good sign that he should be thought of as one, and thus today’s strip, in which his human companions have dressed him as a baby, taken him in an old-timey pram to the city dump and its vast open field piled high with undifferentiated brownish slurry, and declared that “it’s baby’s feeding time” while he eagerly licks his lips, is what we in the biz call “real sicko shit.”

Crankshaft, 4/18/25

Not much to say here about yet another Crankshaft word-mangling bit, though I do enjoy learning that Ed finds the daily grind of his existence disappointing. Mostly I want to point out the very purposeful way the waitress is striding away from the gang in panel two, probably because one of them said something really off-putting.