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Heathcliff, 8/12/14

Here’s an amazing fact that maybe you’re smarter than me and it’s not news to you but maybe it will blow your mind as much as it did mine — I think maybe Ryan North’s Twitter feed is where I heard it but I’m not 100% sure. But, anyway: have you ever noticed that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty rhyme does it mention that Humpty Dumpty is an enormous man-egg? It’s true! It’s not clear from the rhyme’s history whether he was always meant to be an egg — perhaps it was originally a riddle with his eggish nature as the answer as to why he couldn’t be reassembled. Wikipedia says that “the rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.” Humpty-as-egg is such a well-known bit of pop culture, in fact, that Heathcliff and his friends have named their new eggcore band “Dumpty,” which nicely fits into the narrow space between whimsically surreal and thuddingly stupid where Heathcliff has found its sweet spot.

Better Half, 8/12/14

Stanley and Harriet yearn for the days when healthy electronic pizza will be a thing. Until then, they’ll just keep on eating enormous blobs of chocolate-chip cookie dough, I guess.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/12/14

Les has finally figured out that probably nobody wants to see a movie of Lisa’s Story and definitely nobody wants to see a comic version of the story of how Lisa’s Story got made into a movie, so he’s now kicked us into a mildly more interesting fantasy sequence instead.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/10/14

Good news, everyone! Despite the fact that Les holds everyone involved in the lowbrow and extremely lucrative (for him) process of turning Lisa’s Story into a cable movie in the deepest contempt, he’s still been able to give everyone little pick-me-ups and sage advice, like “it’s really all about acting,” so I think everything’s going to be OK. The best line here is clearly “Not in a weird way or anything,” because the best way to make sure an attractive actress knows you’ve been masturbating to the pictures on her website is to blurt out, without prompting, “NOT IN A WEIRD WAY OR ANYTHING” after telling her you’ve been looking at her website.

Crock, 8/10/14

Jules Schmeese is definitely one of the more hapless of the damned souls who inhabit Crock, always on the verge of being executed but never actually achieving the sweet release of death. Today we learn that not only is he somehow suspended in his final moments of mortal terror forever, but that, like Franz Kafka’s Josef K., he is not even permitted to know what he has done to merit his punishment.

Hagar the Horrible, 8/10/14

We already know that Hagar looks forward to the day when he will enter Valhalla. Apparently he’s concerned that his entourage in the afterlife won’t be adequate for his status, because he’s planning on taking his entire crew with him whether they want to go or not.

Heathcliff, 8/10/14

Heathcliff killed a shark with a fork, and now he’s going to eat it! That’s the joke, I think?

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Heathcliff, 8/4/14

Let me start this long post about Heathcliff on a long-running blog about comic strips that I own and write by saying that I’m not crazy, OK? Obviously I know that the anthropomorphized animals in strips like this don’t act like their real-world counterparts. Heathcliff and his skunk associate, for instance, walk on their hind legs and contemplate exchanging money for manufactured goods. But the whole point, it seems to me, of using a very specific type of animal like a skunk in a gag is to exploit its skunk-nature for comic effect. And, you guys: the deal with skunks is not that they “smell bad”, in some generalized, shame-inducing way; it’s that they can spray foul-smelling fluid out of a special gland near their anus at attackers. Right? I mean if you just want an animal that smells bad in ways that gross everyone out, why not just have a really dirty cat? Or maybe … maybe … the point is not that the skunk actually smells bad, but that everyone is nervous around him, for smell reasons, and so his offer to buy all the deodorant is really performative, for Heathcliff’s benefit, so the word spreads that he knows about your odor-related concerns and it’s under control, OK? Honestly, I’d be willing to forgive a lot if some future Heathcliff depicted the skunk-character ostentatiously rubbing deodorant all around his anal region and aggressively shouting “ARE YOU HAPPY? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?” at nobody in particular.

Crankshaft, 8/4/14

Oh, hey, it’s a new plotline in Crankshaft, and here, in the very first panel, you can see a brief glimmer of happiness! I think Pam’s supposed to be smiling? But by panel three, she’s already managed, with zero input from anyone else, to talk herself into Funkyverse-typical heavy-lidded depression. Not … the food truck rodeo! I dunno, I think of a gathering of food trucks in a public space when the weather’s nice to be a fun way to spend lunch, but I’m sure we’ll find out what’s wrong with it soon enough.