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Hi and Lois, 12/20/14

You know I’m 100% in favor of this strip reviving Thirsty’s traditional characterization as an unpleasant drunk. The Flagstons forcing their middle-school-aged daughter to act as a humorless narc seems like a more modern innovation, but I’ll endorse that too.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/20/14

“Wait, is ‘negative’ the one where you don’t have the thing we tested for or is it the one where the test results are real real bad? You’re gonna be dead within a month, is what I’m trying to say.”

Heathcliff, 12/20/14

Heathcliff has “decorated” the tree in his neighbors’ yard with the severed heads and forepaws of his enemies! MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY

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Hi and Lois, 12/16/14

I’ve never been entirely clear on how we’re supposed to understand the Thurstons’ class position relative to the Flagstons. I mean, they live in identical houses next door to each other and Hi and Thirsty work in the same office but Thirsty and Irma’s lives just always seem a little shabbier, somehow. Anyway, I own a number of thrift-store clothing items and feel that nobody should be ashamed of shopping at such places, so I’m pretty resentful about Lois’s super-smug facial expression in panel two. “Haha, guess you wouldn’t have to wear my grubby hand-me-downs like a poor person if your husband weren’t a drunk, eh, Irma? We’re ostensibly best friends!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/14

Oh my God, you guys, Rex Morgan is finally following through on a plot it set up literally five and a half years ago: Becka’s husband Peter worked with a sexy nutritionist, and Becka was jealous! Her suspicions were apparently fully justified despite Peter’s attempt to convince her otherwise. So see, she never particularly cared about academic independence over at the old community college or whatever the dumb faculty intrigue plot was about; she just had her heart broken! Also, in case you’re not reading along at home, Becka is telling all this to June as a way of explaining why she’s quitting her job at the clinic. A good thing to do when you’re emotionally devastated and restructuring your financial life after separating from your spouse is to give up your main source of income!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/16/14

Let’s say that, years ago you named someone in your comic “Funky Winkerbean,” to denote the happy-go-lucky nature of the character and the strip. It was the ’70s, so maybe drugs were involved. I’m not gonna judge! And then say that over the decades your strip became a charnel house of sadness and your character became a bloated, angry jerk. I think it’d probably be a bad idea to have anyone in the strip refer to him by a nickname like, for instance, “The Funk Man.” It’d just make everyone think about the name more, you know? You don’t want people thinking about the name.

Mark Trail, 12/16/14

“Say, Justin, this gives me an idea: what if you still built your titanium mine near the swamp, but then once you got the titanium out of the ground, you just admired it for a bit and then put it back? That’s a reasonable centrist compromise we could all agree on!”

Momma, 12/16/14

So Santa is an immortal magical being whose lifespan lies outside of time as we know it, and Momma is … roughly forty years younger than him? Sounds about right.

Heathcliff, 12/16/14

I like that, even in the iconography of his terrifying cult of personality, Heathcliff looks pretty bored.

Six Chix, 12/16/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because her mother died from melting, and they’re never going to hear from her again!

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Shoe, 12/11/14

A cool thing about having a daily comic strip is that you can use it to air some very specific gripes you might have that arise from your personal life! I mean, if it were me and I was taking on Geico, I’d probably go with “Why does Geico have so many mascots, like there’s the gecko and the caveman and the pig and the talking paintings and the two guys with ukeleles and I think also there’s a stack of money with googly eyes?” But, you know, “I resent the application of actuarial science to me in particular” could work too!

Funky Winkerbean, 12/11/14

I know it seems weird, but there are probably some people who only read Funky Winkerbean and not its sister strip, Crankshaft, or vice versa. These people are spared the useless mental exercise of trying to figure out how the timelines of the two Funkyverse strips now line up, as are 99 percent of the people who read both and still only have the vaguest idea that they’re connected. But even if you forgot/don’t care, Funky Winkerbean has decided that its readers are starved for delightful Crankshaft-related content, and are giving us a charming flashback to the Funkypast/Crankpresent, in which the ’Shaft deals with an obviously emotionally vulnerable little girl with his classic lack of tact. I don’t was to cast aspersions on anyone’s parenting, but it sure looks like this child came to talk to a pizza-parlor Santa with neither her father nor her mother with her, so her family situation is probably pretty dire.

Crankshaft, 12/11/14

Meanwhile, over in Actual Crankshaft, we learn that in the Funkyverse you never ask an innocuous question because you might get a super depressing answer.

Phantom, 12/11/14

Hey, what’s happening over in the “Amnesiac Phantom Joins The Jungle Patrol” plotline, guys? Well, the Jungle Patrol’s colonel decided to test his theory that “John X” was secretly a criminal by locking him in a holding cell with a bunch of criminals, and then our hero brutally beat them into unconsciousness. Now he’s going to be taking down to the infirmary by a leering, sexually aggressive medic. Based on the conduct of one of the country’s main law enforcement bodies, I may have to retract my assessment of Bangalla as a successful post-colonial democracy, guys.

Mary Worth, 12/11/14

Hanna and Sean are so crazed with lust for each other that they’re finding erotic inspiration in anything, even Mary’s cooking. I honestly am rooting for them to start going at it right here on the dining room table, if only to take Mary to levels of scandalization we never would’ve thought possible.

Hi and Lois, 12/11/14

“Chemicals!” shouts Ditto. “The touch of water is anathema to me! Bathe me in a cleansing tetrachloroethylene fire!”

Six Chix, 12/11/14

Hey, everyone, here’s today’s Six Chix! It is 100% grim as shit.