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Crankshaft, 6/28/21

In the United States, things are increasingly getting back to their pre-pandemic patterns, at least for now, but the scars on our psyches will take years to heal. For instance, today’s Crankshaft features the main character scowling and furious about how wastefully clean everyone in his family kept their anuses during the corona year, and despite a return to free-flowing TP he clearly still hasn’t gotten over it. Honestly, you sort of get the feeling that he thinks nobody should be wasting or even using toilet paper at any time, so this may not be the best example of my overall point.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/28/21

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but it’s a rare boomer-created strip that actually gets a lot right about its many millennial characters: namely, that at this point they’re by and large normal middle aged adults who are increasingly dumpy-looking and disillusioned, just like everybody else ever when they start hitting their 30s. Do real millennials speak in hashtags? No, no they don’t. I said the strip gets “a lot right,” not everything right.

Hi and Lois, 6/28/21

Speaking of millennials, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly how old Hi and Lois are supposed to be, but since their kids range from in age from teen to infant, I’m going to guess they’re in their late 30s and are thus “geriatric millennials.” Anyway, good news for your non-geriatric millennials: Hi and Lois are still horny! For now, at least.

Blondie, 6/28/21

Anyway, on the note of actually young people, Cookie and Alexander are drawn so closely to the Blondie/Dagwood character models that it can be easy to forget that they’re teenagers. What I’m saying is, I’m hoping Cookie is surreptitiously filming this to upload for her huge audience of TikTok followers who turn to her for self-care tips, and she sets it to some bleep-bloop song I don’t recognize and adds some text like “my dad’s in an EMOTIONALLY ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP with his boss … and that’s the tea, sis.”

Marvin, 6/28/21

The Marvin characters exist beyond generational discoruse, so I don’t actually care how old Jeff or Jenny or their parents are or what generational cohort they’re supposed to be in. Mostly I wanted to show you this strip, which I enjoyed because of Jenny’s sly little smile in the last panel. “Yep, that’s my husband!” she’s thinking. “He’s a real lazy piece of shit.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/20/21

Since Rex Morgan plots move in excruciating slow motion, we’ve all basically been waiting for weeks now for this moment, where best-selling but writers-blocked graphic novelist “Kyle Vidpa” gets Sarah’s epic fan letter (which almost certainly contains extensive drawings and plot suggestions for future Kitty Cop installments) and realizes it’s genius. There are two potential futures here: one is that “Kyle” steals the ideas for the new book his publisher demands, and the other is that he brings in Sarah as a “guest writer” and she achieves riches and universal acclaim. The first route seems unlikely since the story so far has gone out of its way to show that “Kyle” is a nice guy with a sweet wife and doting parents and a good friend in Buck Wise, who is sadly the center of the Rex Morgan, M.D., universe now, while the second starts to get us on the track of “Sarah is a terrifyingly talented and uncanny child-adult” that Terry Beatty amnesia’d his way out of when he took over the strip. Seems like we’ve painted ourselves into a real corner, how will we get out of it? (PREDICTION: It won’t be very interesting.)

Hi and Lois, 6/20/21

Today in “strips that don’t usually make me laugh for the intended reasons but did today” is Hi and Lois. I absolutely love the contrast between how happy Hi looks in the imagined version of this carefully programmed Father’s Day that was clearly designed by a five-person committee and how completely overwhelmed he looks in real life contemplating how exhausting this is going to be.

Panels from The Lockhorns, 6/20/21

Speaking of irony-free praise for comics, the Sunday Lockhorns grab-bag had not one but two bangers today. The first one manages to pull off two gags (Leroy was snoring loudly in church, Leroy is transparently ogling some other woman) without feeling like it’s putting a hat on a hat. The second one is just laser focused on a single, beautiful joke about how Leroy was seriously injured in a car accident.

Six Chix, 6/20/21

Wait, so, is this how matryoshka dolls reproduce? The big doll births a smaller doll inside herself, possibly hollowing herself out in the process, and then that doll, still entirely enclosed by her “mother,” produces a smaller internal doll, and the sequence goes on like that, excruciating birth following excruciating birth? And can we safely assume this is an act of parthenogenesis, with no male doll involved at all? Happy Father’s Day indeed!

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Mary Worth, 6/18/21

Ah, yes, Shauna and Ashlee “ran in the same circles,” definitely a phrase that someone who ran in those circles would use! Also they ran in those circles as teens, which leads me to ask: how old are they supposed to be now? Like, Drew, a successful doctor, has to be in his mid 30s at least, right? But if these ladies’ minds are still dominated by high school drama, they’re probably … a lot younger than that, which adds another data point to how we should think about Drew’s whole romantic deal, I guess! Just rescuing sexy 23-year-old bad girl after sexy 23-year-old bad girl with his love, surely one of them will be different when she’s with him, he’s just got to find her, darn it.

Dustin, 6/18/21

One of the things Dustin gets very wrong about young people is that it seems to believe they spend a lot of time looking for love at fern bars. Because its older characters are married and settled down, we get less of a look at their outside-the-family social life, but apparently the strip believes that older people spend time at bars wearing suits, drinking wine or liquor, and talking shit about young people? Gonna go ahead and say that seems moderately more accurate.

Hi and Lois, 6/18/21

I guess it’s probably for the best that neither Chip nor Mr. Waverling knows that “bucket list” is a list of things you do before you “kick the bucket,” i.e., die, because otherwise the question “Say, old man, got any plans for your few remaining years of life?” might seem kind of rude. Also, based on his cruel yet triumphant expression in the final panel, Mr. Waverling’s “barrel list” involves a barrel of sarin gas and a plan to have his revenge on the world that never appreciated his genius.

Judge Parker, 6/18/21

In its quest to stay relevant for the emerging Zoomer generation, Judge Parker is pivoting from “brooding, wealthy men of action” to “hot sad girls” and, you know what, as near as I can tell that’s a smart move, score one for Judge Parker.