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Phantom, 3/22/14

Oh hey it’s time for Uncle Lumpy Reads Comics that Even Josh Won’t Read, So Nobody Has To Except for Poor Sad Me, a regular feature. Spunky reporter Lara Bell recruited lowlife adventurer Rick Grubber to take her into the Deep Woods, where they were set upon by the Bandar and brought to the Phantom at his Skull Cave. Phantom gave Lara an interminable tour of his Treasure Rooms, interspersed with braggy vignettes illustrating his complete awesomeness and coy little asides to Guran about how they were going to amnesiate Rick and Lara using Powerful Bandar Medicine®.

So Lara got all “You’re so hot, let us wed!” but the Phantom was like “Nuh uh I’m all married ‘n’ stuff”, and that night Grubber tried to steal stuff but it wasn’t even the right stuff and [WHOOSH!] the bush pilot went back to Bangalla and surrendered to the Jungle Patrol, and the mysterious aeronaut reappeared in his balloon to thank the Phantom for saving his descendants.

I feel much better, somehow.

Dennis the Menace, 3/22/14

Oh, Dennis – I knew Buckaroo Banzai. Buckaroo Banzai was a friend of mine. And you, kid, are no Buckaroo Banzai.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/22/14

Oh look – wordplay. “I wasn’t making a considerate comment about my father’s condition. I was making a commonplace observation about my own reaction to it. Um, ha ha, see?”

Judge Parker, 3/22/14

Ooh, we’re in the lair of the Hat Guys, Flico and Flaco. Flico jerked on the stick and spilled his drone upon the ground, so now he and Flaco will have to make contact up close and personal at the party tonight. They’ll probably run into Randy, who will chat them up for hours waiting in vain for his bribe.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/22/14

If you won’t listen to your own daughter, Rex, your readers would like a word with you.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Judge Parker, 3/20/14

The Bowers/Abbotts père et fille share a private moment and a little shop talk. The thought of simply declaring her Dad’s gift and paying import duties and taxes on it never crossed April’s mind. “Can money even move in that direction — ‘away’?”, she muses. Somehow it doesn’t seem physically possible!

Welcome to the family, girlfriend – a true Parker at last!

Or maybe not? Long-running strips need to be really careful about irrevocable steps like marriages, graduations, and deaths. They upset a strip’s balance, limiting the ways characters can contribute. And if there’s one constant in Judge Parker over the last fifty years, it’s that Randy Parker is a clueless, self-satisfied tool, perpetually used and discarded by women. This principle is so much a part of the strip’s bedrock that even on the eve of his wedding, I can’t believe they’ll go through with it. I fully expect that April will die in a hail of gunfire or (more likely) disappear into the jungle at the last possible moment. Anyway, stay tuned — we’ll know in mere months!

Luann, 3/20/14

That said, what on earth is going on in Luann? Everybody’s been moving through middle-school and high school over the strip’s 29 years, and now they’re seniors announcing college plans for the fall. Ethnic ciphers Rosa and Delta are off to Yale and Howard, most of the cast to nearby “Moony Uni” (OK sure, some kind of Unification Church outfit, I guess), and Luann to the local Community College.

Is Luann really just six months away from becoming a “college hijinks” strip, or a soaper about declining academic standards and unsustainable student debt? Is inert, self-absorbed, academically dishonest Luann even remotely plausible as a college student? All these questions will have to wait, because: OMG YOU GUYS PROM!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/20/14

Yet another newspaper drops Herb and Jamaal, and Herb blames his son for it.

Spider-Man, 3/20/14

“I was going to save those men — but their plight has flushed Spider-Man out of hiding! Now they can just die for all I care, for putting that stink on my beloved city!”

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— Uncle Lumpy

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Judge Parker, 3/16/14

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable are all the uses of this world? Just ask Judge Emeritus Alan Parker! In the years since he returned to his strip, we’ve heard of the growing marital discontent he shares with his wife. He told us he feels old and useless, and we’ve watched helplessly as his compulsive risk-taking escalated from recreational B.A.S.E. jumping to jungle snake-handling.

The story ends, as all such tales must, atop a forbidden cliff in the Mexican jungle with the frenzied Judge turning his wife out to “rock the joystick” of some buzzing monstrosity in the hopes that something — anything — will let him feel again. Oh Judge, Judge — in all those years on the bench, did no one tell you about heroin?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/16/14

“All right, Becka, I suppose it won’t hurt to go over this again. As we’ve discussed, Dr. Morgan and I allow you to banter with us on a first-name basis because it suits our image of ourselves as friendly, egalitarian people. This is our little indulgence, Becka, not yours — and there is a line. Now, when I tell you that Paula John is an incompetent emotional wreck, that is not an invitation for you to defend her, or spew vicious gossip about the Dean — my peer — from below stairs or wherever it is you and your little friends hang out. Especially when you’re not meeting your most elementary responsibilities around the clinic. Well then, I hope you’ve enjoyed our little talk. Now get me those results. And let’s go back to calling me ‘Ma’am’ for now, shall we? There’s a good girl.”

Spider-Man, 3/16/14

Mary Jane manipulates her doofus husband without looking up from her crossword: “Hey, Tiger, what’s a six-letter word for ‘eight-legged parasite’?”

Zits, 3/16/14

This strip finally makes sense to me: Connie is Princess Leia, and Jeremy is Jabba the Hutt.

— Uncle Lumpy