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Funky Winkerbean, 1/7/09

I have absolutely no idea why Becky the One-Armed Band Director looks so horrified in panel two when she thinks that Band Director Emeritus Harry Dinkle is about to launch into an impromptu lesson on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. If one of my high school band practices had been interrupted by an old man rambling away on the subject (“Let me tell you the most important thing my CO told me before we hit the beach at Normandy: For God’s sake, put a rubber on it! That’s how I managed to screw my way through every French cathouse in every town we liberated without my pecker falling off!”), it would have been the best band practice ever; certainly it would have been a more useful and relevant use of our time than attempting to master yet another Andrew Lloyd Weber medley. I can only assume that, as a Funky Winkerbean authority figure, Becky is required to supervise a certain amount of misery in her charges; she’s afraid that Harry is going to head off that chlamydia epidemic that’s raging nicely through the woodwinds, along with a couple of unplanned pregnancies that she’s counting on in percussion.

Judge Parker, 1/7/09

It appears that Heidi the sexy, trigger-happy cop is going to make a final attempt on Sam’s bemused, detached charms, possibly in one of Phoenix Sky Harbor’s parking garages. You know, I’ve finally figured out what Judge Parker’s ladies-love-Sam plots remind me of: the classic Billy Wilder film The Seven Year Itch, in which the protagonist, left alone in his sweltering Manhattan apartment as his wife and son head to the country on vacation, entertains all manner of sexual fantasies about his comely neighbor Marilyn Monroe and other women — almost all of which involve him coldly rejecting them as they fling themselves at him. I remember thinking when I saw it that it was unspeakably perverse, but Sam is so dull that he sucks all the thrill out of it.

Slylock Fox, 1/7/09

4) If you see a supposed surgeon advancing on you in full clown makeup, I don’t care how sick you are, get the hell out of that hospital now. Answer: True, true, for the love of God, kid, run!

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Blondie, 1/3/09

Ah yes, “this” — by which we are surely meant to understand the first week of January — truly is everyone’s very favorite time of year! What with the lingering resentment towards one’s family after too many hours spent in close quarters with them, the need to box up all the Christmas decorations and figure out how on earth to dispose of the tree, the grim prospect of returning to work or school after an extended absence, the arrival of the first round of credit card bills with holiday gift purchases on them, the radical diets undertaken after the horrifying results from the first venture onto the scale in weeks … why, there’s just nothing not to like about it! That the Bumsteads have time for parties and get-togethers in the midst of all this is a tribute to their sandwich and/or meth-fueled stamina.

You know, it’s almost as if this strip, published on the first day of the NFL playoffs, were originally written when pro football’s regular season was shorter and the playoffs really did coincide with the holiday season. The last year that was the case was 1982, when the strip was a mere 52 years old. But the thought that Blondie might just be repackaging strips written years ago is obviously laughable.

Curtis, 1/3/09

Curtis Kwanzaa stories will now forever be judged against 2007’s glowing telepathic otter, and while the Three Unpleasant Maidens Who Are Jealous Of Some Other Maiden’s Magic Water Jug has been dullsville so far, things have undeniably picked up today, as they vomit out increasingly horrifying nightmare visions after drinking out of said magic jug. If the three-eyed frogs and baseball-sized spiders (side note: would these ancient Africans even know how big a baseball is?) rise up to devour our nosey trio, who, after all, only wanted in on an apparently unlimited fresh water supply in a society that doesn’t have indoor plumbing, this will certainly be the most gruesome Kwanzaa yet. Perhaps “mind-numbing terror” should be added as the holiday’s eighth guiding principle.

Judge Parker, 1/3/09

Ah, check out stone-faced Sam in today’s final panel. Just another crazed, murderous stripper shouting “I was dead a long time ago!” as she commits suicide by cop, charging knife first into a hail of automatic weapons fire. If you’re Sam Driver, it’s just another thing to drop a few ironic, detached witticisms about before heading off to the next adventure. The man is such a joy.

9 Chickweed Lane, 1/3/08

9 Chickweed Lane readers, when opening their papers and/or Web browsers Monday and discovering a strip that does not revolve around this endless Belgian cello competition and/or fucking, will come to the logical conclusion that the story has in fact ended with a triumphant Edda killing and devouring Amos right there on stage. To those pleased by such a development, I must temper your satisfaction by pointing you to this.

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Curtis and Archie, 12/20/08

The global economic crisis has become so bad that even the most unresponsive, insulated-from-the-real-world group in America has finally decided that it must address it, or at least appear to be doing so. I’m talking, of course, about cartoonists! Today we have two attempts to grapple with the meltdown’s real-life effects, with varying degrees of realism. As a couple of faithful commentors pointed out, it’s actually kind of weird that the Wilkinses would be experiencing Christmas cash flow problems “because of the economy.” Curtis’s family has always been portrayed as thoroughly lower-middle-class, with their main income coming not from the cratering stock market but from his dad’s no doubt modest but steady income as an employee of the DMV; and unlike the last long-term downturn in the ’70s, this one hasn’t (yet) featured inflation of the sort that would put a crimp in an paycheck that only goes up by a few percentage points every year. Even gas prices shouldn’t affect them too badly, as the whole family appears to take the subway everywhere (yes, I know, the gas prices spike was months ago, but these are the comics, you have expect some lag time). Unless Greg has, like some state employees across the country, been forced to take a few unpaid furlough days, the family’s cash flow should be pretty much normal. Conclusion: Greg has either been exploiting his family’s fiscal ignorance to squirrel away extra cash, which he will spend on cigarettes, or more installments of the syrup chapter, or God know what, or is too embarrassed to admit that he was actually laid off months ago, and spends his days wandering the streets weeping openly.

Archie’s Mr. Lodge, meanwhile, is exactly the sort of person that the current crisis would keep up at night. No doubt heavily invested in growth stocks, mortgage-backed securities, and invitation-only hedge funds/Ponzi schemes, the Lodge family fortune has probably declined in the past year from nine digits to only eight. Of course, the Lodges are still richer than you or I will ever be and will never ever have to do an honest day’s work in their lives, but those paper losses are still very traumatic for someone so attached to money that he has a framed picture of a burlap sack of it hanging on his wall.

Judge Parker, 12/20/08

Since I last covered Judge Parker, Dixie Julep the sexy psycho stripper has bowled over a SWAT team member who was training an automatic weapon on her, leaped through a plate-glass window, dropped three stories to the parking lot below, and then dashed off into the desert — and yet Sam Driver doesn’t think she’s tough, because she bleeds real human blood when cut. We now know what this seemingly asexual lawyer really wants in a woman: a robot, or a vampire.

Shoe, 12/20/08

Seeing as I have railed specifically against the portrayal of the “sexy” lower backs of “sexy” lady birds in Shoe, I’m going to choose take the lower back tattoo that the avian barfly is sporting in today’s strip as a personal affront. The fact that Shoe is openly propositioning her for some water sports action isn’t really helping.