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Judge Parker, 9/21/22

Oh, sorry, it seems the Judge Parker brain trust has heard your little diatribes about how Judge Parker is boring now because it’s all about its characters processing their mundane emotions in baffling and erratic ways. Well, that’s why we’re abruptly shifting gears and bringing back Steve the wounded special forces warrior to introduce this hard-hitting new storyline about the judge that replaced Judge Randy Parker, who cracked down on meth and fentanyl traffic … and whose whole family just got murdered. Or, sorry, assassinated. Assassinated! Will I be cancelled as a soft-on-crime lib if I point out that assassination is a kind of murder?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/22

Speaking of murder, I guess the Funky Winkerbean brain trust noticed they hadn’t pulled any grim shit since Bull Bushka drove off a cliff back in 2019. Well, here you go, you ghouls: Darrin and Jessica tracked down a real weirdo who hoards memorabilia from the TV station that employed Jessica’s father, John Darling, including the gun that a guy dressed as a plant used to kill him! Look at how Jessica and her husband are recoiling in shock at the casual way this guy identifies his ghastly trophy! Are you happy now, you sickos? Are you happy???

Curtis, 9/21/22

I appreciate the long game Greg is playing here — making an elaborate show of enjoying Curtis’s favorite music before cruelly lowering the boom in the final panel. I assume, like a master chess player, he anticipated multiple potential third-panel conversational gambits from his son, and had a sick burn in his back pocket for all of them.

Shoe, 9/21/22

Far be it for me to call a comic strip about talking birds who wear (some) clothes “realistic,” but I do think that its portrayal of life at a small-town newspaper has a certain truth to it, in the sense that it depicts a publication run with almost no employees, which almost nobody reads, and the few remaining editors can just use it to pursue their own personal gripes and vendettas as they kill time waiting for a hedge fund to buy them and immediately shut them down.

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Judge Parker, 9/18/22

Oh, hey, you all remember Marie, the longtime Spencer-Driver maid who, back in 2019, found out her husband faked his death because he was in too deep to the mob, which led to her quitting her job as a maid and “going to grad school” (e.g., hanging out on a beach with some hunk) but then just a few weeks later Abbey tricked her into running her AirBNB? You’d think that the AirBNB burning down would’ve been a great excuse for Marie to skip town again, but Abbey has managed to browbeat her into keeping her company, and, well, I’m not saying she’s back working for Abbey again, but she is jogging a respectful distance behind her while desperately trying to calibrate exactly what she says in order to validate Abbey emotionally, so I hope she’s geting paid something.

Mary Worth, 9/18/22

Ha ha, yes, this is perfect: All the Mary Worth regulars talking themself into believing that romantic failure is good, actually, while the two off-putting guest stars are about to fingerbang to Jeopardy! Truly could not ask for a better end to this storyline. (Please, please, let this be the end of this storyline.)

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Beetle Bailey, 9/17/22

God, I legitimately love this Beetle Bailey. Look at how absolutely miserable Halftrack is in that second panel! Golf is the thing he does for fun, on his day off, and he’s played miserably all day and it wasn’t fun at all and he hates it. Now he’s going to drink a mason jar full of whiskey and get blackout drunk. It’s perfect, no notes.

Crankshaft, 9/17/22

Oh hey, uh, why exactly is Crankshaft tagging along on this theater-buying expedition, exactly? Does he think they can’t do the strip without him? Did he get wind of Dennis getting pushed out of his own strip even though his name is on it? “I’m not going out like Barney Google,” he thinks to himself. “I’m gonna do a labored pun, or at least a smirk, in every one of these stupid strips. I’m the brand!”

Judge Parker, 9/17/22

Big news everybody! Remember Steve, the heroic double-amputee war vet who was Sam’s law partner for a while before running off with their legal secretary Gloria back in 2014? Well, he’s back, which is probably … exciting in some way? For the real Parker trufans? I don’t actually remember Steve being particularly interesting, but maybe he’ll shake things up in the current iteration of the strip, after he and Sam finish this elaborate social dance of mutual blame over the next six to eight weeks.