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Curtis, 6/9/20

Obviously strips like Curtis where the focus is more on the kids’ lives tend to give short shrift to the parents, but it’s 100% true that we never see Greg interacting with any adults other than his wife in a non-work context. At least Diane has her church group friends to occasionally have meetings with so Curtis can disrupt them! It’s absolutely heartbreaking for Greg to say, without hesitation, that what he misses most is his friends, as he closes his eyes and smiles wistfully, contemplating another, better world where he was emotionally fulfilled.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/9/20

It’s funny because we’ve seen Mason Jarr play exactly two roles in his time in the Funkyverse: Starbuck Jones, in the big-budget Starbuck Jones production, who is some kind of superhero spaceman and thus could not be the subject of this kind of “get in his head” exercise, and Les Moore, in the first abortive attempt to film Lisa’s Story, at which point Mason wasn’t even aware that the guy he was playing was same guy as the screenwriter! But I don’t want to dwell too much on that, because I’m too busy dwelling on the image of a second, smaller Les Moore, possibly implanted in Mason’s digestive tract by some sort of facehugger creature who rammed its ovipositor down his throat while he was unconscious, bursting out of Mason’s ribcage during dinner, leaving Les and Cayla’s dining room a mess of blood and viscera. Would the pleasure we’d all derive from this gruesome scenario be mitigated by the fact that, at the end of the process, we’d have two Les Moores?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/9/20

Rex is telling Sarah the story of how he and June met, which mostly seems to be the story of how back when he first started his medical career he had to deal with a lot of patients and their illnesses and their human problems, gross. Now he runs his own clinic and he doesn’t have to do shit! It’s great!

Judge Parker, 6/9/20

“The honest truth is that I probably would’ve lost the mayoral race, and badly, but this mug? They can never take this mug away from me. Not without a warrant.”

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Shoe, 6/2/20

A thing I find genuinely interesting is how in some strips, slowly, over many years, the title character is edged out of the protagonist slot and replaced by their previous #2. Thus, Blondie is now about Dagwood more often than not, Funky Winkerbean spends loathsome amounts of energy on the antics of Les Moore, and Shoe mostly follows the life of the Perfesser. In this case, he’s the marginally more sympathetic character, and this strip demonstrates that pretty well: you can tell that having to write this pun, which some high-priced consultant hired by the private equity firm that just bought the Tattler-Tribune says will “boost engagement,” makes him hate himself very, very much.

Mary Worth, 6/2/20

Oh, man, it’s not just Toby in this new plot, but Saul Wynter, too! Remember Saul Wynter? The old grump who got a dog to replace his wife, but the dog died, so Mary forced him to adopt a new dog? Well, it turns out one of his dear childhood friends has passed away, and even though it sounds like they hadn’t been in touch for a while, it’s nice to know that Saul’s entire life is still dominated by constant emotional loss.

Judge Parker, 6/2/20

yesssssss

judge parker senior has the ‘rona

JUDGE

PARKER

SENIOR

HAS

THE ‘RONA

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Mary Worth, 4/18/20

OK, I’m sorry, I’ve been willing to indulge Hugo’s cartoonish Francophilia, but did he really say that Hamilton, America’s most beloved cultural product of the last decade, isn’t as good as some tired-ass cabaret show that’s been running for more than 20 years at a venue that caters strictly to tourists and nostalgists? This will not stand, monsieur. This means war.

Judge Parker, 4/18/20

“We’re all gonna touch each other and stand in each other’s personal space and breathe into each other’s faces and give each other Covid-19! It’s gonna be a blast!”

Six Chix, 4/18/20

Big news, everybody: aliens are real and they’re horny as hell