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Six Chix, 8/9/16

Freed from the demands of writing Apartment 3-G, Margaret Shulock tries out for that sweet Funky Winkerbean gig.

Love the art, btw: I haven’t done a rebus in years.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/9/16

Apparently we’re just talking about hazing this week? With no actual hazing in evidence, is that it? Or maybe Forehead Girl and Horn Boy are just stone-cold hazing the crap out of one another right this instant, except they’re bonded so tightly from Stockholm Syndrome that it feels to them like the giddy throes of First Love? Sure, makes as much sense as anything.

Gil Thorp, 8/9/16

Welp, Barry “Darth” Bader, ditched at last by the teammates he’s dissed all season, has his final little locker-room sad, then it’s onward to “Somebody’s Mom is Sick.” After all the operatic hard-drinking, drive-drunking, hang-judging, Boo-murdering, funeral-going action this summer I was expecting a bigger close, but hey — there’s only a month left ’til football, and that time’s not gonna waste itself!

Judge Parker, 8/9/16

Sam and Abbey have grown so emotionally and sexually anesthetized toward one another that the only flashes of feeling they experience come from spying on and meddling in their children’s relationships. Knowing this, Sophie and Neddy stage little Facebook dramas to spark up their parents’ lives. Now playing are “Hank is leaving,” “Who hates Honey Ballenger?,” and “Neddy starts a business.”

In reality, Sophie’s the B-student treasurer of her public high school’s Future Farmers of America, and Neddy’s a Carmelite nun. Nobody tell Sam and Abbey — and especially not the strip’s new writer, who’s going to be terribly disappointed when he shows up for work at Spencer Farms on the 22^nd and sees how things really are.

PS. Abbey looks nothing like that, chews tobacco, and is wearing a parka.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Judge Parker, 8/5/16

Ooh, we’ve arrived at the pivotal moment in any Judge Parker storyline: when a large sum of money appears! Usually the large sum of money resolves all the conflicts, but in this case, unusually, it’s the cause of more drama. Why won’t Hank give up his offer of a solid job in a field he loves for the vague promise of partnership Neddy’s crackpot elder-sweatshop scheme? Actually, Hank is almost certainly right to get out while the getting’s good: longtime strip writer Woody Wilson, having handed over the reigns of Rex Morgan, M.D., to Terry Beatty a few months ago, is now getting completely out of the soap opera game, so the endless gravy train might be grinding to a halt! In all seriousness, I obviously have great affection for the work Wilson’s done with both strips and they were a big part of why I started this blog, so I want to thank him and wish him a happy retirement.

Meanwhile, the new Judge Parker writer will be … Sally Forth writer and friend-of-the-blog Ces Marciuliano! This is a secret I’ve known for a few weeks and have been eagerly waiting for you all to find out! Ces’s strips start August 22nd, and I’m excited to see them, and to see how much free money gets handed out in the meantime.

Marvin, 8/5/16

Ha, yes, it’s Marvin talking about pooping, but when it comes right down to it, isn’t this really all of our lives, stripped down to their essence? Makes you think, doesn’t it? It’s no surprise that the colorist changed Marvin’s hair from orange to deep red in that last panel; after all, you don’t expect the protagonist of this strip to be that self-reflective, so they probably assumed it was a different baby.

Beetle Bailey, 8/5/16

The best thing about this strip is how completely devastated the buffet employee in the background looks. “But … we allow ‘all you can eat’ based on certain realistic assumptions about the human appetite! The whole economics of this business relies on nobody doing what he just did! We’ll be ruined! Ruined!”

Dennis the Menace, 8/5/16

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Food Service Worker Emotional Spectrum, that guy overhearing Dennis extolling the virtues of eating processed meat tubes at the beach looks like he just saw his daughter take her first steps. Dial it back, dude.

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Judge Parker, 7/31/16

Finally, everyone Sam and Abbey live with is gone for the night, having sex responsibly somewhere, so now they can have sex, responsibly! Remember, the Spencer-Drivers live a palatial horse-breeding compound and everyone’s bedroom is at least a half a mile away from everyone else’s, so obviously thre is a lot of special pleading going on here on the importance of having everyone out of their hair. I think they’re worried about the last time they tried to have sex, when this horror-nightmare happened, and they want to make sure it never happens again.

Crankshaft, 7/31/16

I like the vigorous wink Crankshaft is giving Pam in the final panel here. He knows he’s making a little joke! He knows this jersey is an inanimate object, and can’t actually collect Social Security! Since this is the first time I’ve ever seen him do this, I have to assume that with every other mangled wordplay-chunk he comes up with — the punchlines of about 75% of Crankshaft strips, in other words — he has no idea how dumb he sounds.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/31/16

The first row of throwaway panels at the top of the strip, which don’t appear in every newspaper depending on how they lay out their Sunday comics, completely change the content here. Without them, we just have a harmless, sappy series of nicknames. With them, we have Loweezy stalling a Barlow, the hated enemy of her clan in a feud that’s stained the hills with blood for generations, until her husband can show up with his shotgun.