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Mary Worth, 9/4/16

One of the low-key best aspects of the Tommy the Tweaker Mary Worth stories is the emotionally complex and slightly co-dependent relationship between Beedle mère et fils. Sure, Tommy has let Iris down, again and again, but deep down in his heart he doesn’t want to. Obviously it’s very embarrassing for Tommy to be busted in front of his mom, partly because now she knows he’s a drug addict. But I bet that what hurts him most is that in her eyes he’s now an incompetent pharmacy-shopper. Like, why couldn’t she have seen all the times he successfully pulled this off, you know? Maybe she would’ve been proud of him, even!

Panel from The Lockhorns, 9/4/16

It’s always fascinated me that the Lockhorns takes advantage of the increased space the Sunday comics provides by printing six unrelated one-panel Lockhorns gags. That’s a lot of content! And as someone who has to produce a lot of content on the regular, I know that sometimes the well just goes dry on your usual shtick, man. That’s why I totally respect today’s Lockhorns, which provided five gags about the usual marital hellscape and one that’s just “what’s the deal with deep-dish pizza, amirght everyone?”

Panels from Crock, 9/4/16

I’m from Buffalo, NY, where Buffalo wings were invented (more than a decade after the notorious Jessica Simpson “I don’t eat Buffalo” incident, some people still need this explained to them), and, fun fact: in Buffalo we don’t call them “Buffalo wings”! We call them “chicken wings,” or just “wings.” So I guess I’m not surprised that people who are actually in the French Foreign Legion don’t call it “Legionnaires’ disease.”

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Judge Parker, 7/21/16

INT. – MONSTER BEVERAGE CORP. – DAY

DIRECTOR OF YOUTH MARKETING AND BRAND AWARENESS: You wanted to see me, sir?

CEO: What the hell is this?

DIRECTOR OF YOUTH MARKETING AND BRAND AWARENESS: Uh, I think it’s a … newspaper? I don’t subscribe to one myself, but…

CEO: No, this comic strip. What in the name of God are we doing in this thing?

DIRECTOR OF YOUTH MARKETING AND BRAND AWARENESS: Oh, that! That’s part of our big spend on native content for the quarter, sir.

CEO: So we paid for this. To reach out to … teens?

DIRECTOR OF YOUTH MARKETING AND BRAND AWARENESS: Yes, sir! You can see from the characters that it’s a teen-oriented strip.

CEO: …

DIRECTOR OF YOUTH MARKETING AND BRAND AWARENESS: I mean, just look at the characters! A multi-ethnic group, engaging in drama. If there’s one thing our research shows that teens love, it’s drama.

CEO: …

DIRECTOR OF YOUTH MARKETING AND BRAND AWARENESS: Just a group of diverse teens, in a band, participating in drama, enjoying Monster Energy beverages. Well worth the $450,000 we spent for the placement!

CEO: [presses button on desk] Security, please come to my office.

Lockhorns, 7/21/16

Man, if I knew someone who sent out paper invitations to parties instead of just creating Facebook events for them, I probably wouldn’t visit their Facebook page either. If they don’t use Facebook even for one of its most popular and useful features, then their Facebook page is probably hella boring.

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Crankshaft, 7/15/16

The punchline to today’s strip, in which Crankshaft responds to an church volunteer’s innocent attempt to play-act as a carnival barker by pointing out life’s essentially random cruelty, is par for the Funkyverse course, so instead I’d like to point out that our hero is just straight-up covered with filth here. This is actually some admirable continuity from earlier this week, where the jokes were about how Crankshaft is incapable of eating fair food without soiling himself, but it gives a nice touch to today’s strip, where it looks like he’s wandered out of a scene of unspeakable carnage. He gets to lay down this truth bomb on poor straw-hat-boater guy because he’s seen some shit, man.

The Lockhorns, 7/15/16

I guess Leroy’s supposed to have a black eye here, indicating that once again a potentially pleasant evening has ended with him getting punched in the face? But all I can see is the eye makeup that Alex wore in A Clockwork Orange, so I’m assuming that the argument was over whether it’s socially acceptable to cosplay as literary characters when you go over to someone else’s house for drinks.