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Funky Winkerbean, 5/12/14

A true artist can take a hacky, overdone concept and still manage to bend it to the service of their larger project. In the case of Funky Winkerbean, that hacky concept is “ha ha, exercise sure is difficult if you’re old and out of shape,” and that project, to which the strip is totally committed, is injecting a dose of soul-wrenching ennui into the funny pages each and every day of the week. What could’ve been just another joke about a guy whose medically mandated time on the treadmill takes longer than he’d like becomes a metaphor for life as an unwinnable race, run in sweaty silence and solitude, increasingly exhausting and yet not moving you forward a single inch. You guys are looking at the work of a master here, and I hope you appreciate it.

Slylock Fox, 5/12/14

Call me a speciesist if you must, but I usually have a hard time summoning up anything but sympathy for Slick Smitty as he occasionally violates the laws of an animal-run polity he neither understands nor respects. Here he is, with his hands terribly injured — probably he made an ill-advised attempt at offering a human-style handshake greeting to some sapient beast with sharp, unretractable claws on its forepaws — and he’s been put up in what’s essentially, let’s face it, a veterinary hospital. So sure, he wandered up the corridors, no doubt reeking of animal urine, found a basket of apples, and, yeah, he took one or two, carefully cradling them in his bandaged hands so as not to exacerbate the pain in his lacerated palms. There was some goat nearby, bleating, but, whatever, there were lots of apples in that basket. There were more apples where those came from. Do you know who first cultivated apples? Do you know who saw a tiny, sour wild fruit, growing on trees on the slopes of a Central Asian mountain range, and realized that, with patience and generations of selective breeding, eventually you’d have something juicy and succulent and sweet, growing on acre after acre of carefully tended trees? It sure wasn’t fucking goats, I’ll tell you that much.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/12/14

“Battle fatigue” is an archaic term for the collective symptoms and psychological reactions to the horrors of combat that we now refer to as a variety of post-traumatic stress disorder. So, even though Hagar spends his days burning and looting villages and murdering and enslaving the innocent, know that he wakes up every night covered in sweat and has intrusive, debilitating thoughts about the awful violence he’s seen. Centuries before the advent of the mental health profession, his only recourse is to drown his sorrows with alcohol and share his feelings with another man whose chosen profession involves endless, endless gore and horror.

Apartment 3-G, 5/12/14

We’ve been having fun for weeks now making fun of the pink Ann Taylor Loft turtleneck sweater that Tommie’s been wearing nonstop ever since she got to Jack’s large animal vet practice/cult compound, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen that she’s also been wearing white pants? This is basically the perfect outfit in which to shovel horse poop all day.

Luann, 5/12/14

In more proof that Luann seems determined to actually change things up and send its cast to college next year, it seems that beloved Pitts English teacher Mr. Fogarty will be retiring! Would you like to enjoy some more hilarious Fogarty Flashbacks™? Well, you’re going to have to check them out on the Web at LuannComic dot com, because they’re just too hot for newspapers.

Dennis the Menace, 5/12/14

It’s too bad Dennis’s spaceship doesn’t have room for a kitchen, because probably he’s going to starve to death on about day six of his mission.

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Judge Parker, 3/20/14

The Bowers/Abbotts père et fille share a private moment and a little shop talk. The thought of simply declaring her Dad’s gift and paying import duties and taxes on it never crossed April’s mind. “Can money even move in that direction — ‘away’?”, she muses. Somehow it doesn’t seem physically possible!

Welcome to the family, girlfriend – a true Parker at last!

Or maybe not? Long-running strips need to be really careful about irrevocable steps like marriages, graduations, and deaths. They upset a strip’s balance, limiting the ways characters can contribute. And if there’s one constant in Judge Parker over the last fifty years, it’s that Randy Parker is a clueless, self-satisfied tool, perpetually used and discarded by women. This principle is so much a part of the strip’s bedrock that even on the eve of his wedding, I can’t believe they’ll go through with it. I fully expect that April will die in a hail of gunfire or (more likely) disappear into the jungle at the last possible moment. Anyway, stay tuned — we’ll know in mere months!

Luann, 3/20/14

That said, what on earth is going on in Luann? Everybody’s been moving through middle-school and high school over the strip’s 29 years, and now they’re seniors announcing college plans for the fall. Ethnic ciphers Rosa and Delta are off to Yale and Howard, most of the cast to nearby “Moony Uni” (OK sure, some kind of Unification Church outfit, I guess), and Luann to the local Community College.

Is Luann really just six months away from becoming a “college hijinks” strip, or a soaper about declining academic standards and unsustainable student debt? Is inert, self-absorbed, academically dishonest Luann even remotely plausible as a college student? All these questions will have to wait, because: OMG YOU GUYS PROM!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/20/14

Yet another newspaper drops Herb and Jamaal, and Herb blames his son for it.

Spider-Man, 3/20/14

“I was going to save those men — but their plight has flushed Spider-Man out of hiding! Now they can just die for all I care, for putting that stink on my beloved city!”

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Apartment 3-G, 1/27/14

Here’s the thing about me and the soap opera strips: after years of reading them, I’ve just sort of normalized their usual low-level absurdity, and so they have to get really absurd before I sit up and take notice. So, last week, when Tommie saw a deer get hit by a car and found a little baby deer and felt bad about it, with the whole thing narrated by Tommie without us ever actually seeing either deer? Low-level absurd. Tommie bringing said baby deer, who looks a lot more like a kangaroo or something, back to her small New York City apartment, to live? VERY ABSURD. This week’s going to be great! Tommie tries to figure out what the baby deer will drink from a bottle and eventually calls La Leche League! Tommie tries to laugh off all the lacerations on her hands and face from the deer’s tiny but still sharp hooves! Tommie takes the deer for a walk, on a leash! The deer poops and pees all over the apartment, despite the fact that Tommie’s been taking it for walks! OH MY GOD MARGO OH MY GOD WHAT WILL MARGO SAY I AM SO EXCITED YOU GUYS

Mark Trail, 1/27/14

Speaking of things I’m excited about: we all know Mark Trail recycles plots from its past, sometimes directly, sometimes piecing together characters and art and plot points from multiple sources to create a dreamlike world of eternal return. Anyway, one of the first great Mark Trail storylines this blog covered, more than nine years ago (ugh, I am so old) involved Birdie, a kindly, animal-loving vet who was married to a taxidermist who was using taxidermy as a front to smuggle drugs and Mark figured it out and Birdie and her husband knocked Mark unconscious and threw him in the water where he encountered some sharks. Will bird-helping Jessica Canupp’s taxidermist boyfriend also be a drug dealer? Let’s hope!

Six Chix, 1/27/14

Can you imagine if some substance that magically restored youth were discovered, but it only existed at one place on Earth and you had to travel there to get it? As soon as word got out, thousands or millions of people would quit their jobs and jump in the car, overwhelming whatever transportation infrastructure existed in the region. But the traffic jams would just be the beginning: whoever discovered the fountain and initially tried to control access to it would immediately be overwhelmed by the influx of desperate people, greedy for eternal life; similarly, whatever government ruled the territory would struggle to simultaneously maintain order in the region and fend off neighboring states for whom the temptation to conquer this miracle land would be overwhelming. Within weeks or even days of the fountain’s discovery, global society would inevitably collapse into violent anarchy. So, yes, there’s some good world-building going on in Six Chix here, though I’m not sure what the “joke” is supposed to be per se.

Luann, 1/27/14

Oh man, I had assumed this was just a rerun of the last time the boys and the girls at Pitts High had weird, unsettling bathroom conversations, but now it appears that Knute actually has some sort of official bathroom-cleaning duties, to give the whole scenario some vague context outside someone’s very specific fetishes. Hey, remember during the 2012 Republican primaries when Newt Gingrich said that poor children should work as school janitors to make money? We should send him a copy of this cartoon and watch him weep bitter tears at the horrifying unintended consequences of his schemes.