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Funky Winkerbean, 5/3/17

Boy, talk about exploring innovative revenue sources: comic strips are adopting commercial sponsorships with a vengeance. Never mind Mary Worth‘s Royal Caribbean International®-themed cruise story or even Spider-Man’s nonstop shilling for Guardians of the Galaxy 2 — opens Friday! — from The Walt Disney Company subsidiary Marvel Entertainment LLC. In just the past week we’ve seen Pickles plugging the Licki cat brush from PDX Pet Design — catch them at CatConLA 2017, sponsored by Rachel Ray Nutrish® super premium food for cats — and Gasoline Alley‘s shameless emotional manipulation in support of the Physician’s Assistant History Society and the American Association of Physician Assistants‘ convention AAPA 2017 in Las Vegas — the ultimate PA event, at MGM Resorts International‘s elegant Mandalay Bay South convention facility.

Here, retired Westview band leader Harry L. Dinkle, worldwide face of DINKLES brand marching shoes, accepts an award for selling band candy from van Houten chocolates (which, for the record, neither runs a factory in Belgium, nor, you know, sells chocolates).

I don’t know whether Dinkle’s award is coming from the “van Houten” that’s a Singapore-based Hershey subsidiary or the one that’s a China-based foodservice supplier, but please nobody tell their flack that Harry is strictly a Toblerone® guy, OK? He can’t fit anything but triangles into that mouth.

Mark Trail, 5/3/17

If you want to become a global branding behemouth like Harry L. Dinkle, you have to start small, but this is just sad, OK? I hope PR’s Restaurant and Truck Stop sprang for the full breakfast and not just complementary refills on the coffee.

Sally Forth, 5/3/17

Credit Sally for accommodating the tender feelings of Walt Disney World® Parks and Destinations and Universal Studios Parks and Resorts. But a more aggressive cross-licensing and affiliation strategy could help her out of her copyright jam. Maybe swap for a 10-year option to build Sally Forth: the 3-D Experience, The Whimsical World of Sally Forth, or Ted’s Flying Car Ride?

Remember, Sally: it’s not selling out when they already own you!

–Uncle Lumpy, brought to you by Palmolive — “you’re soaking in it!”

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Mark Trail, 4/21/17

Gosh, it seems like Mark and our bald kidnapper are just destined to be at cross-purposes, aren’t they? Mark isn’t making “wisecrack” in panel one; remember, his extremely linear mind can’t even conceive of what a “joke” is! He’s just offering useful information to a fellow who he suspects doesn’t know much about the cartographical conventions of rural areas. It’s a darn shame his sincerity is going unappreciated!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/17

Hey, remember “vendos,” the Funkyverse-specific slang term for vending machines? Remember how they took the vendos out of the school and everyone was mad, for some reason? Well now they’re still there, but nobody uses them, and they just induce terrible anxiety about mental health care being used as a weapon of the omnipresent security state when people even think about them! Ha ha, what a truly whimsical world this strip takes place in.

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Mary Worth, 4/19/17

I know that eventually we’re going to get around to the Hoosiers and their smoking-related marital strife and that will be the “real” part of this storyline, and it’ll be fine, I’m sure, but for the life of me I’d be happy with like six to eight more weeks of Mary and Toby just enjoying the cruise industry’s more pedestrian pleasures and describing them to each other in excruciating detail. Today, Mary is excited about the formal dinner they’re about to enjoy, but wants everyone to know that come tomorrow for lunch she’ll be wearing sweatpants at the buffet, shoveling as much lukewarm chicken down her gullet as she can handle under the harsh fluorescent lights. She isn’t some kind of snob or anything. (She still paid the extra fee for sheets changed daily and “premium access” to the lifeboats, of course.)

Funky Winkerbean, 4/19/17

Generally speaking, I don’t try to write things about teenagers that much, which is good because they terrify and confuse me and I don’t know much about them. But one thing I do know better than this strip, which ostensibly has a teen cast, is that teens do not care for Facebook anymore. I learned yesterday that a cutting thing teenagers call Facebook is “Mombook,” in case you want to feel a kajillion years old!

Mark Trail, 4/19/17

Mark’s kidnapper is in that special intermediary zone of cleverness, where he’s smart enough that he can’t be tricked into saying his name, but not so smart that he realizes that he’s the one with the gun and the sinister agenda so he’s supposed to be telling Mark where they’re going, not the other way around.