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Funky Winkerbean, 8/29/21

Oh, poor Les is leaving Hollywood—a place he slags relentlessly, creeps out, ham-handedly bilks, and now pretends to relish leaving.

But apparently his self-satisfaction is tinged with regret that high-school English teachers aren’t held in the same high regard as Hollywood writers. Fortunately, good writers—and even Les—draw material from their own lives, so here’s the seed for Lisa’s Story IV: Les Moore is a Pompous Hypocrite.

Mark Trail, 8/29/21

After delivering a helpful lesson about birds breaking wind, Mark is himself educated by a goose. I bet it plans to “modify his habitat,” too.

Prince Valiant, 8/29/21

Long story short, Val has been drugged by a mysterious hooded sorceress on his way back to Camelot. But he convinced a couple of raven-hallucinations to alert his wife/sorceress Aleta, so mystical help is only a matter of time. While we wait, let’s all admire that shark-on-a-rope guarding the throne.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/13/21

So, in case you haven’t been keeping track and/or want to feel a million years old, Lisa’s death in Funky Winkerbean happened [dramatic music sting] almost 14 years ago at this point. And you’d think, in theory at least, that ongoing syndicated media products like Funky Winkerbean would have as a goal, if only an aspirational one, that they have some regular readers today, in the year 2021, who weren’t regular readers in 2007, and would tailor their content accordingly. You’d think that! But then you apparently haven’t reckoned with the sheer dramatic intensity of characters watching actors re-enacting strips from 2007, while expressing no visible emotions of any kind.

Mark Trail, 8/13/21

So Mark is going to punch [checks Wikipedia] the lakes of southern Russia and Ukraine? He’s gonna unleash the right fist o’ justice on [scrolls deeper into article] the ballast water of ocean-going ships traversing the St. Lawrence Seaway??? He’s going to use his crushing right cross to get to the root of the problem, which is [keeps on scrolling, surely it’s here somewhere] trailered boat traffic? Can we stop trailered boat traffic, with punching? We’re gonna find out!

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Mark Trail, 8/12/21

Oh, uh, the “Mark parties with influencers” storyline has wrapped up, and I’m not going to describe everything that happened (it was confusing?) but there was definitely punching. Now Bill Ellis is assigning Mark to a new editor who works for a member of Woods & Wildlife’s family of trusted brands: Hot Catch’s print run ended in 2011 and now it’s a blog with six to eight mostly aggregated content items per day, but it does have a freelance budget for the stories that it knows will bring in those clicks. And the W&W audience development team has determined exactly what that magic element is: Mark punching somebody. Will Mark be punching people violating fishing conservation laws, or just punching the fish themselves?

Dennis the Menace, 8/12/21

We established years ago that Dennis has achieved at least basic literacy, which raises a lot of questions about today’s panel. Is he doing a gender-reversed version of the thing where girls pretend to be dumb so boys will like them? I leave it to you to decide if the overall terribleness of this strategy is mitigated by the menace to the patriarchy that this particular move represents.

Beetle Bailey, 8/12/21

In order for the rhythm of this interchange to work, we have to assume that General Halftrack already has that bottle of liquor in his right hand in panel one, just out of our sight. I was going to say that he was wandering around the house with the bottle, waiting for the perfect setup for him to unleash a bon mot as he poured himself a glass, but based on his well-known disdain for his wife, perhaps any interaction with her would serve as a suitable trigger.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/12/21

A couple weeks ago we learned that Grimm is dead, and being tortured eternally in hell. “But how did he die?” you probably wondered. The answer is revealed in today’s flashback strip: it’s rabies. He didn’t get his rabies shot, and then he contracted rabies, which killed him.