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Funky Winkerbean, 5/3/18

Hey, you know how Funky Winkerbean is extremely up its own asshole about comics? Like, it’s a comic and one of its main locales is a comic book shop and many of its characters are either comics obsessives or comics obsessives who managed to snag actual jobs in the comics industry? And now those guys (who, to reiterate, are themselves characters in a comic strip) are being given the opportunity to create their own fresh new comics characters? Well, get this: what if this comic-within-the-comic had its origins in [pause for dramatic music sting] A COMIC BOOK SHOP????? Really makes you think, huh?

Mark Trail, 5/3/18

So for some reason Mark has spent the last several days recounting to his family the plot of ¡Three Amigos!, a 1986 Steve Martin-Chevy Chase-Martin Short vehicle that is widely remembered with a certain amount of warmth, but apparently Rusty has checked out from this lesson in pop culture to go talk to a girl. A girl! This is what happens when you leave the compound! Mark’s weird sidelong glance in the last panel shows that he knows that, in theory, it’s important for someone Rusty’s age to learn the basic social skills necessary to interact with another human outside of his immediate kinship group, but that doesn’t mean he has to be happy about it.

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Mark Trail, 5/1/18

I had a friend once who insisted that since luck could be good or bad, saying that someone is “lucky” shouldn’t by right indicate whether or not they had good things happen to them more than they would to an average person, but rather should mean that the luck they experience is just far from the mean in either direction, which, that’s not how language works, man, but anyway, Mark seems to be definitely buying into this worldview! Like, how “lucky” can a man be who’s suffered through multiple boatsplosions and also the aforementioned volcanic eruption, you know? Thank goodness they’re headed to Mexico, where volcanic activity is unheard of, they’ll probably be fine.

Hi and Lois, 5/1/18

Wow, I’m pretty sure the Flagstons haven’t had a ginormous Last Supper hanging on their dining room wall before this? Like, it seems like it’s the sort of thing I would’ve noticed. Anyway, while everyone else is squabbling about the pizza and whose fault it is that it wasn’t here ten minutes ago, Trixie is contemplating the fact that one of the others that she’ll be dining with tonight will definitely betray her.

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Gil Thorp, 4/27/18

Finally, our basketball heroes have solved racism forever, so now we’re ready to launch into our spring storyline, which is centering on … Barry Bader! Barry is a tremendous asshole who really leaned in to being a heel even before his father, a travelling salesman and amiable drunk, got a DUI and was sent to jail by the judge-mom of one of his teammates, then got drunk again and was involved in accident that killed a Milford student. This made Barry even more of an asshole and everyone ended up rejecting him socially, which is I think where we left it, like two years ago? I don’t remember any Barry action since, so I assumed he graduated or quietly transferred to another school where none of the students were friends with anyone his dad killed, but it seems the Bader family is being brought back for a very special plotline involving a Mudlark looking to make pen pals with a hot prison DILF.

Spider-Man, 4/27/18

I feel like I need to go back earlier in this storyline to when Spider-Man’s hitherto unheralded jumping powers became an important means of locomotion for the characters, because the whole point of it was that (a) it was a fast way to get a desperately injured man to the hospital while avoiding Miami’s notoriously congested freeways, and (b) it at least involved jumping unnaturally long distances, which is a kind of superpower, even if it’s an extremely dorky one. Now that we’re in the swamp and nobody’s in a big rush, you’d think everyone could just, you know, walk out on their own power, but hilariously “Spider-Man needs to carry Dr. Connors to the hospital while leaping” has morphed into “some characters are going to carry other characters while strolling through the Everglades.” Meanwhile, MJ has arrived on a jet ski, which means an end to this hilarious nonsense but the beginning of even more hilarious nonsense as we watch five people trying to balance precariously on a jet ski.

Mark Trail, 4/27/18

Ha ha, Rusty, you can’t remember the names of ancient Mexican structures or of the various cultures that built them! You just got … mesoamerisplained.