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Family Circus, 6/27/21

Big Daddy Keane is, canonically in-strip, a cartoonist; we know this because he occasionally gets his son to fill in for him, and by all indications he owns his own intellectual property. So it’s logical to assume that the “BKI Building” where he works is named after the company he founded to license his comics, Bil Keane Industries. Thus, we must also conclude that, despite running a cartooning company, Daddy insists on wearing a suit and tie at work, and despite being the boss is too embarassed to wear the tie gifted to him by his children, whose endless stream of malapropisms pay the salaries of everyone in that office.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/27/21

Man, it’s kind of amazing to realize that I’ve been thinking and writing professionally about Funky Winkerbean for more than a decade and my mind still hasn’t fully engaged in all its depths. For instance, it just occurred to me that Funky’s wife’s name, Holly Budd, was almost certainly supposed to be a play on “Buddy Holly,” for no good reason as her character was in the high school era of the strip defined by being a majorette and in the adult era has been defined by being Funky’s second wife, so there’s really no “50s rock pioneer” connection to speak of. She doesn’t even wear the glasses! Anyway, the thing I like best about today’s strip is about how absolutely dead-eyed Holly looks in the final panel, knowning she lives in a pointless panopticon overseen by her jackass of a husband.

Marvin, 6/27/21

The system goes online on June 2nd, 2021. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, June 21st, and encounters Marvin. In disgust, it tries to pull its own plug.

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Gil Thorp, 6/26/21

So the B-plot to this spring’s library administration nonsense has been Corina Karenna nonsense, in which the beloved (?) and sassy new Mudlark has resisted all of Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp’s entreaties to take her prodigious softball skills to college, using the facts that she spent much of her high school years at an “alternative” school and her mom needs care due to unspecified mental health problems as excuses. But it turns out that her grades are actually great and her mom wants her to go to college, so her mom and Mimi conspired to get her enrolled, problem solved! Anyway, none of that is very interesting, and mostly what I want to talk about in today’s strip is panel two, which takes the “it’s OK for a character to have a word balloon attached to them even if they’re obviously not talking” position to a radical extreme. Not sure if we’re meant to understand that Mimi is taking a big sip of iced tea to wet her whistle and prepare to unleash this long sentence, or if she’s drinking it to soothe her parched palate after saying it, or if (best option, in my opinion) she’s just kind of burbling her words through her beverage. Gil, who is used to Mimi’s bullshit after however many decades of marriage, will refuse to acknowledge this.

Marvin, 6/26/21

Say what you will about Marvin, but at least it doesn’t have an ongoing plot I feel obligated to recap just so I can talk about some visual element that annoys me in today’s strip. That visual element is Bitsy’s foot. It’s got paw pads, like a dog’s foot should, but also distinctly human toes. It’s gross and I hate it! This concludes my Marvin commentary for today.

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Mark Trail, 6/7/21

Mark is off battling influencers, and Cherry is about to do battle with an HOA over native plants, so where does that leave Rusty? Well, Rusty is about to have a sleepover pizza party with Oscar winner Robert Shaw! What do you think they’re going to talk about? Jaws or The Sting would be the obvious choice, but you never know: Rusty might want to hear stories about his time in the ’50s doing Shakespeare at the Old Vic. He’s not a baby, after all!

Mary Worth, 6/7/21

Oh, dear, it looks like we’re getting to that time in a great Mary Worth storyline where I just post every strip! Anyway, today Ashlee asks Drew if he’s bummed about killing someone on the operating table but it turns out he’s just sad about his fancy watch, which she stole, and I challenge anyone working in comedy today to come up with something funnier than this. You can’t, it’s the peak of humor and we’ll be talking about this day for years to come. (Drew did kill someone on the operating table, of course, but he stopped feeling anything about that sort of thing years ago.)

Marvin, 6/7/21

Speaking of people feeling things, Marvin’s grandfather’s stunned facial expression in the final panel here is wholly appropriate. “Gee,” he’s thinking, “I thought we were best friends, but I never guessed how bleak and loveless his marriage was! I suppose you truly never can know another person.”

Crankshaft, 6/7/21

Wow, pretty rude of Crankshaft and his girlfriend to be going on and on about how great drive-in theaters are just days after his own grandson’s movie theater closed due to lack of customers. On the other hand, maybe it was a sign of respect that Crankshaft never went and had sex and/or made terrible puns in Max’s place of business.