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Funky Winkerbean, 10/16/17

Ah, it’s Monday, and what new gloom is settling on the Funkyverse? Well, somebody in a generic office building has been working to track down Darrin Fairgood, somebody with a flat-top haircut and dour demeanor that implies law enforcement of some sort. Or maybe this is tied into the plotline about Darrin’s stalker-y bio-dad that never seemed to come to anything? Anyway, I love that these guys are acting like they just cracked a major cold case by looking up a guy’s IMDB page, as I’m sure it presages hilarity ahead!

Mary Worth, 10/16/17

The problem: Wilbur so hates and fears his own body that he’s unable to even dance properly. The solution: radical exposure therapy, implemented by taking him to the beach, putting him in a speedo, and showing him that nothing bad will happen as he and his beloved frolic together in the ocean for all the world to see. And it’s working! Look at the grin! Feel that joy! His glasses are about to get knocked off his face by the next big wave, but even that won’t be able to kill his mood!

Meanwhile, back in Santa Royale, Mary is sitting in the dark, to make sure she doesn’t accidentally catch a glimpse of her foul, sinful flesh.

Marvin, 10/16/17

Hey, just a reminder that Marvin’s house is wholly permeated by the smell of feces, to the extent that the family dog feels morally superior because he goes out in the yard to take a dump!

Dennis the Menace, 10/16/17

A good way to make us all feel really menaced is to remind us that we’re three or so generations into a long-running experiment to see what happens in a society where most people start getting antsy any time they’re not looking at a screen of some sort, and that experiment is not going well.

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Pluggers, 10/4/17

Do you guys know about Just Watch? It’s a great site where you can plug in pretty much any movie or TV show you can think of and it’ll tell you which of the innumerable streaming and paid download sites out there has it available. (There are probably tons of others, but this is the one I use.) Anyway, I plugged Gunsmoke into it and found…

So I immediately take back all the unkind thoughts I had about Older Dog-Man here. You’ve hit the jackpot, buddy! Your meticulously catalogued collection of videotapes, kept secured in your locked Gunsmoke Closet,represent a resource more precious than gold in the plugger community. Of curse, videotape is an analog medium, and with each viewing the tape degrades, so you’ve got to be smart about rationing wholesome Western entertainment. That’s why you have to make sure that your fellow pluggers pay a price that reflects both market demand and the irreplaceable nature of the resource before you allow them to sit enraptured and watch 333×480 black-and-white imagery flicker across the flat-screen TV that your nephew, after much coaxing, finally hooked up to your wheezing old VCR. He doesn’t get a cut. You sent him $5 for his birthday every year until he turned 18. And you dutifully hit “Record” on the tape machine every night at 11 for years when they still played decent syndicated TV on that UHF channel that’s all half-hour commercials for kitchen stuff now. You’ve earned this.

Lockhorns, 10/4/17

Even see a comic that just seems really stuck in a specific time period, like the Lockhorns with its sort of early-to-mid ’60s suburban vibe, and think, “You know, this strip should really get in touch with a more modern set of cultural touchstones if it wants to stay relevant”? Well, be careful what you ask for, is all I’m saying.

Marvin, 10/4/17

Wait, does Marvin’s dad think that women … don’t use toilets? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it seems this strip has yet to fully explore all of its characters’ terrible and wrongheaded ideas about urination and defecation.

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Mary Worth, 10/2/17

Hey, everybody! Remember when Wilbur left town for a year to go ask intrusive questions to disaster victims, for money, and Iris took it badly and told him they should “consider [them]selves single” while he was away and then she decided to “try new things” with a guy her son’s age, all the while loudly proclaiming to everyone within earshot that she and Wilbur were “on a break,” and yet she couldn’t stop thinking about Wilbur so she dumped Zak and they had a tearful goodbye and then like five minutes later she spotted Zak with some new age-appropriate woman so she sent Wilbur a large-font “u up?” email? Welllp, looks like Wilbur took her claims that they were on a break to heart and has a hot Colombian lover, possibly someone whose mountainside home was destroyed in a mudslide or something, leaving her financially and emotionally bereft and receptive to his doughy charms! Words cannot describe how much I’m looking forward to the next several weeks of total emotional chaos, which I certainly hope involve Iris and a similarly devastated Dawn consoling each other by going down to the Santa Royale boardwalk and getting increasingly drunk and sexually belligerent.

Marvin, 10/2/17

If you need any more proof about the strangeness of comic-strip timescales, imagine if you were a parent of a baby in a universe where the main joke for literally 35 years was about how much he likes to aggressively shit himself, and then you abruptly decide “Yeah, I can teach him to poop in a toilet in, what, a day? How hard can it be?” Anyway, remember how I said that words cannot describe how much I’m looking forward to this week’s Mary Worth,? Well, with Marvin it’s, like, the opposite of that.