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Funky Winkerbean, 2/3/22

Look, whatever, I’m perfectly fine with the idea of beleaguered band parents getting bombed while at their kids extracurricular events, and I’ll even allow that this concept + [TOPICAL PHRASE] makes for a perfectly adequate mid-week daily comics punchline. My problem is that all these people have at their table is a bunch of pamphlets. What, are they just selling instructions on how to make Jello shots? Where’s the vodka? Where are the huge bottles of vodka? Parents may or may not get drunk at the parades and sporting events they have to go to in order to support their children, I wouldn’t know, but they definitely get drunk at conventions like this one, so these people are leaving money on the table.

Mary Worth, 2/3/22

Have Dawn and Estelle ever interacted with one another, socially? Has Wilbur ever even bothered to introduce them? Or did they just awkwardly run into each other outside the bathroom of the Weston condo one morning and each of them had to explain to the other who they were?

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Mary Worth, 2/2/22

No. No! No! You’re backsliding, Mary! I’m not sure what sort of brain parasite Wilbur slipped into your tea back in 2014 or so, but for a brief, shining moment your rage cleared away the mental fog and you saw him as he truly was. But now, suddenly, while Wilbur’s own daughter and a woman who has willingly had sex with him still seethe with anger, you’re nattering on about “the highs and lows of life with Wilbur!” Don’t you see, Mary? This is how it started with Barney Google! If five years from now this is strip is called Mary Worth Presents: Life With Wilbur and you haven’t made an on-panel appearance since 2024, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hi and Lois, 2/2/22

Beetle Bailey was originally a college-based strip that pivoted to the military for a change of pace, and we can all agree that that didn’t work out so great in terms of realism. But when Hi and Lois was launched as its sister strip, with a mission to capture the crushing, soulless ennui of middle-class American suburban life? Well, they really nailed it.

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Mary Worth, 1/31/22

Look, have we be burned by Mary Worth before? Yes. Obviously. Repeatedly. Repeatedly in this storyline alone. But I honestly am beginning to believe that the endgame for this is in sight, and that endgame will be that either everyone rejects Wilbur so thoroughly that he experiences a social death more devastating than drowning, or, perhaps more likely, that everyone (including Mary, who’s long been willing to smile her way through his various terrible antics) is so thoroughly mad at him that he actually engages in … a certain amount of self-reflection and personal growth? Maybe?? If nothing else, Mary, who is notoriously not self-reflective, at least has managed to finally get off the “Wilbur is fine, actually” train. Look at those eyes in panel two. Those are they eyes of a killer! The eyes of a woman who can’t admit she’s been wrong, exactly, but can at least admit that she’s been wronged, and now it’s no more Ms. Nice Guy.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/31/22

I’ve been a fan for a while of the Showtime show Work In Progress, a slice-of-life comedy starring standup comedian Abby McEnany that’s part of the long-pedigreed “A standup comedian plays a thinly veiled version of themselves” genre. One of the things I like about it, and find really kind of unique, is that a lot of the jokes of the show take the form of banter between the characters that’s actually supposed to be funny within the universe of the show. Often in comedies of all types, characters deliver very funny lines to one another but react as if they’re talking to each other like normal people would, whereas a lot of Work In Progress feels like you and your friends sitting around trying to crack each other up, except each of you has an entire writers room at your disposal to write your dialogue. They’re diegetic jokes, if that makes sense.

Anyway, one of the few comic strips in which the characters acknowledge that they’re saying punchlines to one another are the Funkyverse strips. Unfortunately, the acknowledgement always takes the form of characters recognizing that they jokes they’re telling are very, very bad. Not funny at all! Everyone hates them! They make everybody mad! Look at how mad everyone is at Harry and Becky! How they can stand themselves?