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Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/16

It’s hard to remember now, but Funky Winkerbean used to be a fun, whimsical strip that included exaggerated, cartoonish elements, like Les serving as a hall monitor in a machine gun nest, which readers did not immediately assume meant that he had finally snapped and planned to gun down the whole town. The current plotline, involving Darrin and Mopey Pete raiding a cargo ship off the coast of Los Angeles to get a crate of Darrin’s favorite pens, seems to harken back to those days of yore, but mostly just makes it clear that you can never actually go home again. These strips are embedded in the current hyper-realistic, hyper-pessimistic version of Funky Winkerbean, and all I can think about while catching up on their hijinks is their inevitable rendition to Guantanamo Bay and trial before a military tribunal for violation of various Laws of the Sea.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/20/16

From the look on Samanthy Jane’s face, it seems that she alone is beginning to question Hootin’ Holler’s political order, in which citizens attempt to decipher the will of a hereditary line of dogs as the basis for government policy.

Judge Parker, 7/20/16

“No, no, let’s do the unpaved road thing! It’s a totally normal and efficient shortcut, and definitely not through the property of some crazed murderous friends of my dad who will kill everyone but Derek and then lock him up in their art cave, where only I’ll be allowed access to him!”

Mary Worth, 7/20/16

“Has your brother considered switching from booze to pills? I understand they’re extremely relaxing.”

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Mary Worth, 7/19/16

Guys. Guys. Guys. We’ve been waiting a long time for post-jail Tommy to reach the amazing heights he achieved twelve years ago, in his first appearance in the strip. Back then, of course he was trying to sell drugs, and only dabbled in smoking some low-grade “whatever” occasionally, but now the drugger will become the druggee. I am sincerely thrilled to watch his rapid downward spiral into addiction, which begins as he, like all pill-crazed maniacs, flings the precious, precious caplets into his mouth all at once from eight inches away.

Dick Tracy, 7/19/16

I’m not an expert on the long history of Dick Tracy, which may explain why I’ve been kind of meh on the new-look Dick Tracy, which seems to mostly focus on reviving various characters from the strip’s long history. Anyway, this new plotline may get similarly bogged down with baffling references, but for today I’m going to enjoy it, as it appears to be about something that I choose to call “Car-Navor: The Car That Only Eats Other Cars.”

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Pluggers, 7/14/16

I’ll say this for today’s Pluggers: it’s managed, without having heard of any of the bands, to put together an actually realistic summer concert series lineup, in the sense that it runs the gamut from relatively popular, relatively current acts (Animal Collective) through jam bands that had a minor mainstream breakthrough years ago but have been touring the festival circuit more or less nonstop both before and since (Rusted Root) to bands that were popular in the early ’90s and subsequently broke up but then a subset of the original members gained legal control of the band’s name and now are cashing in with a bunch of new people (Color Me Badd). We’ve rounded out the list with two separate bands who were apparently mistaken for one (Slightly Stoopid and SOJA, who are touring together this summer) and, apparently, just to stick it to know-it-alls like me, the truly obscure “Kongas,” which as near as I can tell was the name under which Marc Cerrone, an “Italofrench disco drummer, composer, record producer and creator of major concert shows,” released a couple of albums in the late ’70s. I guess it’s probably more likely that this is a mistake for Kongos, a band that’s in that first category with Animal Collective, but I want to believe that we’re talking Italofrench disco drummer here.

Mary Worth, 7/14/16

Oh man, it looks like Tommy’s upcoming opioid addiction’s going to arise from a bad interaction between a lower back injury … and broken heart. I guess this is why you shouldn’t start dating someone before you start growing your hair back out. The relationship begins under false pretenses. They won’t know the real you.

Family Circus, 7/14/16

Mommy’s grim facial expression tells us exactly what she thinks of the MPAA’s censorious reign of prudery and its effect on film as an art form. “More like a Profoundly Grotesque stifling of cinema’s ability to shock us out of our comfort zones,” she thinks, glowering at her hopelessly middlebrow children.