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Family Circus, 3/29/16

I’m usually pretty meh on the art in the Family Circus. Still, the trailing shoelace in today’s panel is a nice idea, despite the fact that those shoes look to be loafers and the lace is sort of emerging out of nowhere. It gives a nice air of childhood whimsy and innocence to the drawing; it also gives hardcore Billy haters like myself hope that he’s soon going to trip and break a tooth, or, even better, his watch.

Crankshaft, 3/29/16

Tom Batiuk famously writes Funky Winkerbean almost a year in advance, which I assume is also true for Crankshaft. So it’s actually just a total coincidence that this storyline is running the same week a guy in North Carolina was stopped because he had a broken taillight and then literally handcuffed and taken to jail for not returning Freddy Got Fingered to his local video store in 2002. (The local video store, I think it goes without saying, closed down years ago.) Anyway, if we live in an absurd world where decades-old civil judgements for very small amounts of money can lead to actual arrest, maybe you should be careful, Lillian! The cops in the North Carolina case were nice enough to let the guy drop his daughter off at school first, but they didn’t have to! Probably they could just drag Lillian off to jail and leave the twins in the car, miles from anywhere. (Is Lillian even supposed to be driving these kids around?)

Mary Worth, 3/29/16

Looks like Dawn’s starting to make a bolder personal effort at school! Step one: just don’t do things you don’t want to do! If she were being a little bolder, she just would’ve said “Nahh, not my scene. Later, blondie!” But this is definitely an improvement over signing up and pretending to enjoy it.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/29/16

“…what if I looked him up … on the Internet? And so I did. He’s got a Wikipedia page. Turns out he’s dead! Cool story, huh?”

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Mary Worth, 3/27/16

You know, if you want proof that Mary’s reputation as a fixer of lives isn’t quite deserved, check out Dawn Weston. She’s been living in Charterstone under Mary’s watchful gaze since childhood, and still she’s as sad and pathetic as ever! But soon she’s going to be the coolest kid at her local junior college: remember, every great tale of social climbing begins with a unappreciated teen violently clinking coffee mugs with an old woman. Let the aggressive friendship-establishment montage … commence!

Judge Parker, 3/27/16

How often has this happened to you? You think your country music star husband has run off with his secretary … but nope, he’s just flown to Los Angeles to buy some solid gold cookware, probably as a gift for the Sultan of Brunei or something. Ha ha, what a kooky misunderstanding! Thank goodness the crack Judge Parker investigative team was on the case to figure this stuff out before things got out of control! And all they had to do to figure it out was abuse their wealth and privilege and use the power of the state for their private interests.

Oh, and, hey, remember that lady that Neddy sideswiped with her monstrously large RV without noticing? Well, she’s not a sexy lady like Neddy at all, but is instead a heavyset woman literally named “Mrs. Chubb,” so probably the whole thing was her fault and she’ll be writing the Spencer-Drivers a check soon enough.

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Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 3/24/16

Unlike what appears to be a surprising number of you, I don’t care much about the weird chronological disconnect between Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, where both strips take place in the present (as near as can be determined by technological and social details) and yet Funky Winkerbean takes place ten years after Crankshaft. I really don’t care at all! It’s just Comic Book Time, y’all, and unless you’re dealing with For Better or for Worse or Doonesbury, you just accept that the characters all stay the same age more or less while the universe ages around them. The Funkyverse seems to want its readers to care about the discontinuity, though, which is strange because literally the only forms of “caring” anyone could have about this are “confusion” and “irritation”; still, what other explanation is there for the slo-mo crossover details that would only be of interest to Funkyverse obsessives? Like those twin girls who recently surfaced in Funky Winkerbean as teens are now back in Crankshaft, teasing us with potential clues about their birthdate! (Jokes on you, nerds: October 1995 is before they were born whether Crankshaft takes place in 2016 or 2006.) Meanwhile, in Funky Winkerbean, the gang is visiting the Valentine, presumably to show us that Max and his girlfriend have managed to run it for a decade without going bankrupt. I guess that’s supposed to be Max? Or some other bearded dude? At least he’s making a dumb play on words based on a phrase nobody ever uses. At least something makes sense.

Mary Worth, 3/24/16

Is there a phrase more emblematic of Mary Worth’s ethos than “Mary explains what Dawn is feeling”? Anyway, now that Mary has successfully annihilated Dawn’s emotional autonomy, she’ll be ready to force her puppet to make a “bolder personal effort” for “in-person connecting,” which probably will entail an assassination attempt on a senator or businessman opposed to Mary’s interests.

Crock, 3/24/16

Normally I would just pass over this incomprehensible punchline like so many others in Crock, but the title character’s knowing glance in the final panel is really forcing me to dwell on it. “Eh? Hairy backs? Get it? His back? It’s hairy?”

Herb and Jamaal, 3/24/16

You know those Slylock Fox puzzles where the solution revolves around someone making a technically true but misleading statement to beat a lie detector test? This reminds me of a particularly pathetic version of that. “Heh heh,” thinks Herb smugly in the final panel. “I sure gave her a piece of my mind, in a way that guarantees that she’ll never notice! That’ll show her!”

Judge Parker, 3/24/16

WOW, when is BIG GOVERNMENT going to get OFF THE BACKS of JOB CREATORS who want to MAKE THINGS IN AMERICA by HIRING OLD PEOPLE and NOT PAYING THEM ANY BENEFITS because they’re ALREADY ON MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY????? Man, whichever local state legislator had his or her last campaign entirely financed by the Spencer-Driver SuperPAC is going to hear about this.