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Funky Winkerbean, 2/19/08

“So, how come you’re named Funky Winkerbean and not something non-giggle-inducing?”

You know, if I were the writer from Pizza and Calzone Restaurateur Monthly, I’d be less concerned with Funky’s branding strategy and more with his inhumanly broad smirk, which is splitting his cheek most of the way to his ear. He appears to be preparing to tip the top of his head back completely like a Pez dispenser so that he can cram the reporter lady and the photographer down his esophagus in a single gulp.

Reporter lady might be forgiven for assuming that “Montoni” is a whimsical mascot like Uncle Ben or Bob’s Big Boy and not an actual person who once dished out pizza and wisecracks from behind the counter. I believe that it’s been mentioned in passing post-time-jump that he’s retired to Florida someplace. Since this is Funky Winkerbean, he’s presumably living out the end of his life in a cut-rate, urine-scented nursing home, desperately lonely and wondering why none of his former employees or neighbors whose social lives revolved around his restaurant ever come to visit.

Mary Worth, 2/19/08

And now the circle of meddling is … complete. “Drew, your father flew to Vietnam and did some very rewarding work there until it almost killed him and I made him come home! Why don’t you follow in his footsteps? Except in your case, you’ll be dying alone, since we’ve already established that nobody loves you enough to come and rescue you!”

Momma, 2/19/08

I’m pretty sure that today’s Momma is about bird-fucking. I was trying to come up with something funny to say about it, but then I decided it pretty much stands on its own.

Pluggers, 2/19/08

A plugger cares about our natural environment only to the extent that he can chop it up and set it on fire.

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Family Circus, 2/17/08

Everything those fussbudgets who testified before Congress in the 1950s about the evils of the comics industry and how the comics were rotting the tiny brains of America’s youth said was true, because I used to be a pretty smart guy who got a graduate degree in a useless, esoteric subject and now after three and a half years of doing this blog I apparently can’t even figure out the freaking Family Circus. Why did Billy’s hideous multihued plaid shirt earn the unwelcome attention of his teachers? Since they surely haven’t bothered to learn the names of their interchangeable moppet charges, you’d think they’d probably call on kids by saying “Hey, you in the blue” or the like, and would rather pass the eldest Keane kid over rather than hazard a guess at what to call that monstrosity of a garment. It’s possible that someone on the faculty is epileptic, and when Billy says he was “called on” he merely means that he was ordered to cover up lest he induce a seizure.

Mary Worth, 2/17/08

“If you want to resolve this permanently, Drew, why don’t you just go straight to hell? You’ll wish you did, after hearing my advice!”

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Ziggy, 2/11/08

Every once in a while, something deeply strange and more than a little bit wonderful peeks out at you from the cracks in the tired old surface of a long-running comic strip. Today, Ziggy, having long failed in his quest to make human friends, and routinely mocked and derided by his own pets, is searching for companionship from a machine, which, he sadly believes, will be able to soothe his loneliness. But he’s not satisfied with the run-of-the-mill answering machines that merely record phone messages and play them back at the touch of a button; instead, he’s searching for an advanced model with basic decision-making abilities. In so doing, he touches on a philosophical dilemma that has troubled great thinkers for centuries: can truly rewarding affection come from an entity lacking free will? If Ziggy’s answering machine is forced by its programming to love him, can what it feels truly be said to be “love” at all, rather than mere slavish devotion? But, on the other hand, if the answering machine is allowed to decide on its own what to feel about Ziggy, won’t it respond with the same mixture of pity and disgust universally held by the service employees, animals, and newspaper readers who encounter him daily?

Dick Tracy, 2/11/08

I was going to laugh mightily at Dick Tracy’s decision to make up, and then explain in a footnote, a completely nonexistent slang term for being nefariously rendered unconscious by a baddie with a roofie and/or a dart gun, but then I consulted Urban Dictionary and found that “smacked” can mean getting high from smoking marijuana or taking Ecstasy. While this doesn’t necessarily conflict with the narrator-supplied definition of “foreign substance in system,” it obviously puts an entirely different spin on the scenario: the problem is not so much a stealthy, sinister baddie willing to do anything to kidnap the Chief, but rather an out-of-control drug problem that’s affected even the police force’s most elite officers. Fortunately, once Chief Liz has been recovered, Dick Tracy will deal with the hippie slacker responsible, probably with the butt of his pistol.

Gil Thorp, 2/11/08

OH SWEET SWEET SWEET lunging out of the mental hospital and into the third panel at a bizarre, inexplicable angle: it’s self-bashing Tyler! Who, uh, looks actually pretty much exactly like Andrew Gregory. Really, is there a Valley Conference rule that says that one spit-curled player must be on the court at all times?

Spider-Man, 2/11/08

Oh, man, no matter how often Spider-Man is felled by getting hit in the back of a head with a lead pipe with absolutely no warning from his spider-sense, it never gets old. Never.

Mary Worth, 2/11/08

do it Drew do it just turn the wheel a little to the left LIFE’S NOT WORTH LIVING do it do it do it