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Funky Winkerbean, 8/20/18

Time has, it goes without saying, not been kind to the core cast of Funky Winkerbean, the ones who were all in high school in the original, carefree iteration of the strip, and even though they look extremely wizened and beaten down, I guess they’re supposed to be at the oldest end of Gen X, now in their early 50s. This puts them squarely in what’s being called the “sandwich generation”: forced to simultaneously care for both their belligerent and confused Greatest Generation parents and their smarmy, unlikeable Millennial children. You’d feel bad for Funky and his cohort if not for the fact that they themselves are also completely and utterly insufferable.

Mark Trail, 8/20/18

Hmm, Rusty, did you ever think that maybe Becky is selling the copies on the black market as an elaborate sting operation to catch the artifact-rustlers who have been plaguing the Yucatan for far too long? I mean, she’s not, of course, because everyone in Mark Trail is exactly as villainous as they appear, but still! Anyway, I’m enjoying the vision of Becky spending years making and discarding two-dimensional copies by just jamming them into a photocopier, shaking her head and waiting for the day when technology finally catches up with her criminal ambitions.

Slylock Fox, 8/20/18

It’s bad enough that the animals rose up and largely exterminated humanity and then moved into our cities and took over our civilization as if it were theirs. But now they’re erasing our history, producing films that imply Cleopatra and her subjects were something other than full-blooded H. sapiens. I know casting minority actors isn’t always “convenient” for directors who have a core set of performers they usually work with, but I’m sure that Slick Smitty is available and more than willing to wear a wig.

Pluggers, 8/20/18

Oh no, I know this movie is nearly 20 years old and this point but it’s still avant-garde weirdness and pluggers will not be able to handle it. Abort, plugger, abort! Reruns of Matlock are on all afternoon, why not settle in for them instead

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Marvin, 8/15/18

I honestly neither expect nor require Marvin, a legacy syndicated newspaper comic strip about a baby who poops a lot, to be up-to-date on current fashion trends, but I do think it’s a little awkward that in its attempt to depict a modern-day hipster they’ve overshot and given him a fashy, the haircut beloved by your more upscale white supremacists these days. Since Miller is the third most common surname for Jews in the United States, it certainly gives a very different reading to “they may not even let you in”!

Spider-Man, 8/15/18

Oh, Kingpin, you think you’re going to be some kind of bad-ass real estate criminal, but you’ve got a lot to learn about branding! The sort of hipster “pioneers” you want to attract in your moves to gentrify Chinatown will be positively thrilled to live above the alley where MJ Parker’s first husband was brutally murdered by a Chinese gang. Then, five years later, once MJ has been married to a fellow celebrity more suited to her current lifestyle, you jack up the rent by $1,000 a month and then the finance industry people move in.

Mary Worth, 8/15/18

This is definitely one way for Tommy to gently explain to Brandy that he has no plans to put out any time soon.

Pluggers, 8/15/18

Sure, it makes sense that Branson, Missouri, is ground zero for the plugger orgy scene, but I for one could’ve gone my whole life in happy ignorance of this fact.

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Dick Tracy, 8/5/18

Today’s Dick Tracy is brought to you by the tourism board of Minot, North Dakota: the Magic City! Sadly, this nickname is not a testament to its rich heritage of sleight-of-hand artistry, but rather is a reference to the fact that it sprung up almost overnight in the 1880s, as if someone had waved a wand and intoned “Abracadabra!” The real reason was not because of any dark sorcery, of course, but because it was at one point the last stop on the Great Northern Railway as that line was being built across the U.S. The town’s railroading history makes it an appropriate location for this adventure, since Sawtooth escaped from his botched attempt to kill Dick Tracy by hopping on a freight train. According to Wikipedia, another nickname for Minot is “Little Chicago,” which makes sense as well because it’s where Dick Tracy, a lawless cop from Regular Sized Chicago, is going to gun down Sawtooth while he’s “attempting to escape,” Chicago-style.

Pluggers, 8/5/18

The obvious thing to point and laugh at here is of course “pluggers wouldn’t be caught dead spending time in some foreign country where the people probably don’t even speak English,” but let’s not sleep on the fact that our plugger couple is making their vacation plans based on whatever happened to show up unsolicited in their mailbox this morning. You can have your fancy digital marketing campaign with your carefully cultivated Instagram influencers; the way to a plugger’s heart, and wallet, remains direct mail.