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Funky Winkerbean, 7/19/19

For the past few days of monkey madness in this strip, I’ve begun to suspect that the payoff of this Butter Brinkel storyline would be “Zanzibar did it!” This would be some classic Funky grimness: though a chimp has the opposable thumbs necessary to pick up and fire a gun, clearly any resulting death would be both an accident and liable to result in an innocent creature being put down, and so Butter instead refused to testify in his own defense and went to prison in order to save the life of his beloved pet.

What I didn’t expect was that the real solution to the mystery was that Zanzibar did it, and also Zanzibar can think and talk and reason like a human being, and Zanzibar thinks of Butter as his “father,” and the only reason Cliff Anger is still alive is because he didn’t have any actual firearms in the house. I’m looking forward to the vicious, desperate hand-to-hand combat between man and killer ape that will transfix comics readers across the nation for the next several weeks.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/19/19

I had sort of built up this image in my mind of Miss Galexia as a very woo-woo new agey type, an older woman who’s been in this game for years, and who believed in her own mysticism once before she turned it into a lucrative revenue stream, or maybe even still believed and managed to hold both the commercial and the spiritual in her mind at once. Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where everything is pretty much exactly as it seems and can be resolved very quickly, and so Miss Galexia is a petty con artist who likes to cackle about the rubes she’s fleecing with her boss while drinking a cup of what I assume isn’t even herbal tea.

Mark Trail, 7/19/19

I like how the composition here makes it look like Mark and Leola seem to have angrily turned their attention not on JJ, who I assume is thoroughly unconscious, but on Doc, who after all is the guy who got them into this mess in the first place. “Look old man, I’m not scared of some bestubblèd mining shop proprietor with a gun, but at the same time I don’t exactly enjoy having a pistol stuck in my face, so there’d better be some god-damned gold in this magic mine of yours, capisce?”

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/14/19

We’ve seen some evidence in the past that one of the few jobs that humans are still allowed to have under the Glorious Animal Regime is clown. Presumably this is because the newly ascendent animals find us funny, both because of our gangly physique and because of the general comical pathos that accrues to the once mighty brought low. At any rate, is it any wonder that we steal now? Steal from the animals, literal animals, who hold us in contempt, who keep us around only to laugh at us, and who, it’s very clear from the background details in this panel, have no idea how to run a circus? This clown may be a criminal in the eyes of Slylock, but he’s a true hero to me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/14/19

Rex Morgan has traditionally been about providing medical information that folks at home could really use in their own lives, like “there’s a really specific disease that’ll make you barf up your food every time you try to eat it,” for instance. Anyway, this current storyline seems to be about how you should not let your elderly family members listen to podcasts? Honestly, I agree with this. Better safe than sorry!

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Mary Worth, 7/10/19

Well well well, it looks like Dawn’s big summer romance is going to be with Hugo Lambert, a handsome French exchange student (do they call them “exchange students” in college? I’m pretty sure they don’t) who took Ian’s class with Dawn last year. (Side note: how is it that we never got to see Dawn take Ian’s class? I for one would’ve loved to have seen her smirk her way through Ian’s bloviating lectures about how Tess of the D’Urbervilles will change your life.) Anyway, you can tell Hugo is French and definitely not some kind of con artist because he speaks French for things that English speakers could quickly grasp in that language, but otherwise speaks perfect English. Plus he kisses Dawn’s hand! No American man would be that romantic, based on what I’ve learned from TV sitcoms!

Mark Trail, 7/10/19

Say what you will about Mark Trail, but he’s always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Like, maybe JJ just doesn’t know that it’s illegal to threaten people with a gun and force them to give you all the gold they found in a hidden, magical mine. Or maybe he forgot! He just forgot that he wasn’t supposed to do this! That’s a whoopsy that could happen to anyone, and it’s kind of Mark to jog his memory a bit before punching the shit out of him.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/10/19

Wow, look at that smile on June in the last panel! Literally nothing that’s happened to her in the past decade of this strip — certainly not any of her interactions with her husband or her growing brood of children — has made her as happy as the thought of checking out a website that will tell her how much money dumb people are willing to pay to have their auras laundered or whatever.

Gil Thorp, 7/10/19

Oh, I see how it is: it’s OK for Hadley and Jaquan to live in two different places just because she already has an established legal career and he’s an NBA player who doesn’t get to choose where he lives but also he’s rich so they can afford it, but when Tiki Jansen wants to live in two different places at once so he can go to the school of his choice, he gets in trouble? This is precisely the kind of outrageous double standard that Hadley used to oppose. You’ve changed, Hadley. You’ve changed.