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Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 2/17/18

For once, the decade-long Funkyverse chronological disjunction actually comes into play with today’s strips! In Crankshaft we see Comicszone, a local retailer that was unable to survive in the face of competition from online retailers who could offer the same products with more convenience and less overhead. In Funky Winkerbean, taking place a decade later, we see a key strategy deployed by those brick-and-mortar businesses that survived: transforming stores from mere places to purchase goods into sites for community building and in-person experiences.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/17/18

Sarah has clearly internalized the classic three-part thank-you-note structure for kids — (1) thank the gift giver, (2) make a specific reference to the gift given, (3) make a reference to future social interactions you’ll have with the gift giver — and stripped it down to its bare essence to deploy in face-to-face scenarios and make them as efficient as possible.

Beetle Bailey, 2/17/18

Do … war games generally involve firing massive live artillery rounds? Regardless, I’m not sure what the “joke” in today’s strip is supposed to be, unless it’s “General Halftrack can’t experience joy in the absence of alcohol, ha ha!”

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Shoe, 2/6/18

There are plenty of people of all ages who love all the bands the Perfesser just rattled off here, thanks to the Baby Boomers’ stranglehold on the canon of pop culture — I certainly listened to all of them as a kid. If the Perfesser really identifies with them, though, I guess he’s supposed to be a Boomer, and if his date has never even heard of them, maybe she’s … a literal teen? It’s so hard to tell, because she looks just as beaten down and depressed as every other bird-person in this strip.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/6/18

Ahh, June is doing some snooping around Johnny’s grandparents’ background, and finally we’re going to get some dirt on these suspicious char– oh, a kindergarten teacher? Huh. Well, surely the grandf– ah. Model kits. RC cars and such. Hmm. Maybe the real drama is how much less interesting this can get.

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Judge Parker, 1/31/18

Oh, man, I’ve dropped the ball on keeping you up to date on the doings in Judge Parker, haven’t I? Well, it seems that April busted out of prison with her dad’s help, then came to Randy’s to sweep him and Charlotte off into a life on the run with her, but he didn’t want to go, so she fled without them, after vaguely promising to be reunited with Charlotte, some day. Now we learn that as a result Randy has become a shut-in, refusing to leave his child or his home lest April come spirit her away. Far be it for me to force an emotionally devastated dad to go back to work before he’s ready, but does Randy know that the courthouse is probably the most heavily guarded structure in all of Parkerburg? He could go back to dispensing justice (presumably he’s the town’s only jurist, so suspects have been languishing in jail without trial for months while he works all this out) and Charlotte could coo adorably in the arms of the bailiff. Everybody wins!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/31/18

In keeping with this strip’s new hard-and-fast “no conflict whatsover” rule, I assume this court appearance will go off without a hitch, with Rex and June cementing their hold on little Johnny while his last living blood relatives look on with submissive adoration. But it’d be pretty great if they were just setting things up to snatch Johnny away in the most dramatic way possible, like showing up to object with an incredibly high-powered lawyer at the last minute, or possibly just bursting into the court room with a gang of former Special Forces troops to extract the grandchild from his kidnappers.

Mary Worth, 1/31/18

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a tragedy, but isn’t centered on the title character, who, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, is stabbed to death about a third of the way through the play. No, the protagonist is Brutus, a decent man whose fatal flaw is that he is all too aware of his own decency, and so he allows himself to believe it when other people convince him that only he can save the Republic, and the only way to do it is to help murder his friend. Mary of course can’t be lured into Ted’s muffin scam by riches or glory — she has a comfortable pension and is the manager of her condo complex, so what more could she want in those departments? But when she’s presented with the fact that currently most of the world’s 7 billion people will live and die without ever getting to enjoy her muffins — well, you can hardly expect her to accept that sad state of affairs, can you?