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Funky Winkerbean, 5/31/20

It would take too long for me to explain in detail and it would be boring if I bothered to try, but this week’s Funky Winkerbean began with Mopey Pete learning about the existence of Hoagy Carmichael and then going through a series of free associations that passed through this before producing the inspiration for a new Atomic Komix title. Most I’m posting this because I think it would be very, very funny if Pete did in fact credit Hoagy Carmichael, and then Hoagy Carmichael’s estate sued Atomic Komix into bankruptcy.

Shoe, 5/31/20

“I mean, I guess you could say he’s a coworker … I’m a bird, he’s a dog, we’re both cops, there’s no real hierarchy there. ‘Pet’ is more of a sex thing, really (we’re also lovers).”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/31/20

It’s funny because Snuffy and Loweezy are very poor and seeking even basic medical care is ruinous to them financially! Ha … ha?

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Dick Tracy, 5/30/20

[I take an extremely deep breath so that I can wrap up the current boring-ass storyline in one run-on sentence] So Shaky got arrested but then later got bailed out by this woman who’s going to be playing Breathless Mahoney in a movie and I guess is a relative of the real Breathless Mahoney, who was lovers with the original Shaky, and even though Shaky has a perfectly nice girlfriend, I guess he and Breathless Jr. here are gonna do it? It hasn’t been an “interesting” journey to this point by any means, but when a woman in the newspaper comics asks one of Dick Tracy’s freakish villains “So, you’re basically a human vibrator, right?” I feel honor-bound to report it to you.

Beetle Bailey, 5/30/20

Man, I’m so steamed over Beetle calling Killer his “buddy” — I can’t cite any specific strips or anything but my strong impression is that they tolerate one another but have no real strong feelings about each other either for good or ill — that I can’t even focus on the fact that Sarge has started pitting the men under his command against one another in sport combat, for his amusement.

Shoe, 5/30/20

I don’t … think that would work? I’m really pretty sure that wouldn’t work.

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Mary Worth, 5/22/20

I had sort of been hoping that Mary Worth would never do a coronavirus pandemic plot, that it would just remain my happy place forever when the worst thing we had to worry about was how many mai tais Wilbur’s had, but now that Mary and Dawn are moving on from “Cheating’s fine, honestly, most of the time there isn’t really any hard feelings” to “You know who the real heroes are? Doctors, and nurses, and whatever it is Jared does, I’m not clear on it exactly but he definitely wears scrubs and works at the hospital,” I worry that we’re headed in that direction. I’ll allow it only if Jared succumbs to COVID, allowing Dawn to weep bereft pandemic tears for months.

Shoe, 5/22/20

Despite how long I’ve written about comics, there are still parts of the creative process I don’t understand. In Shoe, for instance, what factors determine the punchlines that get Goggle Eyes of Horror and the ones that get Heavy Lids and Undereye Bags of Despair?